You got what you deserve,
You were asking for it. It’s cause and effect. I call it karma. What goes around comes around. It was God’s will. Who sinned, this man or his parents? You got what you deserve, You were asking for it. It’s cause and effect. I call it karma.

What goes around comes around. It was God’s will. We all know this song. We know the words and the rythym, we know how it makes us feel safe, nestled up in the arms of a judgemental God, safe because we know the rules, we know how not to sin and so therefore towers will not fall upon our heads and our blood wont be mixed in by Pilate with the sacrifices and we wont get a terrible disease or drown in tsunami’s or lock our keys in the car. That’s how it works isn’t it. Or at least that’s how the crowd who gathered around Jesus think it works. What about you? And what about Jesus, what does he think.? What does he say?  

‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way. I tell you no’     Jesus answer is clear and yet over 2000 years later we still struggle with the why of suffering and we still find ourselves, fall, fall, falling into the poisonous trap of believing that bad things happen when people are bad and God is punishing us, ‘every mothers son’. In our guts most of us still think this way. We can’t help it. This is primal stuff.

So what do we do about it? Well it helps to look at the facts. Which is what Jesus is encouraging the gathered crowd to do. Helps to understand the WHY of the falling tower and the WHAT of Pilate murdering the Galileans. Or in other words that the tower fell because it was badly constructed, or because their was a natural earth tremor and that Pilate killed the Gallileans because he was a ‘Yes Man’ of a despotic oppressive regime.

We live in a natural world with its own natural laws and no matter how much we would like to believe in a God who Zaps the bad and saves the good; history reveals to us that things just don’t work out that way. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with the challenge of becoming the vessel through which God’s grace and love can flow. It leaves us with the challenge of becoming the fig tree which bears fruit. Ahh the fig tree, lets talk about the wizened old fig.

I remember the first time I heard this story and all I could think of was that poor old fig and that’s not very fair and what a hard word this was. Lutheran Minister Brian Stoffregen  makes an interesting point about this fig, he writes: I note that the "sin" of the fig tree is not that it is doing something bad, but that it is doing nothing! It is just taking up space in the orchard. With this observation in mind, I think that the following poem by Toyohiko Kagawa is appropriate. I read In a book

That a man called
Christ
Went about doing good.
It is very disconcerting to me
That I am so easily
Satisfied
With just
Going about.

In today’s reading Christ demands that the crowd repent, and as we know the original meaning of the word repent is simple to turn, to turn back to turn back to God, and its something that we keep doing, all of our lives. ‘Turning, turning, turning through the years minutes into hours and the hours into years’.

So Christ wants us to repent, to turn back to God, not so that we can save ourselves from being zapped but so that in this complex natural world of ours we can be part of the embodiment of love that makes it possible for the world, at a global, national, local and personal leval to not completely self destruct.

As Richard Rhor , the Fransican Preist writes: God only gets in through the cracks, it seems, the cracks in our hearts and now and again the cracks in history’ By repenting we are cracking open, just that little bit more, to the God light which burns inside us and then we can become the fig tree that doesn’t just stand there, but the one which bears fruit for the world.