Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near.
We live in an unsatisfactory world. We'd like to be healthy, but viruses and bacteria may have other plans for us; we'd like to be always surrounded by friends, but the realities of our human chemistry means life's not always that easy; we may dream of peace and plenty, but our dreams are often dashed by the tough realities of the world around us. In such a world the way good and bad get apportioned out may often seem unfair. It would be great if only good things happened to good people, and only bad things to bad people. Even the opposite way round, while it might not be so nice, at least it would be consistent, I suppose. But it doesn’t work like that; it's a lottery out there.
People trying to get their children into the best schools, and people hoping to get the right treatment when they’re ill, can face what the papers call the postcode lottery. In one case a year or two back, Brighton and Hove City Council literally drew names out of a hat to decide which children went to which school - claiming that that was the fairest way. People who’d deliberately moved to up-market addresses in order to get the right post-code were outraged, of course. But that’s life; unfair, unsatisfactory. You can work and plan and prepare, you can even connive and cheat, but even then things may not go the way you hope they will. None of us can guarantee our future.
The Gospel reading today mentions people caught up in recent tragedies. On one occasion the Roman governor had instructed his soldiers to mingle in disguise among a mob who’d gathered to protest at plans to divert money from the Temple tribute to provide a new water supply for the city. The soldiers were supposed to disperse the mob, which they did so energetically that several people died.
And on another occasion people had been killed when a tower collapsed upon them. These were probably Jewish workers employed by the Roman governor on one of his construction projects, and some righteous Jews saw what happened as God’s just and righteous punishment for their collusion with the enemy.
Jesus told the people not to think like that. The fact that tragedy had befallen those people didn't mean they'd been worse sinners than anyone else. But he followed that with one of his hard sayings: "Not one of you deserves any better, unless you repent and turn from your sin."
Jesus tells us not to judge one another. When we do, and when I say, as I might, that "I'm better than him (or her)" I can end up thinking that I'm just as good as I need to be. Jesus told his disciples that they’d only one benchmark to aim at, and that was perfection. "You must be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect," was what he said, and that’s another really hard saying. For it's an impossible task; not even the saintliest follower of Jesus can manage to equal the example set us by our Lord. And until we grasp that, we’ll begin to understand what's truly distinctive and special about our Christian faith.
But here, in ten words, is what’s special about our faith: "Only by the grace of God can we be saved." And what that means is this: our sin is a permanent stain upon us that only God can wash away. Our sin! Most of us aren’t that bad, and in fact most of the time we're even quite good. But the truth about sin is that even the littlest bit of it taints us fatally. There aren’t big sins and little sins, there’s just sin: breaking God’s laws, going against what he wants from us. And none of us is so free from sin that we qualify on our own merits to escape destruction. But God remains patient with our weakness, and his grace washes that sin away.
The Gospel we believe as Christians is the Gospel of the second chance. It's not always an easy one to take hold of and live up to, so far as our own witness is concerned. We might find it quite hard to accept that someone who's tried and failed, and maybe caused harm and damage, still deserves to try again. Especially if it's us that got hurt or let down or abandoned; especially when the reason they failed seems to be that they didn’t try. Let’s think about a prisoner who’s served his time, and while in prison come to Christian faith as some do. Would we welcome him into our Sunday fellowship? Maybe we would. Would we let him count the collection after church? Or might we be tempted to doubt the truth of his conversion? But God offers all of this to each one of us; as we read the Gospels we realise that God’s word to us when we fail, when we fall short, when we let him down, is that we still have a place, and we can still try again. When we come to our senses. When we know what we’ve done and feel the hurt of it. When we turn back, like the Prodigal Son, and head for home.
That brings me to the unfruitful fig tree in the story Jesus told. You’d plant a fig tree in a vineyard to provide shelter and wind-break for the delicate vines. But you'd want more than that of it, you’d like some fruit. This unfruitful tree was using up good soil to no great effect. In my garden my instinct is always to leave in place plants that aren't doing well, in the hope that with a bit of care they’ll do better.
And that's what the vine-dresser does in this story. It only goes so far, of course, this support for the unfruitful tree; if the fig tree continues to be useless then it won’t be kept. But for now there’s a second chance, and we discover that God is happy to use failures in his service. Unlike, say, Louis van Gaal, he's ready to give another run-out to the team that messed up last time. The vine-dressers even prepared to improve the growing conditions, manuring, digging round and improving the drainage.
Grace is about real second chances, in which we're not just abandoned, or too readily rooted out. In Jewish thought, if someone was doing well and had a measure of success that showed God's favour upon them, it proved they must be doing what was right in his eyes. Someone in that happy state might well look across at less fortunate folk and say: "Things aren’t going well for them, so clearly God’s not pleased with them." This parable addresses that point of view: Jesus tells us, "Just because God is patient with you, don't assume he's happy with how you’re living."
Judgement is never far away in the stories Jesus tells. He promises a Gospel of the second chance, he speaks about the Father who goes on loving us, and deals with us graciously. But alongside the promise of the second chance is the threat of the last chance. If we go on ignoring God's call to us to be fruitful in his service, we risk cutting ourselves off from his grace. So the fig tree is offered, not unlimited chances to be fruitful, but one season more: one more chance to be fruitful, one more chance to multiply God's blessings. Rejoice in the grace of God, for without that grace we are lost. But don’t let that gift of grace go to waste - seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near. Amen.
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