May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The theme of my sermon today is compassion. Compassion is very much a feature of Luke’s Gospel and is particularly evident in today’s Gospel reading.
I would say that compassion is pity, inclining one to be helpful or merciful.
In today’s Gospel reading we are given in the words of Jesus two viewpoints that generate compassion. The first is not to suppose that you are less of a sinner than a wrongdoer is. The Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices are, Jesus says, not worse sinners than all other Galileans. Nor are the eighteen people, who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem. Jesus warns his Disciples that they need also to repent, or they too will perish. The second viewpoint is not to rush to condemn but to have enough patience to allow for the wrongdoer to have a second chance. By means of a parable, the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree, Jesus calls upon a gardener to avoid cutting down a barren fig tree until a year has passed and he has given it fresh soil which will give it another chance to flourish. Only if that fails can it then be cut down.
The question I ask myself is how does this call to repent square with the unconditional love of God for us all. I believe that ultimately there are no limits to God’s love for us but in the short term we are required to be aware of our sinful state and repent of our shortcomings to God.
This requirement to repent, as today’s Gospel reading makes clear, is asked of us all or we will perish. We know that there is a ‘wideness in God’s mercy that is wider than the sea’ but particularly in this time of Lent we call upon God to ‘forgive us miserable sinners’. We do this because we wish to communicate to God our recognition that we are sinful and need his mercy as we do not wish to fall away from him and we are mindful as Christians of the pattern in the Bible of wrongdoing and punishment.
We find this pattern at the very beginning of the Old Testament. When Adam and Eve fall, having disobeyed God’s will, the outcome is their being ‘cursed among animals, enmity and the pain of childbirth. This first sin had a massive negative impact on them and their descendants and today we too suffer much of what they were condemned to suffer. Again, in Genesis, the corruption and violence on earth prompted God to destroy a multitude of peoples in a flood. Only one man and his family and animals are saved. God’s covenant of everlasting love is kept in place in his saving of Noah. Noah was a righteous man who ‘walked with God’ and was saved in an Ark, together with his family and animals, but all else are destroyed and the flood waters cover the earth.
The call to repentance and warning of what will happen to the unrepentant runs on into the New Testament and even Luke whose Gospel is full of compassion to all, the lost and the sinner, cannot leave out the word ‘repent’. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he warns them not to fall away from God as they may be struck down. They must repent or perish.
The compassion of God, then, that we find throughout the Bible, is there on the understanding that his mercy will depend upon repentance. What I believe demonstrates the unconditional love of God is the death of Jesus on the Cross. As people have failed to heed the countless warnings to repent, God puts his only Son on the Cross to save us all. My thinking here is that as Jesus fell under the weight of the Cross on his final journey to be crucified, this marks a rectification of the fall of Adam and Eve and his death and resurrection allow us to be saved even though there has not been universal repentance. Even so, until the kingdom comes, as promised by the death on the Cross, we need to continue to seek God’s mercy and forgiveness. We need to do so because although we have the bigger picture of eternal salvation until the kingdom comes we are caught up in earthly situations that involve crime and punishment, misguided actions and disputes all of which may take us away from God rather than, as Noah did, staying with God.
In today’s world, with all its troubles, the call for God’s mercy does need to be a strong one. We are in a rather hard-edged world filled with uncertainty about the future but in this time of Lent, we can, and I quote from a Commentary on Luke: ‘open our eyes and look at the world around us and our place within it with a renewed generosity of heart’. Add to this an encouragement this Commentary provide from a verse of the hymn ‘There’s a wideness in his mercy’ which reads:
‘For the love of God is broader
than the measures of man’s mind,
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind’.
So let us take heart at this time and move forward, no matter what obstacles are there to be overcome, in the sure knowledge of the unconditional love of God for us all.
AMEN