Bloody Pilate (The Politics of Jesus, Week 3)

Isaiah 55:1-9

Luke 13:1-9             

When life is hard, when things don’t go our way, we are often tempted to find explanations that give us some relief.  Some of the basic stories we tell are meant to clear up some of the confusion we face.  Our reading today names three of the stories that we often come to believe.  They are all partly true.  That’s their appeal.  But each of them will ruin your life if you don’t find something bigger and better to believe.

Here are the three partial truths that can claim your life if you’re not careful . . .

First, all of life’s problems are political problems.

Second, you get what you deserve in life.

Third, we’re all out of time.  Nothing and no one ever gets better.

First, for people who believe that all of life’s problems are political problems, Jesus redirects us to something better.  Jesus calls us to recognize the time for the arrival of God’s new realm is now.  And God’s kingdom of love and mercy and justice is here in our midst as a real possibility.  No political ruler or political system can block this arriving newness.

The crowds ask Jesus if he’s heard the news about how Pilate murdered some Galileans who were offering sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple.  We don’t know if this really happened.  It’s not attested anywhere else.  Certainly Pilate was capable of it.  But these are oral cultures who rely on word of mouth.  And they are tempted to project all of life’s problems onto the enemy of Rome. 

At the very least it was an aggressive complaint that life isn’t fair and the Romans are the real problem.  But they may be suggesting that it’s time for an armed revolt.  When we get fixated on political problems, Jesus redirects us back to ourselves.  It isn’t time for an armed revolt.  It’s time to repent.  Stop pointing fingers.  The problem is you.  Stop shifting the blame everywhere else.  Make a difference by the way you open your own life to God’s arriving kingdom.

Second, for people who believe that you get what you deserve in life, Jesus redirects us to a larger perspective.  The crowds raise the report that Pilate murdered some Galileans at the Temple.  Jesus adds to that story another one, “What about the 18 who died when the tower fell near Siloam?”  Jesus uses both stories to make a point: These people weren’t worse sinners than you.  Death can come at any time.  During worship at the Temple.  Or just standing under a wall.  And when it comes like that, there’s no time to repent.  But you DO have time, because God is patient with you.

Lots of bad things happen in life.  And it’s tempting to believe that people get what they deserve.  That life is basically karma, you reap what you sow.  Life is a reliable feedback loop.  So if you’re poor, or your marriage doesn’t work, or you’re overweight, or disabled or ill – it’s your fault.  You did something wrong.

Yes, we have to admit that sometimes life does in fact have built in feedback loops of foolishness and wisdom, punishment and rewards.  But we can’t generalize from that reality.  If you believe that people get what they deserve in life, you have built an excuse for not helping, not engaging, and not caring.  And yet what is undeniably clear about the gospels is that “Jesus announced God’s favor on the poor, the maimed, the blind, the crippled” (Craddock).  In this way Jesus teaches that one’s financial, social, or physical condition is never simply a direct reflection of one’s standing with God.

Third, for people who believe that we’re all out of time, that nothing and no one ever gets better, Jesus redirects us to hopeful possibilities for fruitfulness.  In response to the crowd’s image of bloody and violent Pilate, Jesus offers the image of the patient gardener, down on his knees, digging and fertilizing the trees’ roots with manure in hopes of giving the fig tree a chance. 

In Matthew (21:18-19) and Mark (11:12-14), the primary fig tree story has the fig tree cursed for its failure to produce.  Here in Luke’s story, Jesus “leaves open the possibility of fruitfulness” (Craddock).  It isn’t producing figs right now, but there is still time, and hope.

What would happen if we imagine our lives as this fig tree – hopeful but not sure of future fruitfulness; partly weighed down by past performance, but also bouyed by the patient and tireless work of the gardener down at our roots.  After all, none of us has claim to any certainty that our fruitfulness is done.  And none of us can claim with certainty that our lives will end laden with fruit.  We have opportunities, being the tree we are, and we have time, and we have a gardener laboring underneath us to make it happen.  And so we can only drink deeply where we are, in hopes of a coming bloom of productivity. 

Now what if we imagined all other people this same way.  They are not yet cursed and done.  Their current barrenness is not the final word about them.  They are trees too.  They too have time.  The gardener toils underneath them as well.   And so we hope.

Homeboy Industries

In the 1980’s gang related problems in Los Angeles were unavoidable.  Young people were faced with bleak futures.  Families didn’t work.  Schools didn’t work.  There weren’t any jobs.  Despair and hopelessness were the basic story of life.  And so many joined gangs.  They joined gangs in order to belong to something, to have some sort of family.  And in those gangs, they found a coping mechanism for life’s pain.  Through violence, neighborhood boundaries, drug use, and crime, they did the best they could to deal with a hopeless situation.

In one of the worst areas in LA, there was a church called Delores Mission.  That church recognized the gang problem as a crisis of hope and meaning.  And so they began a small job training initiative for gang members.  Today, twenty five years later, “Homeboy Industries” in LA is the world’s largest gang intervention, rehab, and re-entry program. 

The project started with a Jesuit priest named Gregory Boyle and a few people at church.  (Boyles’ book is “Tattoos on the Heart”).  They found jobs for gang-members willing to work.  That small beginning led to what is now a full-service support system for gang members with an annual budget of 15 million dollars.  They offer tattoo removal, and classes on anger management and parenting.  Homeboy Industries has started a range of businesses so that they have plenty of jobs for placement.  They have a bakery, a grocery store, a café, a diner, and a silkscreen printing business.  They didn’t start these businesses to make money.  They started them because they wanted to help ex-gang members and former convicts.

Boyle describes the Homeboy staff as “reverse cherry pickers” who deliberately choose to work with “the belligerent and the difficult,” people in great pain who have “been through the wringer,” to provide them with job opportunities and support services.

When discouraged gang members ask Father Boyle why their lives have been so difficult, why God has sent them such heartbreak and tragedy, Boyles’ response is simple.  “God didn’t send you that.  Life is hard.  And I believe God protects us from nothing, but sustains us in everything.”

In an interview, Boyle was asked, “How do you see blessing as part of your ongoing work, amid so much pain?”  And here’s what he said.

Well, in a concrete, specific way, homies are always asking me for blessings, especially on Fridays -- because the weekend’s coming, and there’s a little bit of magical thinking there.

They never say, “Father, may I have your blessing?” They always say, “Hey, G, give me a bless, yeah?”

They stop me wherever, and it’s very touching. And sometimes I’ll say, “Now you give me a blessing.”

They’re very sweet, very wonderful. They’ll say, “I don’t know how to do one.” But they always do. They know how to do one exceedingly well.

It’s about gift. Discover the gift of who each person is, and then invite people to live in each other’s hearts. And then hope that people will not only discover their gift and their own goodness but that they’ll live out of that place with each other, because as human beings, we’re just astoundingly hard on each other.

Tenderness is sort of contagious. And at our place, you feel it the minute you walk in. It’s baked into the walls, and it’s very compelling. Homies will walk in and go, “I want to work here.”

“I need a belonging place” is what a homie said to me once. It’s a belonging place, where nobody is outside of that sense of belonging.

When Boyle was asked how they deal with those addicted to drugs who aren’t really ready to come clean, aren’t ready to commit to life outside gang habits, he said that in this kind of ministry . . .

Success and failure are meaningless concepts.

If somebody’s here with us, we drug test when they get in, and then randomly and constantly. So when you test somebody after three months and there’s crystal meth in their system, usually we say, “Hey, let’s go to rehab, and then when you come back, you can start exactly where you left off.”

Often enough, they’ll say, “I don’t need drug rehab, thank you very much,” and they leave us.

One homie, Fabian, always says, “Progress is progress; we had them for three months.” And this Fabian is a kid I would hire and then I would fire, like so many others there.

But progress is progress . . . He made a lot of progress in three months; hopefully, he’ll come back. You can never take that progress away from him. It was three months of being held tenderly in a community that held him in high regard.

Who knows why he relapsed or got high? I suspect it’s because once you start to do the work, it’s too painful to look at it, and you want to self-medicate. But we’ll pick up where we left off and hope it’s soon.

But it’s never helpful to say we failed this guy. No, you meet halfway. You hope for the best. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes the good news is that God graciously redirects our attention from lifeless preoccupations towards life-giving possibilities.  Jesus redirects us.  From focusing on our political enemies.  From simplistic stories of what people had coming.  He redirects us to a life of repentant trust in God.  This new life Jesus offers isn’t waiting on pins and needles for political rulers to fix things.  This new life Jesus offers isn’t even tied to life’s ups and downs, successes and failures.  It is hope in our own future fruitfulness.  And in the fruitfulness of others.  And all this is possible because God patiently gives us time.

Jesus redirects us to stories of hope and trust.  These are hard stories to hold onto in the midst of pain and frustration.  Not everyone can hear them.  They are stories about a little mustard seed that, given time, will bloom into a sizeable tree.  They are stories of a woman working yeast into her dough.  Given time, the yeast will permeate the whole thing, and cause it to rise.  This is how God’s kingdom works among us.  It looks like barely a speck of a seed, a little pinch of yeast.  And yet it does its work over time.  Can you watch for it?  Can you learn to trust that this is the truest story about your life, and the life of everyone else?  Can you let Jesus redirect you to something bigger and better?