Who do you blame?

“There’s a reason for everything”—I cannot tell you how many times I hear that in a given week—and occasionally it appears to be so. Adolf Hitler dies in a Berlin bunker, his dreams of world domination in flames all around him, and we are tempted to think the world is orderly, predictable. The TV evangelist’s empire crumbles, as if built on clay or sand, and again we are tempted to think we have it figured out. The wheels of justice are turning. Slowly, sometimes, but turning. A rebellious kid fries his brain on drugs; the black sheep of some family corrodes his liver with cheap whiskey; one or both drive and die under the influence and we say, “Yes, yes, we understand.”

After all, your sin or turning away from God will find you out. We know the old sayings are true: Pride goes before destruction; a haughty spirit before a fall. God is not mocked. What you sow, that is what you reap. Such thinking may be more akin to karma than the gospel, but it can bring some comfort, this notion that the score is being kept. And so, whether God is keeping score or not, we are. So were those who came to Jesus that day in the reading from Luke 13.

We search for someone or something to blame when things go wrong. It’s almost more comforting to think of a God who punishes us than one who is sitting in heaven just watching what’s going on down here on Earth and doing nothing, like the absentee landowner frustrated with the fig tree that just won’t produce. Isn’t it our first tendency to associate God with landowner, who is the person with power in the story? We want that causality; it helps us make sense of things.

In other words, don’t think you are sinless because you see. Don’t think you are righteous because you weren’t in the tower, weren’t slaughtered like the sheep. Towers fall. Strongmen kill. Those who die in such ways may not be offenders at all but only victims. All of us are guilty of such thinking. When bad stuff happens to someone, one way or the other it is most likely their own fault. We all blame the victims: one way or another they are not living right, which lets us pat ourselves on the back and offer sanctimonious comfort and explanation, all the while applauding ourselves that, from the available data, we do seem, in fact, to be living right.

Consider another possibility. Suppose God is the vinedresser? What if the absentee landowner represents humanity and the fig tree represents our spiritual lives? We’re not producing, not fruitful, because we aren’t paying attention to how we are growing. We’re off in the city like the landowner, too occupied with other matters to take the time to nourish ourselves. Then disaster strikes, and we wonder, “Where is God? Why are we being punished? What will God do to help us?” God works in the vineyard of our souls, offering to aerate the soil and put down a little manure. God digs around the tree and cuts the roots of old attitudes, habits, and beliefs. God creates the possibility of prolific growth.

Jesus is aghast. He will not abide the way many of us think or self-righteousness. Instead, he offers the parable of the gardener as a means of suggesting that we do not know how, when or what life will throw at us and how God may be involved in that. Neither do we have enough even of the available data to begin to know what is the truth of a situation. When Paul advises that we weep with those who weep, that we rejoice with those who rejoice, he may have been providing the perfect antidote.