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What we believe about God has a profound effect on how we live our lives. When I say believe, I don’t mean our confession of faith – the doctrinal idea stuff we throw around about God. Rather, I mean the deep down been programmed into me since I was a baby kind of feelings about God. There’s the God we say we believe in and then there’s the God we really believe in. Who is that God? I’m fond of a book by Bradley Jersak entitled A More Christlike God: a More Beautiful Gospel in which he points out several different deep down beliefs that we project on to God that aren’t Christian.
First, he talks about God the doting grandfather. This is the God who spoils us with whatever we want while ignoring our misbehaviour. This is the God who gives you whatever you ask for, if you just believe he’s so good and wonderful. Like the Easter bunny he always comes around with a basket of chocolate for his little snookum who can’t do anything wrong. He’s the Santa Claus who doesn’t have a naughty list and blesses you with everything privilege can provide. The doting grandfather God image works until tragedy hits and you find your prayers aren’t being answered the way you feel they’re supposed to be. Then we must ask how God can allow suffering to happen.
The second projection that Jersak defines is God the deadbeat dad or God the absentee landlord. This is the God who abandoned me, the dad who walked out shirking his responsibilities. This is the God who created the universe and gave it laws to govern how it functions, but then left it to fend for itself. This God leaves us feeling like orphans. He’s simply not there when we need him.
A third common image that we project upon God is that of the punishing judge, the God who gets us when we’re bad. He is a “meticulous micromanager” of our behaviour and a harsh taskmaster. God has given us the law and we must obey it or else. He seems to like us best when we are feeling guilt or regret about our behaviour; penitent. We try to tell ourselves that he “hates the sin, but loves the sinner” yet there’s no escaping the pervasive feeling that if he hates the sin, he hates us too and will only accept us if we can find some way to make ourselves right with him, some way to appease him and avert his angry wrath.
Jersak’s last un-Christ-like image that we project onto God is that of the Santa Claus Blend. This is the doting grandfather blended with that punitive judge. Like the doting grandfather it’s, “Ask me for anything and I will give it to you…as long as your good.” And, like the punitive judge he’s keeping a list of everything we do so don’t let your naughty list grow longer than your nice. Blended Santa falls apart when the nice get only socks that they didn’t ask for and the naughty get the ponies. There’s also nothing called grace here because it is all about how good or bad we have been and what we deserve, but nobody gets what they deserve.
Although these examples my seem a bit trite in my portrayal of them, I think we can all raise our hands and say those sound a lot like the god that I grew up with. We can confess God as Trinity, as the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has made us participants in their loving communion. But, what we really mean when we say God is: God is God the Father, the punitive Santa who when held accountable for the cold hard fact of suffering in the world turns out to be just a deadbeat dad who, although his only begotten Son died to appease his anger towards us, he is still ready to pour that wrath out on us because no matter how hard we try we only keep discovering we’re not good enough.
I’ve also said nothing about the Holy Spirit in this description of the way God is not but we seem to believe he is because talk of the Holy Spirit or the personal presence of God with us is generally left by us to the fanatics and for us it’s just easier to say we’ve been touched by an angel when something maybe experiential involving God may have happened. This is the God we functionally serve. This is why guilt is the number one motivator for church participation. If you want something done around the church, just find the person who will feel guilty if it doesn’t get done and that’s your bunny…your Easter bunny.
So, my point is that our deep-down beliefs about who God is ain’t necessarily the true God revealed to us in, through, and as Jesus as presented to us in the Bible and sensed by us through his presence with us. And so, we come to Luke, and this morning’s passage which is admittedly a very difficult passage to swallow. It seems here that Jesus is making God out to be that punitive judge we met earlier. It seems he is saying get yourself right with God, repent, or God will to get you just like he did them.
But, that’s not what’s going on here. I think Jesus is actually exposing a false image of God that was common in his day. I think this because twice he uses the phrase “do you think” which can also mean “do you suppose” or “do you believe”. With this conjectural kind of questioning, it seems to me that he is pushing into their belief system to expose a false idea of God. “Do you really believe that’s the way God is?” would be his question.
A predominant belief back in Jesus’ day was that God punishes sinners and the worse sinner that you are, God will get you all the more. Birth defects, accidents, horrible deaths, diseases – they believed things like these were punishment from God for sins committed in secret or out in the open. Therefore, those Galileans spoken of here had to have been really bad for Pilate to have massacred them and mixed their blood with sacrifices; so also, the Jerusalemites upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell. God was getting them good.
If I were to paraphrase a bit and read a bit between the lines here, I think Jesus is saying “Do you believe these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans (and we all know that all Galileans are dreadfully sinful). Is it because they were especially bad sinners that God punished them in such a way? Is this the God you believe in?” Jesus answers his own question with an emphatic “No!” No, they were faithful people on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship God rightly and for some reason of Pilate’s whim they died a horrible death. Sometimes bad things happen to even the most faithful of people.”
Jesus continues. “Those eighteen Jerusalemites who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Tower of Siloam fell, do you really believe they were worse sinners than anybody else in Jerusalem (and we all know Jerusalemites are so good and pure) so that God would punished them by wasting their lives with such a haphazard death? Is this the God you believe in? If so, you better get yourselves right with God because he’s going to get you too just like he got them. Tell me, really; is that what you believe God is really like?”
Jesus then tells them a parable in which he contrasts their false image of God and with one that is more Christ-like. Their false image of God is like the vineyard owner. He is like a blend between God the punitive judge and God the deadbeat Dad. He planted a fig tree in his vineyard and left it to grow on its own only to come back at harvest time when there was supposed to be something on it for him only to find that the tree bore no fruit. Since he couldn’t have a tree wasting his good soil, he wanted it cut down. But you know, the vineyard owner was at much at fault here as the tree itself for their being no fruit. You just don’t plant a fruit tree and go off and leave it. They require a lot of maintenance. Sp also4, why plant a fig tree in a vineyard? The grapevines were probably too much competition for it with respect to the nutrients in the soil. You can’t punish something for your own neglect. That’s not the way God is…is he? No!
God is like the Gardener in this parable. The Gardener won’t cut the tree down. He knows better. He knows it needs tending. He sees that the tree needs some fertilizer and gets his hands dirty with poo to make the tree able to bear fruit. This is the God we see in Jesus. Jesus, God the Son, got right into the poo of what it is to be human and suffered as we do in every way. He shared our every weakness. Though innocent of any crime, he was condemned to death for treason. His closest friends abandoned him and denied knowing him. He died a horribly painful death after being tortured by Roman soldiers who were probably histories best at that game. Yet, God the Father did not pour wrath out on humanity for this ultimate crime against God…No! He raised Jesus from the dead and then poured the Holy Spirit out upon us, that we may participate in his very life. God is like this Gardener. He makes us able to bear the fruit expected of us by pouring himself into us. The Holy Spirit, God’s very self, is the fertilizer that seeps into us through our roots and restores vitality to us and makes us able to bear the fruits expected of those bearing the image of God in his good creation.
Well, I bring up all these images of God because as I said at the very beginning what we believe about God has a very profound effect on how we live our lives and express our faith. Unless we repent of our misplaced faithfulness to these false images of God that we project onto God and serve instead of the True God, we will perish within the confines of a bankrupt religion.
The Greek word for repentance is “metanoia”. “Meta” means “with” and “noia” means “mind”. It is to be “with-minded”, “with-minded” with Jesus. It means to think, and pursue the things that he thinks and pursues which are adoration of and faithfulness to God his Father that expresses itself in the humility of suffering servants. Paul tells as at 1 Corinthians 2:16 that we have the mind of Christ which means we have the Holy Spirit in us helping us and empowering us to choose and live by means of the way of the cross. The Holy Spirit makes us able to live together as a community of disciples who love each other as the Trinity loves us and who relate to our surrounding community with compassion and the utmost hospitality. If we persist in clinging to the false images of God that we project onto him we will quench the work of the Holy Spirit in us and we will not be Christ-like but something rather sinister that claims to be (something like a voting bloc). So, what do you think? Do you think God is really like Jesus? Amen.
