Isaiah 55. 1 – 9
Luke 13. 1 – 9
Fr Alex
I don’t know about you, but I find turning on the TV and watching the news a pretty miserable experience at the moment.
Death and destruction in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan, and so many other places; crazy rhetoric over the other side of the Atlantic; fear and anxiety at home about the rising cost of living, and diminishing support for the most vulnerable in our society; the ever present threat of climate change.
Things seem to keep getting worse. In the Church, too, we live with this feeling of decline: fewer Christians, not enough money for priests, churches closing. Will there even be a Church in twenty years’ time?
And all of this before we grapple with whatever our own personal concerns and anxieties might be.
I promise I’m not trying to depress you!
But it’s easy, isn’t it, to feel that our story as human beings in the 21st Century is a story of scarcity; of not having enough to satisfy our own needs, let alone enough to go around the rest of the world.
This is the narrative we hear again every time we engage with what’s going on in the world.
But as Christians, we know that’s not the end of the story; we know that there’s a different story about our world: one that we read in the pages of scripture, that Christ came to tell us and show us.
Our story is not a story of scarcity, but of abundance. The incredible abundance of God’s love, and his provision in creation.
This is the story Isaiah is trying to tell in our first reading. “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. … Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.”
Isaiah sets out all the wondrous things that God offers to his people: and there’s so much of it that money becomes meaningless. But, he asks them, why don’t they see it? Why do they carry on as if life is a competition, and chase after so many ultimately worthless things? He asks, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?”
Isaiah is calling the people to transformation: to cease living in the tiny world of their own scarcity, and to open their eyes to see the super-abundant world of God’s provision.
If they “seek the Lord,” “forsake their ways and thoughts” of selfishness and greed, and “return to him,” he will “have mercy on them; he will abundantly pardon.”
God’s ways, God’s thoughts, are so different from ours, so much “higher,” as Isaiah puts it – because when God looks at his creation he sees the abundance of all he has provided for us; and he weeps as we act as consumers of that provision, and not as the stewards and sharers that he has appointed us to be.
Isaiah’s call to transformation resonates with us today, in the face of so much conflict and uncertainty. We have to decide what kind of a world we want to live in: will we batten down the hatches, and each seek our own safety and security first, as certain prominent western leaders think we should? This way might make sense from a human point of view, but it is only ever diminishing; it makes our world smaller, in every sense, as we only look to ourselves.
Or, do we take a risk, and seek to look at the world from God’s point of view: to widen our vision, to act and think in his “high” way, and delight and share in the abundance of his provision?
It might be a difficult transformation; it might involve sacrifices. But it can only ever lead to growth, and to the flourishing of life, as we embrace things beyond ourselves.
We are given an image of this transformation in the second part of our Gospel reading. The fig tree is living in its own tiny world of scarcity. It is wasting the soil by simply living for itself.
But the gardener gives it one last chance to transform itself from a life of selfishness to one in which all may share. It will involve a sacrifice, in putting its energy into producing fruit, only to give it away to others. But if it can do that, it will become something so much more than it was before; providing food for those around it, who in turn will put their energy into caring for the tree. Its own flourishing, it turns out, is dependent on the flourishing of others.
And it can be part of a miracle: the mess and muck of the manure can be transformed into sweet and sustaining fruit.
It is our calling, as Christians who engage with the issues of the world, to show those who are stuck in their own tiny world of scarcity, that there is so much more out there. That there is another story, the story that the pages of scripture tell us: and it’s so much better than the one we tell ourselves.
And God has shown us the way of living this transformation, in Jesus. God could’ve quite happily remained as he was, above and beyond the mess and muck of creation. But he didn’t; the abundance of his love for what he had made drove him down right into the heart of it, into poverty, and pain, and persecution.
And on the cross, by sacrificing himself for us, Jesus brought about the ultimate transformation: of life out of death. By making that sacrifice, by looking out beyond himself and giving of himself for all others, he was able to show us how God looks at life: not short and limited by death, as we see it, but eternal; more life than we could possibly imagine.
May we be inspired to take up our cross and follow him, and work to bring in his kingdom of peace, and justice, and abundant love. Amen.