Repentance, Bearing Fruit, and the Transformation of Desire

Image Credit: Codex Parisinus Graecus 74 (12th century), anonymous, Luke 13

Third Sunday in Lent, Year C
23 March 2025

Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

I have burned plenty of fossils fuel in my life, and I continue to. The most fun way of burning fossil fuel was driving my dad’s BMW on the German Autobahn and on windy country roads when I was a young man. The most sensible was running our gas furnace during prairie winters.
Driving my dad’s BMW comes to mind now and again. In part because I like saying, “been there, done that,” when it comes to the kind of automobiles that are supposed to (primarily?) appeal to male drivers. Not that a BMW was ever an option in the time since I had moved away from home.
But surprisingly I still have some interest in cars and can identify them by more than their colour.

My dad’s BMW also comes to mind in regards to spending money on things that do not satisfy, not that I would know since I have never owned one. And as far as my father is concerned, he did drive a lot for his business, and he believed that the car he drove needed to project the kind of solidity and success that would inspire confidence in potential customers. At one point or another all of us are victims of such assumed expectations and our own rationalizations. This is no judgment on my dad or on anyone else.

Since cars are marketed not primarily as devices to get you from A to B but as expressions of our desired identity – you know, what my dad thought he needed to project – we are not surprised that consumer choice has become equated with freedom, like the car we drive, the vacation we go on, the toothpaste we use. And that consumer choice is extended to wanting to do what I want to do whenever I want to do it. In that way our whole life has been defined by the market and we are consumers before we are anything else. And we know that the market does not create freedom but dependencies.

But letting ourselves be defined as consumers is a reductionist view of what it means to be human, or to be a citizen. In fact, being a citizen is difficult within the consumer paradigm because being a consumer frees me from all but financial obligations (and maybe voting every four years, but please, no more). Yet being a member of a community, a neighbourhood, a church, a nation places me in obligation to others for community requires that we are bound to each other. If this sounds like wedding vows, that is not coincidental, for a marriage is also a community in which two people have committed themselves to each other for the sake of the other.
We know that the biblical understanding of freedom is not a freedom to do what I want whenever I want to do it, but a freedom from, freedom from the need for one’s life to revolve around oneself. Martin Luther described this being centered on our own needs as being turned in on ourselves.
The Christian understanding of freedom is that in Christ God has freed us from being turned in on ourselves so that we are now free to serve God and others. That is why Martin Luther could say, “A Christian is the most free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone.”¹

In 1 Corinthians eight, a little before today’s passage, Paul speaks about food sacrificed to idols, and writes (The Message),
¹⁰(…), say you flaunt your freedom by going to a banquet thrown in honour of idols, where the main course is meat sacrificed to idols. Isn’t there great danger if someone still struggling over this issue, someone who looks up to you as knowledgeable and mature, sees you go into that banquet? The danger is that he will become terribly confused – maybe even to the point of getting mixed up himself in what his conscience tells him is wrong.
Paul continues,
^11-13Christ gave up his life for that person. Wouldn’t you at least be willing to give up going to dinner for him – because, as you say, it doesn’t really make any difference? But it does make a difference if you hurt your friend terribly, risking his eternal ruin! When you hurt your friend, you hurt Christ. A free meal here and there isn’t worth it at the cost of even one of these “weak ones.” So, never go to these idol-tainted meals if there’s any chance it will trip up one of your brothers or sisters.

Paul says that my personal freedom, my consumer choice, does not trump your salvation.
In today’s passage Paul returns to the experience of Christians living in a pagan world, perhaps not so unlike ours, with the temptation to fall back into pagan ways of living and Paul assures us that God is faithful and that in times of such testing we can rely on God.
The examples Paul gives from the Hebrew Scriptures relate to idolatry, for the sins described relate to a lack of trust in God and to practices related to pagan fertility cults. Our parable from Luke’s Gospel expects us to bear fruit.
The question is, why do we do things we often know are wrong or do not satisfy, and thus we bear no fruit.
The answer, our readings suggest, is that we do the wrong things because we desire the wrong things, or that we do not know what to desire. That would be the things we buy with our money that do not satisfy, any number of things that are not God. Desiring what is not God keeps us from bearing fruit.

We have known since we were little that not everything we desire we will attain, and we have known that not everything we desire is good.
One way to deal with our desires is to bring them before God. Prayer means to intentionally spend time with God and it is in prayer that God can transform and shape our desire. When we pray that would would love what God loves, this prayer is born of the recognition that our life and all goodness are in God. In Psalm 73 Asaph prays,
“Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.”(v.25)
God wants to transform our desires that we would not accept substitutes from communion with God in the community of the Church. (This does not mean that God is present only in the church, only that the church is where God makes us into Christ’s body for the world.)

The parable of the fig tree goes beyond desire, for we need not wait for the complete transformation of our desire to live as those who belong to Jesus Christ. The parable of the fig tree declares the goal of the Christian life to be one that bears fruit. This imperative is not softened by the gardener’s request to give it more time, nor is it softened by the sacrifice of Christ that fertilizes the ground. But the pleading of the gardener and the sacrifice of Christ fill us with hope. A few verses after the parable of the fig tree Jesus sustains our hope by telling the parables of the mustard seed and of the leaven, which made Luther interpret the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer (“your kingdom come”), declaring that God’s reign will come anyway but we pray that it also come to us.

In the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer we pray,
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven. (6:10)

The Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann says that of all of the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, this seems to be the simplest and most understandable. Yet, he says, in reality it is the most difficult petition.² Schmemann observes that “even the most ardent believer all too regularly, if not always, desires, expects, and asks from the God he claims to believe in that God would fulfill precisely his own will and not the will of God.”
Schmemann then looks at the gospels and asks about the crowds, “Are they not following him because he is accomplishing their will? He is healing, helping, comforting … However, as soon as he starts speaking about the essential, about the fact that a person has to deny himself if he wants to follow him, about the need to love one’s enemies, and to lay down one’s life for one’s brothers, as soon as his teaching becomes difficult, exalted, a call to sacrifice, a demand of the impossible – in other words, as soon as Christ starts to teach about what is the will of God, people immediately abandon him, and moreover, turn against him with anger and hatred.”³

Schmemann shows us that even in our prayer we can deceive ourselves, and that even in prayer we can remain distant from God, though God is never distant from us. Schmemann concludes by saying, “ ‘Thy will be done.’ This means first of all: grant me strength and help me to understand what is your will, help me to overcome the limitations of my own reasoning, of my heart, of my will, in order to discern your paths … (…) Help me, in other words, to desire that which you desire.”⁴

Prayer then is key for us to be able to bear fruit, for in prayer we ask God to transform and shape our desires and to help us discern God’s will. Worship, hymns, the reading of the scriptures, giving alms, all serve to help us to let the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 2:5) Repetition is important because it reminds us of the mind of Christ again and again.

In the meantime, we are grateful for the gardener’s intervention, for Christ’s sacrifice that is the soil’s nutrient, for parables that proclaim the coming of God’s reign, even without our doing. We pray that it come to us also.

Amen.