Repent Or Perish
REPENT OR PERISH
LUKE 13:1-9
An important part of Jesus’ message was that people must repent and turn from their sins.
Verses 1-5. Mention of Pilate’s Galilean massacre, and the disaster of the Siloam Tower, flows from the words on judgment which closed the last chapter. It was no doubt suggested that the victims of the two catastrophes were under some special judgment of God. Not so, Christ replies. Man is exposed to the vicissitudes and chances of life, and God does not always intervene to protect the innocent from disaster. A little reflection will show why. Continual guarding of the good would make it profitable to be godly, on the lowest level of that word. If man is richly to believe it must be in spite of all, without special patronage or ready reward.
The mention of the atrocity at the altar is a glimpse of Pilate’s rough-handed government. From the New Testament, from Josephus, and from Philo, a group of similar incidents may be collected. The same arrogant character, with its streak of cowardice, may be discerned throughout them all. It was a similar incident in Samaria which led finally to the procurator’s recall in AD 36, and his disappearance from the pages of history.
13:6-9. Hosea 9:10 and Joel 1:7 are probably the key to the imagery. In 13:3 and 13:5 the Lord had used the chilling word “perish.” How could a “chosen people” perish, was the spoken or unspoken response. The little parable is the answer. Fig trees were planted in spare corners of vineyards and it was natural to expect signs of fruit after three years. The truth which the Lord sought to emphasize was that national privilege carried national responsibility. To those taught to think in the imagery of the Old Testament, it was plain that Israel was the fig tree. Israel, the similitude suggested, would stand only while she fulfilled the historic purpose for which she came into being. This is true of all living. Every privilege carries a responsibility. A duty attaches to every endowment which man enjoys. Historically the respite might represent the early ministry of the church in Palestine.
Notes 13:1: possibly men who caused a riot when Pilate used money from the temple treasury to build a 25-mile aqueduct into Jerusalem; the incident may have caused the enmity between Pilate and Herod (Luke 23:12). Did the questioners expect Jesus, as a Galilean, to take sides for personal reasons? 13:7: literally “for three years I have kept coming.”