Luke 13:1-8 The barren fig tree. Source of image unknown. Please let me know in comments. This is a very Lenten passage. It is headed in many versions as saying ‘Repent or perish’. The audio of this talk can be found here It is one of those passages which might be used by street preachers. It is a call to repent, to turn back to God. 1. We are called to repent of our judgementalism. Some pilgrims in Jerusalem, who had gone to make an annual sacrifice, had been murdered by Herod’s troops. We have no alternative source for what happened, but we know that religious festivals could be high tension times and there were regular clashes between the authorities and pilgrims. It seems that the people talking to Jesus imply that the murdered pilgrims must have been doing something sinful to have suffered their fate. Perhaps, people said, they were offering the sacrifices but had hidden sin in their heart and God was not to be deceived. Perhaps they w...
Luke 4:1-12 The temptations of Christ. The Basilica of San Marco, Venice c1100-1150 The story is told of the boy whose parents found out that he was swimming in the river on his way home from school. They told him that he was not to do that. The following morning, mum thought it was wise to check his bag. She found in it a pair of swimming trunks. She said to him, ‘I thought I had told you not to go swimming on your way back from school’. And he replied, ‘It is OK mum. I wasn’t going to go swimming. I packed them just in case I was tempted’. Today, as this season of Lent starts, we read about the temptations of Jesus. Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted Interestingly, we pray a bit later in this service, ‘Lead us not into temptation’. We will look at that in our Lent course on the Lord’s Prayer, but I wonder whether one way to think about this is to consider that there are two kinds of temptations. There are those temptations which are too strong for us and wi...