Putting on a New Mind

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Lent 3C, 3/23/25

Readings: Exodus 3:1-15 (Moses and the Burning Bush 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

How do we respond when tragedy befalls us? The answer Jesus gives is to repent. What in the world could our good Lord mean? I do think our initial shock at this answer comes from a misunderstanding of what it means to repent, which is what I’d like to explore with you today, because I think repentance is really a remarkable gift, not a punishment.

In today’s Gospel Jesus tells of two contemporary instances of tragedy which would have been familiar news stories to his disciples. In the first instance, Pontius Pilate, the same Roman governor who would go on to crucify Jesus, orders the execution of a number of Galileans for an unspecified charge. In the second instance, eighteen people were killed after an unsteady tower collapsed on them. One is an example of disaster effected by human hands and the other is simply a freak accident.

In both cases, Jesus poses the question “do you think these people perished because they were worse sinners than anybody else?” And the answer is definitively – no, they were not. This part, I believe, is straightforward enough. Jesus is effectively overturning a theology of transactional grace in which God is imagined as a divine Santa Claus, keeping a tally of good deeds, to be rewarded with presents and treats; and bad deeds, to be rewarded with persecution and natural disaster. Bad things happen to good people and we ought not blame others or ourselves for previous misdeeds when such instances occur.

We are all sinners after all, and God’s deepest desire is not to punish us, but to save us from the punishment we so often inflict on ourselves and our neighbors through our sin. We know this because in the Old Testament, God, in the burning bush tells Moses of his plan to liberate the Israelites from the cruelty of the Egyptians. God does not blame the Israelites for being enslaved, but promises to enact their liberation.

But then, after overturning this theology of transactional grace, Jesus says something perplexing which seems to contradict his previous contradiction: “but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did” (Lk. 13:3). Hmm. So which one is it Jesus – is tragedy not a punishment for our sins or must we repent to avoid tragedy? If the answer is the latter, that tragedy will befall us if we do not repent, then I think we are all in big trouble and it’s also an incredibly unpastoral answer.

Unless, Jesus is inviting us to reconsider our understanding of repentance. You see, there are two commonly held meanings of what it means to repent. The first comes from the Latin verb repentere, which means literally, to turn away. To turn ourselves, body, mind, and soul, away from that which is sinful and towards the love of God. This, I believe is a very lovely and useful understanding of repentance, but not at all in this instance. I can’t imagine a situation in which someone came to me for pastoral care in the midst of a crisis and I told them “well, have you considered turning away from your sinfulness?” No! Absolutely not.

And this is not what Jesus is talking about either. Rather, the Greek work Jesus uses when he calls on us to repent is metanoia. And metanoia is a difficult word to translate into English but can be understood as meaning ‘to change ones mind,’ or even better, ‘to put on a new mind.’ This is what Jesus is telling us to do when we repent, to put on a new mind; to reorient our understanding of our relationship to God and the world around us. To believe and act as if we are beloved children of God and so are those around us. That is the repentance Jesus is inviting us into.

So what exactly does this new mind look like? For one, we know it is not a mind in which God is actively out to get us for falling short. Jesus has already refuted that understanding of God. Instead, Jesus invites us to set aside a mind which asks “what is God doing to punish us” and put on a mind which asks “what is God doing to save us?”

And to answer this question, what is God doing to save us, Jesus offers a beautiful parable. A man grows angry at his fig tree for not producing figs and orders the gardener to cut it down. The gardener responds by challenging the man, saying “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down” (Lk 13:19).

Now who is who in this parable? In light of Jesus’s words about putting on a new mind, I’m inclined to believe that we are the fig tree which is struggling to bear fruit. And we struggle to bear fruit either because of our own sins or the sins around us which have made the soil hostile to growth. The man who wants to cut the fig tree down can be seen as the worldview, the mind, which sees only punishment without opportunity for grace, which is perhaps the mind we hold about ourselves at times. And the gardener, the wise and patient gardener, is of course our good Lord, who wants more than anything else, to save the already struggling fig tree from perishing entirely, which he does by pouring nutrient rich soil – grace upon grace – at its roots so that the tree may live.

If this is what repentance looks like. If this is what putting on a new mind about what God is trying to do in our lives, then I will be first in line to repent. Our Lenten repentance is about opening ourselves to receiving the grace which our Lord is heaping at our feet. And to do this, we also need to pull up a few weeds, to remove a few stubborn stones that are blocking our root systems from receiving God’s grace in its fullness. And in doing this, we are able shed the old leaves, the old mind, and put on a new one that is marked by the fruit of grace. That, thank God, is gift of we have in repentance. Amen.