One of the most attractive but at the same time most challenging truths which comes from our fundamental Christian belief that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine is that when we encounter the human Jesus, as we do in tonight‘s gospel and in a sense in every page of the gospels, we don’t just encounter a remarkable human being: we also encounter God who reveals Himself - we might say reveals His heart and his mind - through the heart and mind of Jesus.

What this invites us to reflect on, and to reflect on deeply, is that as we listen to Jesus speak, we hear God speaking in human ways. When we hear Jesus teach and preach, we hear God’s truth proclaimed in human ways. When we see Jesus in action and reflect on the deeper meaning of every single encounter, He has with so many different people in so many different situations, we see God at work in human ways. Quite simply, we can say that Jesus through His humanity reveals for us the truth about God. The creator and sustainer of the whole universe, which as the modern discoveries of science point out is really beyond our capacity to grasp in its complexity and its enormity, becomes accessible to us and knowable by us in this man, Jesus Christ.

What makes this truth so attractive, but at the same time so challenging, is that if we take Jesus seriously then God is perhaps very different to the image of God which we have somehow or other created in our own minds. The challenge of the gospel, and this is particularly true in the Gospel of Saint Luke, is to ask ourselves if our image of God, which often has elements of remoteness or vengefulness or anger, really corresponds with the God whom Jesus reveals.

Tonight’s gospel is a good example of this. When Jesus hears about two disasters which have caused great suffering to people, one as the result of an accidental collapse of a tower and the other as a result of a vengeful persecution by Pontius Pilate, Jesus warns His listeners against the temptation to believe that both groups of people were being punished for their sins. This was a common view in the time of Jesus of the way God acted, and it remains a very common view among many people today, including Christians. Jesus refuses to make this link between the suffering of innocent people and a decision by an angry God. Instead, He reminds people that we are all sinners in need of repentance and should look to ourselves and our own need for conversion rather than seeking to identify guilt in others. Behind this, of course, is Jesus’s understanding of God as a merciful and compassionate God rather than as an angry and vengeful God.

The next part of tonight’s gospel goes a little further. The simple story of a farmer who becomes frustrated because, in spite of his hard work and his patient care, his fig tree is still not producing any fruit, is the story of a farmer who in the end runs out of patience and gives up. Everyone listening to Jesus would know that it is good farming practice, and indeed common sense, to remove an unproductive tree so as to make room for planting a new tree which hopefully would eventually produce the fruit the farmer wanted. The gardener, however, advises the landowner to go beyond good farming practice and common sense and be still more patient, to wait a little longer, and keep hoping that eventually the tree will do its job.

The point of the story, of course, is that in God’s dealings with us God does not follow human logic which would say “only so many chances and then no more”. God instead continues to wait and hope that we return to Him. In this sense He does do what any good farmer would do, and what the farmer in tonight’s story was prepared to do, but only for three years: to till the ground, to improve the soil, to keep on watering. Through the gift of His grace, His compassion and His forgiveness, God continues to tilt the ground of our lives, of our souls. God continues to water us with the gift of His Spirit. But the difference between God and the farmer is that God does not give up. God continues to wait, and wait again, and wait again, always ready to be patient, always ready to forgive, always ready to welcome us back whenever we have strayed away.

Many people struggle to believe that God really is like this because many people have failed to understand that God does not operate with human logic but with the divine logic which is grounded in mercy and compassion. In this Jubilee Year of Hope it is precisely this infinite mercy and compassion which is the source of our hope. As one of the letters of Saint Paul to Timothy puts it, “We may be unfaithful, but God is always faithful, because God cannot disown his own self”.

It is with this thought in our hearts that we can hear the words of scripture which are put before us so often during Lent:

Come back to me with all your heart, fasting, weeping, mourning. Let your hearts be broken, not your garments torn. Return to the Lord your God again for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in graciousness, and ready to relent (Joel 2:12).