From Our Archives

Debie Thomas, What Are You Asking? (2022); and Debie Thomas, Ask A Better Question (2019).

This Week's Essay

Luke 13:3 and 5, "Unless you repent, you will perish."

I have purged my personal library two times — once when we painted my bedroom office, and once when we deconstructed our house of twenty-five years and moved to San Diego. One of the few books that survived both cuts, and one that I have read twice, is the novel Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace.

When the publisher released a 20th anniversary edition of the novel, Michael Pietsch, the CEO and Wallace's editor, justified his decision this way: "The book’s main ideas — that too much easy pleasure may poison the soul, that we’re awash in an ocean of pain, and that truly knowing another person is the hardest and most worthwhile work in the world — are truer now than they’ve ever been."

Truly, this is the stuff of Lent.

I interpret Infinite Jest as a modern reprisal of Isaiah's ancient question in this week's lectionary: "Why do you spend money on what is not bread, / and your labor on what does not satisfy?" Isaiah's question always reminds me of Michael Pollan's distinction in his little book Food Rules (2009) between highly processed "food like substances" and truly nourishing real food.

Such is our soul-destroying temptation in our culture of ambition, entertainment, and indulgence, and it's the subject of our Lenten disciplines. Consider one of my favorite scenes in Infinite Jest.

About half of the novel takes place at the Enfield Tennis Academy, an expensive boarding school where kids hone their skills in the hopes of making it to The Show — the professional circuit. At the ETA, accepting a tennis scholarship to college is an admission of failure.

Jesus Curses the Fig Tree, by the Coptic monk Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, late 17th century.

One of the kids, LaMont Chu, is already obsessed with tennis fame at his tender age. He imagines pictures of himself in tennis magazines, television announcers analyzing his stroke in hushed tones, and corporations paying him to wear their logos. He's so obsessed that he can't eat, sleep, or even pee. His performance is suffering. Ambition is eating him alive, and so he goes to Lyle, the ETA guru.

LaMont admits his rabid ambition to Lyle. He's ashamed of his hunger for hype. He feels lost and lonely.

Lyle is the perfect listener: "the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment." Lyle never condescends, but he also never candy coats the truth.

"Trust me," he tells LaMont, "the pros whom you envy do not feel what you burn for. They are trapped, just as you are."

"Is this supposed to be good news?" asks LaMont. "This is awful news."

"LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true? The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist."

"This is good news?"

"It is the truth."

"The burning doesn't go away?"

"What fire dies when you feed it?"

Withering of the Fig Tree, 13th century woodcut.

"Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn't make me feel very much better at all?"

"LaMont, you suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of the oldest lies in the world. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage."

"So I'm stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out."

"You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage."

That, it seems to me, is a marvelous description of the outmoded word repentance, which is the heart of this week's gospel — a change of heart leading to a change of action. To turn around and go in a different direction. And, if you don't change, then a sort of spiritual corrosion will consume you. 

In Luke 13 this week, Jesus compares his audience to barren fruit trees. Unlike the victims of Galilee and Siloam (a neighborhood in Jerusalem) who had suffered sudden death in freak accidents, they still had the luxury of a future with choices. If they let those two tragedies speak to them, they could rearrange the furniture of their lives, adjust their priorities, and make changes while life was left.

But the window of opportunity doesn't stay open forever, Jesus warned them. Mere length of years was no guarantee of a fruitful life, just as premature death could not diminish it. Sooner or later, young or old, the tree will be cut down. Repent or perish, says Jesus, not once but twice. In the gospel of Mark 1:15, the very first words spoken by Jesus are nearly identical: "Repent and believe the gospel!"

Jesus and the Fig Tree.

And so Isaiah asks us this week, "Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?" That's spiritual deficit spending of the worst sort, accumulating depreciating assets that lose value every day. When the clock stops and time ends, Jesus said, your life will not consist of your possessions, the wealth you hoarded, the vanity you perfected, or the power you wielded.

There's a deep hunger and thirst in all of us, says the Psalmist (63:1) for this week, a palpable longing for human nourishment that no amount of power or money, no prestigious job, nor any gorgeous home in an upscale neighborhood can satisfy. My financial anxieties won't disappear by winning the lottery. A new lover will not bring true love.

Thank God for the season of Lent, in which Jesus warns us two times: "Unless you repent, you will perish." This isn't a moralistic judgment. As Lyle tried to explain to LaMont in Infinite Jest, it's a tragic statement of fact. At Lent we identify what Lyle called the cages that imprison us. Yes, this bad news is actually good news.

It's good news because the warning comes with Isaiah's invitation: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live."

Weekly Prayer

Reginald Heber (1783–1826)

Bread of the World

Bread of the world, in mercy broken,
Wine of the soul, in mercy shed,
By Whom the words of life were spoken,
And in Whose death our sins are dead.

Look on the heart by sorrow broken,
Look on the tears by sinners shed;
And be Thy feast to us the token,
That by Thy grace our souls are fed.

Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net 

Image credits: (1) The Walters Art Museum; (2) Heaven on Wheels; and (3) Vridar.org.