Repent, or you too will perish: the fig tree, the bent woman and the lament over Jerusalem

Luke 13 belongs to the Gospel traditionally ascribed to Luke, the physician and companion of Paul (Colossians 4:14), who also wrote Acts. The attribution rests on early church testimony such as Irenaeus. Some critical scholars doubt that a companion of Paul was the author. The Gospel was probably written for a Greek-speaking and largely Gentile audience, addressed to a patron called Theophilus (Luke 1:3), so that he might know the certainty of what he had been taught. Dates range from the early 60s, if Acts was finished before Paul's trial, to the 80s, on the common view that Luke used Mark and wrote after Jerusalem fell in AD 70.

The chapter sits in the central section of the Gospel often called the travel narrative (9:51-19:44), where Jesus journeys toward Jerusalem. Luke reminds the reader of the destination again in 13:22 and 13:33. Much of the material in these chapters is found only in Luke, including the fig tree parable and the healing of the bent woman. Other sayings have parallels in Matthew and Mark, which fits the widely held view that Luke drew on Mark, on sayings shared with Matthew (often called Q), and on his own sources. Scholars who reject Q hold that Luke used Matthew. Either way, Luke has chosen and arranged the material to show a Messiah whose mission to Israel meets resistance and who opens the kingdom to many from outside.

The historical setting is Galilee and Judea under Roman rule. Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod Antipas, a son of Herod the Great, ruled Galilee and Perea as tetrarch. Pilate's slaughter of Galilean pilgrims is not recorded elsewhere, though other sources describe his harshness. The same is true of the tower at Siloam, which stood near the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem. Both events raise an old question: does suffering mark out the guilty?

Luke 13 combines teaching, parable, healing and prophecy. The sections are linked by the theme of response to Jesus now, while there is time. The first two units call for repentance and warn of judgment, the middle ones show the kingdom at work in a rescued woman and in small beginnings, and the last two show who will and will not enter, ending with grief over a city that will not come.

Two principles help with the parables.

• First, a parable normally makes one central point, and the fig tree parable is told as an answer to the call to repent: judgment is delayed, but not forever. It should not be turned into a detailed allegory in which every figure is assigned a meaning, though the Old Testament does use the fig tree and vineyard for Israel (Isaiah 5:1-7; Hosea 9:10; Micah 7:1).
• Second, the paired parables of mustard seed and leaven contrast a small beginning with a great result, and they follow a scene in which the kingdom is already at work in an unnoticed woman. Leaven is elsewhere a figure for corruption (Luke 12:1), but here Jesus uses it for the kingdom's spread. An image takes its meaning from how the speaker uses it.

A further principle: Sabbath controversies are not attacks on the Law. In the story of the bent woman Jesus argues from within the Sabbath commandment, asking what the day was given for. The woman's release (Greek luo) matches the Sabbath's function as rest and freedom in Deuteronomy 5:12-15, where Israel is told to remember that they were slaves in Egypt.

Verses 1–5

Some report that Pilate has mixed the blood of certain Galileans with their sacrifices. The assumption behind the report is that those who die suddenly or violently have been punished for sin. Jesus rejects it: 'Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered this fate?' He adds the case of eighteen people killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed. The answer to both is the same: 'No, I tell you. But unless you repent, you too will all perish.' He does not explain why the victims died. He turns the question onto the hearers, for the danger is unrepentance. 'Perish' here carries more than physical death. The Bible does link some suffering to sin (John 5:14), but not so that it can be traced case by case, as Job and John 9:3 show.

Verses 6–9

A man has a fig tree in his vineyard and has come three years looking for fruit without finding any. He tells the keeper to cut it down. Why should it use up the soil? The keeper asks for one more year to dig around it and fertilise it, and if it bears fruit, well, but if not, it can be cut down. The parable has no resolution, so the hearers must decide. The mercy lies in the delay, not in a promise that the tree will be spared forever.

Verses 10–17

On a Sabbath in a synagogue Jesus sees a woman who has had a spirit of weakness for eighteen years. She is bent over and cannot stand up straight. Jesus calls her over and says, 'Woman, you are set free from your disability.' He lays hands on her and she stands upright and glorifies God. The synagogue leader is indignant, and speaks to the crowd rather than to Jesus: there are six days for work, so come on those days to be healed. Jesus calls them hypocrites and argues from the lesser to the greater. Each of them unties an ox or donkey on the Sabbath and leads it to water. Should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan has bound for eighteen years, be released on the Sabbath day? His adversaries are humiliated and the crowd rejoices. Jesus gives her the title daughter of Abraham, full membership in the covenant people, and names Satan as the source of her bondage. Healing is part of the kingdom's war against him (Luke 11:20-22).

Verses 18–21

The kingdom is like a mustard seed that a man sowed in his garden. It grew into a tree and the birds nested in its branches. The image of birds nesting in a great tree echoes Ezekiel 17:23 and Daniel 4:12, where such a tree represents a kingdom giving shelter to the nations. The seed is tiny but the end is large. The second parable is about a woman who mixed leaven into three measures of flour until all of it was leavened. Three measures is a large quantity, the amount Abraham and Sarah prepared for their heavenly visitors in Genesis 18:6. The kingdom grows quietly and thoroughly.

Verses 22–30

Teaching in the towns and villages on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus is asked whether only a few will be saved. He does not give a number. He tells them to make every effort to enter through the narrow door, for many will try and fail. When the master of the house gets up and shuts the door, those outside will knock and appeal to table fellowship: 'We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.' The master answers that he does not know where they are from and tells them to depart from him, all you evildoers, which echoes Psalm 6:8. Knowing about Jesus and sharing his company is not the same as knowing him. There will be weeping when they see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom and themselves thrown out. People will come from east and west and north and south to recline at the table in the kingdom of God. The prophets spoke of the gathering of the nations to the feast (Isaiah 25:6; 49:12), and Jesus says some who are last will be first and some first will be last.

Verses 31–33

Some Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod wants to kill him. Not every Pharisee in Luke is an enemy (compare 7:36; 11:37). Jesus replies: 'Go tell that fox.' The fox was a figure of cunning, and perhaps of a small creature set against a lion. Jesus says he will keep driving out demons and healing today and tomorrow, and on the third day reach his goal. This is not a timetable but a way of speaking about a set course. The reason is that a prophet cannot perish outside Jerusalem. The city that kills the prophets will be the place where he dies.

Verses 34–35

'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those sent to her, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling!' The Old Testament speaks of God sheltering his people under his wings (Ruth 2:12; Psalm 91:4). Jesus speaks as the one who has longed to do this. Their house is left desolate. The words 'you will not see Me again until you say, Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord' come from Psalm 118:26, the pilgrim psalm that Luke 19:38 shows the crowds shouting as Jesus enters the city. Matthew 23:37-39 has the same lament, placed during Jesus' last days in Jerusalem.

The chapter's first question is the Bible's old one about suffering and guilt. The book of Job denies that suffering can be read as direct punishment for the victim's sin, and Jesus says the same here. Yet he does not say that sin is harmless. Everyone needs repentance, and the death that reaches some early will reach all in the end. The delay in the fig tree parable shows the patience of God (Exodus 34:6; Romans 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9), a patience that has a limit.

The chapter also shows the kingdom as both present and future. It is present in the healing of the woman and the quiet work of the seed and leaven. It is still to come in the feast when the patriarchs sit at the table with people from every direction. The reversal at the end of the narrow door section, 'some who are last will be first', gathers up a pattern throughout Luke (1:52-53; 14:11; 18:14). The sorrow over Jerusalem adds a note that runs from Genesis to Revelation: God's offer is real, and rejection is real as well. The closing words leave room for a later welcome.

In this chapter Jesus identifies himself in four ways. He is the one who frees: he breaks Satan's hold on a daughter of Abraham on the Sabbath, the day of release, and argues that this is just what the day is for. He is the prophet who must die in Jerusalem. Luke has told us from 9:51 that his face is set toward the city, and 13:33 states why. Prophets before him were killed there (2 Chronicles 24:20-21; Jeremiah 26:20-23). His words about the third day and reaching his goal point ahead, more tentatively, to the resurrection Luke records in chapter 24. The phrase may simply mean a short fixed time, so it is best called an echo, but Luke's later chapters invite the connection.

He also speaks as God. The hen who gathers her chicks is a figure for God's care in the psalms, and Jesus applies it to his own longing for Jerusalem. The citation of Psalm 118:26 sets him as the coming one of whom the pilgrim psalm sings, and Luke 19:38 shows it fulfilled at the triumphal entry. Finally, he stands at the door. In the narrow door passage he is the master who decides who enters, and in Matthew 7:21-23 the same warning is given about those who say 'Lord, Lord'. To eat and drink in his company is not enough. The kingdom's feast belongs to those who come to him and are known by him.