SundayGospelReflection.org

Gospel Reflection 20070311

Sin is not only a private affair, but one that concerns our relationships to the larger community—to society, both local and global.
In addition to stress on the inner attitude of an individual, the Church is increasingly aware of our social responsibilities. Vatican II's Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (#30) insists that the contemporary Christian cannot rest content "with a merely individualistic morality. It grows increasingly true that the obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if each person, contributing to the common good,...also promotes and assists the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life."

What the Church is telling us today is that it is not enough to examine ourselves merely in terms of personal piety, but also in terms of our contributions to the good or evil of society.

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Finding Fruit
March 11, 2007

Third Sunday of Lent

Luke 13:1-9
At that time some people who were present there told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. He said to them in reply, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did! Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them -- do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!" And he told them this parable: "There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the gardener, ´For three years now I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?´ He said to him in reply, ´Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.´"




It seems that, more and more, the Church must put the message of Christ in the warning terms which Christ Himself uses in today’s Gospel. Were we to apply the spirit of these texts to modern times we might well ask: Were the 3,000 people annihilated at Ground Zero more guilty than the rest of us? Are the millions of innocent children suffering from HIV/AIDS more guilty than the rest of us? Are not these horrific tragedies warnings also to us? Or do we live thinking that death will never come to us? Do the sweetness of freedom without responsibility, rights without truth and the unspoken dread of changing our lives to live righteously and piously before God lull us into moral and religious oblivion? Do we insist all the more on our freedoms because we smart all the more at admitting the truth? Do we want more freedom to compensate for the pressures, demands and unbearable tedium and stress of our daily existence? Are we angry at God for being God and at ourselves for being ourselves, that is, not God?
I ask many questions and offer few answers; I seem to focus on the shadows and forget the bright signs of hope around us and among us. I know. But not everything can be said in one go: I hope you understand that I take my cue from the Gospel of today in which Jesus, our Hope and our Light, demands of us to consider the bitter shadows in order to stir ourselves to sweet repentance, which is nothing other than the discipline of falling in love with Him. If I recall one doctrine above, I do so inseparably with another: it is the unfailing mercy of Christ given through His Church to those who seek to obey, but fail on the way. Mercy is not an excuse to justify disobedience, but a remedy to strengthen us to seek and find the freedom of obedience.


Jesus, in St. Luke's gospel, warns us against becoming complacent. He warns us, "Those who think they are secure should take care not to fall."
In today's gospel, Jesus uses the current news events of that day as an example to talk about the punishment of God for those who do not accept the gift of salvation. Apparently, there was outrage among the Jews over the mingling of blood from animals sacrificed to pagan idols and the blood of some Galilean insurrectionists. They wondered what sin these Galileans had committed to deserve such a disgracing death.
Jesus tells them that these tragic deaths had nothing to do with the personal sins of the individuals. However, He warns them that they will suffer a similar fate if they do not repent. This is really the central message of the Gospels. "Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand I". We are chosen to be delivered from sin and death. We are given the Spirit to guide and direct our actions. We are strengthened by the Eucharist to stay on the road which leads to the Promised Land, but if we do not repent, continually reform our lives, and renew our commitment to living as God's Chosen people, we will be punished. The security we thought we had will be taken away.
Sisters and brothers, now is the time to purify ourselves, repent, and renew our commitment to live as People of God. We want to live as God's Chosen people. We do not want to follow the complacency of God's first Chosen People. We must not "take on the yoke of slavery a second time," turn to the false idols of our passing pleasures, or grumble against God when we think He has abandoned us. We must be committed to the journey, confident that Jesus, our New Moses, will lead us safely, guide us with His Spirit, sustain us with His own Body and Blood, and lead us to the new Promised Land of Heaven.
Bitter-sweet describes well the taste of hard, personal decisions. Decisions always seem to be dilemmas since a “yes” to one option inevitably means a “no” to others, and those others are often not easy to give up. Although I should always choose what is truly good, what I know to be truly bad can also appear incredibly good. It is easy to fall gradually in love with evil, not because it is evil, but because it appears to be so good. Conversely, it can be difficult to fall in love with what is truly good, not because it is truly good, but because it can appear hard, arduous and downright bad. I see the sweetness of evil in the deceptive beauty it displays, but once I bite it the honey turns to acid inside me. I see the bitterness of the good in the real toil and effort it demands of me, but once I taste it I savor the mature richness of life and love and the deep peace of knowing I have not struggled in vain.
As human beings, pilgrims in time and space, life spreads before us a banquet of choices. A right conscience commands us: “choose good and avoid evil!”, but not all consciences are always right, at least not in all things. Of themselves, human beings do not have a clear and definitive picture of what is good and what is evil. Of itself, conscience does not guarantee infallibly what is right, what is good or what is to be done. Human beings and moral conscience need the light of divine truth to know what is right and good. It is that truth which forms and informs right conscience; without it there is no universally valid right and wrong, but only what human beings want and want to justify on the convenient, but questionable, basis of the shifting sands of their personal or collective preferences. Every human being has a deep desire to be rid of a truth which impinges upon their freedom of choice, yet paradoxically he or she thirsts for that very truth. We want to be uninhibited, unrestricted and immune from responsibility to anyone but ourselves, yet deep down we also want to surrender to an unnameable Other, albeit our own immortalized self. When it comes to the crunch, however, freedom is sweet, truth bitter. Yet, it is the truth which makes us free, while freedom alone cannot make us true. Truth is a given, to be revealed or discovered; while freedom is also a given, it remains like a wild animal or a tornado without a path if its strength is not tamed, formed and directed towards choosing and loving the truth.
To learn the truth, to learn to love and to do the truth, is the meaning of discipline as it is the meaning of discipleship. Freedom without truth turns our soul into a fruitless fig-tree. A person who shouts “freedom! freedom!”, but does not root that freedom in the truth, becomes sterile. They waste not only their own freedom but also the truth, the ground in which they stand. Rights and freedoms are neither right nor free if they are not rooted in the truth. No amount of indignation or self-invented justification or clever, cosmetic argumentation, can make true what is only make-believe. Just as sterile fig-trees would render an orchard fruitless and “exhaust the soil”, so all who proclaim freedom without the truth can lay waste an entire community and, indeed, civilization itself. It will be too late if, having uselessly destroyed the soil, they then remonstrate with it for not feeding them. If the gardener waits too long before trying to save them, they will all have to be cut down, the soil will be wasted and the gardener himself dismissed.
For our salvation’s sake, it is of fundamental and urgent importance today that we keep continually and clearly in our minds the following doctrine of the Catholic faith: when our Holy Father the Pope, and the Bishops who are in communion with him (no matter how discredited some of them may be), teach us the bitter-sweet truth of what is right and wrong, good and bad, in matters of faith and morality relating to our salvation, it is Christ Himself who teaches us. All Catholics are therefore obviously obliged in conscience to receive such teaching with religious respect of both mind and will; even if they do not understand it from a purely intellectual or cultural perspective, it commands their obedience because Christ commands their obedience. The truth is often bitter, and freedom in matters we do not understand, or towards which we feel culturally hostile, is particularly sweet. But the gardener would be failing to fertilize the soil if he failed to teach the will of Christ above all in matters where the soul is in danger of sterility.
The Church’s magisterial authority does not teach unthinkingly as if intending to cut us off from the rich soil of Christ’s truth. She does not teach to condemn, but to call to repentance, something that sometimes requires strong and unapologetic statements. She does not teach in order to conserve some imaginary façade of feudalistic power over the faithful, but to serve their consciences with the tools to unmask the deceptive beauty of evil and to discern the true beauty of the good behind the appearances of difficulty or suffering. She does not teach in order to be counter-cultural or to make a name for Herself or to gain influence over political opinion nationally or internationally. No, She teaches at Christ the Lord’s own bidding to be “light to the earth”, to shine His light on the nations presently enveloped in the suffocating darkness of “respectable immorality”, terrorism, war, injustice, poverty, famine and disease. The Church is not the mistress of doom and gloom, but the Mother of light and hope to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. Those who do not want to listen to Christ’s truth will not listen to the Church; indeed, even among Her own children, She will be ridiculed and falsely accused of infidelity to Christ; and we should not be surprised if, or –perhaps better- when, in the persons of Her faithful members, She is persecuted both subtly and blatantly for defending the doctrine of the Lord Jesus. If the world hated Him, it will hate us no less. We must be vigilant, strong in faith and stronger still in loving and forgiving those who hate us.


This season of lent is a wake-up call for us, a time to be brutally honest with ourselves so that we come to know how deeply we depend on god’s mercy. The God we worship has proven to be loving, forgiving and saving throughout the history of our faith.
In today’s gospel, Jesus tells about a fig tree that never bears fruit. Like any sensible farmer, the owner thinks it’s probably time to get rid of it. But the guy who works in the field has a better idea. I’ll give it a big dose of loving care and then we’ll hope to see its branches bend under the weight of juicy figs.
And that is exactly what Jesus does for us. He feeds us, not with fertilizer, but with his own body. He invites us to stop boasting and let him gently point out what we are doing wrong.
Eight-year-old jimmy was acting up. He refused to do what he was told to do, and did about everything he was told not to do. In desperation his father finally sent him to bed before the dessert was served. Just then a neighbor dropped in. he always liked jimmy, and after a while he asked the parents if he could talk to the boy.
With a prayer in his heart he reminded the lad that his disobedience displeased his parents and made them sad. Especially it displeased god. The boy began to cry: “what can I do?” the visitor called his parents who listened with tears in their eyes as jimmy told them he was sorry.
What that visitor did for jimmy, Jesus does for every one of us. That is the meaning of the story our lord tells us in today’s gospel.
The man who planted the fig tree is god. The fig tree means the chosen people of god, you and me. The vinedresser or worker in the vineyard is Jesus. In justice god the father decides to cut down the fruitless trees. Christ intercedes. He pleads and prays that we will have more time, another chance. For the sake of his son, the heavenly father gives us another chance. That is the story of our life with Christ.
We have not borne fruit. We have not done what we were created to do. We have even done what god told us not to do. We have disobeyed his ten commandments. We have not produced.
You can’t blame god for being dissatisfied. He decides to remove us. But Christ intercedes, intervenes. Christ steps between us and god and asks for another chance.
Pleading for us is one of the principle tasks of Christ. He asks for mercy for us. He gets us another chance. Not only does he beg his father for forgiveness, Jesus begs for all the good things we need. That is one reason every official prayer of the church, especially in the holy sacrifice, winds up with the plea: through Jesus Christ our lord, or some variation of this thought.
There’s a rather famous painting that shows a young man playing chess with the devil.
They are playing for possession of the young man’s soul. The painting portrays the devil as having just made a brilliant move.
Chess players who study the arrangement of the chess pieces in the painting feel immediate sympathy for the young man. He has been put in a hopeless situation. He has been led down a blind alley with no exit.
Paul Murphy, a former world-class chess player, became intrigued by the painting. One day while studying the arrangement of the chess pieces, he saw something that no one else did.
Excitedly, he cried out to the young man in the painting, “Don’t give up! You still have an excellent move left. There’s still hope!”
That story fits in beautifully with the point Jesus makes in the parable of the fig tree today. Like the young man in the painting the fig tree seems lost. Then, suddenly, a ray of hope breaks through. Like the young man in the painting, the tree is not doomed after all. It gets a last-minute reprieve. It gets a last-minute “second chance.”
This is an important message for us. Because of Jesus we are never doomed, no matter how bad things seem. Because of Jesus there is still hope for us, no matter what situation we find ourselves in. because of Jesus there is always one more move left to make, no matter how late in the game it is.
This brings us to the most important point of all. How does all of this apply to our lives in a practical way?
All of us, to some extent, are like the young man in the painting and like the fig tree in Jesus’ parable. All of us, at one time or another have arrived at a point in life when it seemed that we were in a no-win situation. Perhaps some of us are at such a point right now in our lives.
Perhaps some situation threatens to engulf us and overwhelm us.
Perhaps some relationship threatens to destroy everything we believe in. Perhaps some problem has led us down a blind alley that seems to be a dead end.
It’s right here that today’s gospel has an important message for us. Because of Jesus Christ we are never doomed, no matter how bad things seem. Because of Jesus we always have one more move left. Because of Jesus there is still hope for us, no matter what the situation.
This is the lesson that’s contained in today’s scripture. This is the good news that we celebrate in today’s liturgy. And this is the message that god wants us to carry back into our world to share with others.

posted by Mike Young @ 5:25 PM