Third Sunday of Lent (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 19, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, C, Vigil
March 19, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when he will speak to us what are in my opinion his most forceful words of conversion that we hear in the 156-week cycle of the Church’s Sunday liturgical readings. Two and a half weeks ago, you recall, as Lent began, we were marked with ashes, reminded that we are dust and unto dust we shall return upon our death and instructed to repent and believe in the Gospel. We listened with fresh ears to St. Paul’s appeal as an ambassador of Christ calling us to be “reconciled to God,” appealing to us not to take this time in vain, and begging us not to procrastinate, saying, “Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation.”
• This Sunday’s readings shock us out of complacency — almost as defibrillator paddles for our souls — and get us to examine honestly before the Lord whether we have been responding to this acceptable time of mercy with the urgency and priority that God desires or whether we have been taking these 40 days and perhaps our whole Christian life and calling, for granted.
• In Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus begins with current events, referring to two tragedies that had captured the attention of the crowds in previous days. If Jesus were preaching today, he could easily make the same point referring to the appalling atrocities being committed in the Ukraine or about any fatal car accident we see on the news.
• Someone asked his opinion about massacre of Galileans by Pontius Pilate in the Temple whose blood had been mixed with animal sacrifices. Those pilgrims from Galilee had made the long journey to the Temple in Jerusalem to pray, but they had gotten caught up in a crowd where protestors were demonstrating against Pilate’s decision to raid the Temple coffers for funds to build a new water system. When Pilate sent his troops to quell the protest, the soldiers met resistance, unsheathed their swords and massacred not only the protestors but these Galilean bystanders. There was a superstition at the time that if people died in such a way, it had to be a sign that God was punishing them for some serious sins they had committed, as if they somehow “deserved it.” Jesus asks, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?” “No way!,” he replied. Then he raised another example of people who were bathing underneath the water tower at the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, which they believed had miraculous powers to cure them of bodily illnesses. The shoddily constructed tower collapsed and crushed to death some of those bathing. Jesus asked again, whether the 18 people who died were “more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem!” “By no means!,” he said again. And he made a crucial moral point in response to both tragedies: “I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!” Jesus didn’t mean that we would all die by being in the wrong place at the wrong time as a victim of some terrible accident. He meant that unless we repent, we will die as unready as the pilgrims from Galilee in the Temple or those underneath the Siloam water tower. The only way we’ll be ready to die well, to die ready to pass to life, will be if we repent and believe in the Gospel, if we recognize that now is the day of salvation and live each day as if it is our last, if we recognize our need for God’s mercy and grace, come to receive it, and then begin to live in full accordance with those gifts.
• To drive home the point of the urgent need for us to respond to him and his call in Lent and in life, Jesus then gives us the parable of the fruitless fig tree. The fig tree represents human life; the owner, God the Father; the gardener, Jesus.The owner came looking for fruit on the fig tree and, finding none, 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?” The point, harsh as it may initially seem to our ears, is clear: some people are sadly wasting their lives, not bearing any fruit whatsoever; some people receive all types of gifts from the soil, but give nothing back. Such people, the Parable indicates, are “wasting the soil.” They merit, according to the parable, to be cut down — not as a punishment, but because, in some respects, they’re already dead. The lesson is that if a Christian is not bearing fruit, he’s spiritually dead. If a Christian is living like everyone else, compromising with sin, identifying more with the standards of the world than the standards of the Gospel and Christ’s kingdom, then she’s spiritually deceased.
• Thanks be to God, however, that’s not the end of the story. The parable has often been called the Parable of the Second Chance, because the gardener in the parable, representing Jesus, makes an extraordinary intervention. Fig trees normally take three years to mature and if they’re not bearing fruit by the end of the third year, they’re likely never going to do so. And yet the gardener beseeches the Orchard owner, “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.” He asks for an opportunity to try, essentially, to raise the fig tree from the dead, to help something that has not yet borne fruit and might never will to be given every last chance to do so. And this, too, is a lesson for our life. If we’re not bearing fruit in our Christian lives after the years that God has given us — if we’re not growing in faith, in hope, in love, if we’re not bearing fruit in acts of loving prayer and service of others, if we’re not living our faith and passionately sharing it— then we’re like a barren fig tree, wasting our life, wasting God’s graces just like the fig tree was exhausting the soil. But Christ asks for more time for our life, fertilizing the soil of our hearts with his blood, offering us once again his mercy, his healing, his help, his grace. Jesus goes way beyond what’s reasonable so that our life, if it’s spiritually barren, may have every possible chance. That’s what he does each Lent he gives us. But we should never pretend as if we’re guaranteed another Lent. There will be a time when there’s no time left. Against the devil’s attempt to convince us that there will always be time later, Jesus uses current events to convince us that now, not next year, not 10 or 50 years down the road, is the acceptable time, the time for action.
• Lent 2022 is a gift of extra time from the Lord so that we might become the type of tree that will bear much fruit, not out of fear of judgment, not so that we won’t be cut down, but out of love for God, who loves us and has given us so many graces so that we will bear fruit. There are two essential things we need to do, Jesus makes plain elsewhere in the Gospel. First, we need to examine our soil, to make sure it’s the “good soil” that listens attentively to God’s word and allows it to change us in 30, 60 or 100 says. Second, as Jesus described during the Last Supper, we must remain attached to him. “Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine,” he tells us, “so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit.” And we remain in Christ, and he remains in us, through prayer, through the Sacraments, and through the Christian moral life. This is the secret of the fruitfulness of St. Joseph, whom the Church celebrates on March 19, as of the Blessed Virgin, and as so many saints since. They were ready to seize each moment as the acceptable time to glorify God and serve others. They’re interceding for us not to accept Jesus’ merciful but stark summons in vain.
• The most fruitful tree that has ever existed was the Tree of the Cross, the new Tree of Life. It’s at Mass where Jesus fertilizes the soil of our souls so that we may bear fruit that will last as we enter into communion with him as branches on the Vine. We thank him for this extra time he has given us and ask him to help us seize this chance.

The readings for this Sunday were:

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