Urgently Bearing the Fruit of Faith, Third Sunday of Lent (C), March 24, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Basilica of St. Mary, Alexandria, VA
Third Sunday of Lent, Year C
March 24, 2019
Ex 3:1-8.13-15, Ps 103, 1 Cor 10:1-6.10-12, Lk 13:1-9

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

Lenten Urgency

Two and a half weeks ago, 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” and enjoining us not to procrastinate, saying that “Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation.” Lent is a period in which, together with the whole Church, we remember in the words of today’s Psalm, that the Lord is “kind and merciful,” pardons all our iniquities, heals all our ills, redeems our life not from peccadillos and trifles but from destruction, and crowns us with his kindness and compassion. It’s a chance for us to ponder how merciful and gracious he is, how slow to anger and overflowing in goodness and come before him to allow him to fill us with his merciful love, press the reset button on our life, bring our soul back to its baptismal splendor and make all of heaven rejoice that we who were wayward and lost have been found, and we who were dead through sin have the chance to experience resurrection through reconciliation.

But we need to ask what difference this special season overflowing in God’s mercy and kindness has made in our life until now. We know and we rejoice that there are many people who have responded to God’s invitation to recognize their need for conversion and have come to receive the grace of conversion in the Sacrament Jesus the Lamb of God has established to take away our sins. We know and we rejoice that many others, having been filled with God’s forgiving love in this way, have recognized it as a summons to pay it forward, to treat others with similar mercy, making new efforts to carry for others’ bodily and spiritual needs through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. But we also know with a little sadness and trepidation that there are others, many others, who are no spiritually different than they were on March 5, the day before this holy season began.

That’s one of the reasons why today’s readings are so important, because they’re meant to 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 his kindness and mercy as he desires us to do this Lent or whether we have been taking these 40 days and perhaps our whole Christian life and calling, in vain.

Will we be ready to die well, so as to pass to life? 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks 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. He begins with two tragedies that had captured the attention of the crowds in previous days. Someone asked his opinion about massacre of Galileans by Pontius Pilate in the Temple whose blood had been mixed with the blood of the sacrifices that day. Those pilgrims from Galilee had made the long journey from Galilee to the Temple in Jerusalem to pray, but they had gotten caught up in a crowd where some rabble-rousers were protesting Pilate’s decision to raid the Temple coffers for funds to build a new water system. When Pilate sent his troops into the temple area in order to put down the protestors, the soldiers met resistance, unsheathed their swords and massacred not only the protestors but the 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 said. Then he brought up 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 one day and crushed to death some of those bathing. Jesus asked again, whether they thought 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!” He 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, like a falling crane, or a freak tornado, or an inexplicable drive-by shooting in a safe neighborhood. What Jesus meant was that unless we repent, we will die as unready as the people 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 our need for God’s mercy, come to receive it, and then begin to live in full accordance with that gift.

Jesus, who called us on Ash Wednesday to “repent and believe” and who tells us in the verse before today’s Gospel, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” means it, and he wants to help us to do so thoroughly. One of the main themes of Lent is, as God announces through the prophet Ezekiel, is “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked man, but rather in his conversion, so that he may live” (Ezek 33:11). Jesus died, in fact, so that we wouldn’t perish but have eternal life (Jn 3:16). But we have to cooperate with that gift and do so with true urgency, as our biggest priority.

Bearing fruit

Jesus gives the parable of the fruitless fig tree to drive home the point of the pressing need for us to respond to his mercy. The fig tree represents human life. The owner represents God the Father. The gardener represents 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 modern ears, is clear: some people sadly are wasting their lives, not bearing any fruit whatsoever; some people receive all types of gifts from the soil, but give nothing back. Those people, Jesus seems to indicate, are “wasting the soil.” Such people merit, according to the parable, to be cut down — not as a punishment, but because, to some degree, they’re already dead. If a Christian is not bearing fruit, if he’s not thinking like Christ, living like Christ, loving like Christ, forgiving like Christ, 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.

Our Lenten Second Chance

But thanks be to God, that’s not the end of the story. The parable has often been called the Parable of the Second Chance and that’s what we see.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 probably never will to be given every last chance to do so. And this 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 adoration, thanksgiving, prayer and service of others, if we’re not living our faith and passionately sharing it, if we’re not responding to God’s gift of mercy, coming to receive it, being merciful toward others and bringing others to receive 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 the extra mile 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. This is the holy time for us to examine our life and act.

Three years ago, during his Angelus commentary on today’s Gospel to pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis said, “Jesus invites us to change the heart, to make a radical switch on the path of our lives, abandoning compromises with evil” and rejecting the hypocritical temptation to think we’re “basically good people” who don’t really need to convert. “Unfortunately,” the Holy Father says, “each of us very much resembles the tree that, over many years, has repeatedly shown that it’s sterile. But, fortunately for us, Jesus is like a farmer who, with limitless patience, still obtains a concession for the fruitless vine.” Jesus gains for us “a ‘year’ of grace, … a time of … Mercy,” essentially telling us, that as long as we are still alive, “It’s never too late to convert.”

The devil’s most successful temptation 

At the same time, however, Jesus in the Parable makes it clear that there will come a time when there will be no time left. There’s a time when after that fertilization, if no fruit is being borne, the tree will be cut down. And that time, as the pilgrims from Galilee and the bathers at the pool of Siloam found out, may come suddenly, when we least expect it. That ought to leave us with a sense of urgency. The devil’s greatest temptation, according to the brilliant 20th century British writer CS Lewis, is not to convince us that God doesn’t exist — because most of us have too much commonsense to realize that if our watch couldn’t put itself together on its own then there would be no way to explain the existence and order of the world or even the wonder of the human person unless there were a “divine Watchmaker,” a God who ordered the whole world. No, the devil’s greatest temptation, as Lewis wrote in his great work The Screwtape Letters, is to convince us that … there’s … always … time. He gets us to buy the lie that we don’t have to convert today. We’ll have plenty of time to convert when we’re 80, or 90, or on our deathbed. We don’t have to say sorry to someone we’ve hurt today, because we’ll get to it the next time we’ll see them. We don’t have to say to a family member that we love them, because there’s absolutely no chance that their or our life will end before we have the chance for that conversation. The father of lies is constantly trying to tempt us to put off to tomorrow the repentance, the faith, the charity, that needs to be lived today. Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, wants us to grasp that now — not tomorrow, or next year, or 10, 30 or 60 years down the road — is the time. Now is the day of salvation. Now is the time of mercy. Now is the time for our response in faith. Now is the time for us to bear fruit.

What God has done for us in the desert

In today’s second reading, St. Paul intensifies this wake-up call if we’re being tempted to ignore or delay Jesus’ merciful and pressing appeal to repent and believe. He describes all of the blessings the Israelites received in the desert after God had called Moses from the burning bush and sent him to Pharaoh to liberate the Israelites from slavery, after God through Moses had worked ten miracles to get Pharaoh finally to let them return home, after God worked so many more miracles for them in the desert. “I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters,” St. Paul tells us, “that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea. … All ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them.” After so many manifestations of God’s mercy and salvation, we would think that they would have all been saints. But St. Paul comments: “Yet God was not pleased with most of them, for they were struck down in the desert.” And he adds, “These things happened as examples for us…, as a warning to us,” namely, that “whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall.” If any of us thinks we’re standing secure, that we’re not being called to make this Lent the best Lent of our life, that we really don’t need this time of urgent and radical conversion, we need to beware lest we fall … and fall all the way to the netherworld. The truth is that we’ve received far greater blessings in our life than the Israelites ever did in the desert, because we’ve received the fulfillment of what all the miracles they experienced foretold. All of us have passed through the Red Sea of baptism. All of us have received the protection of the cloud via manifold interior graces. All of us have eaten of something far greater than manna, the Body of Christ, the true Bread from Heaven (cf. Jn 6:32). All of us have literally drunk Christ’s blood, the Living Water that flows up to life eternal (cf. John 4), the blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins. But all these divine gifts, like the blessings received by the Israelites, will not save us unless we correspond with them, unless we bear fruit as a result of them, unless Jesus’ giving of his body and blood for us transforms us and makes us willing to give our body and blood for him and others.

What we must do

Lent 2019 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 is kind and merciful, 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 tells us elsewhere in the Gospel. First, we need to examine our soil, to make sure it’s the “good soil.” Jesus describes in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, and not the hardened stubborn soil by the way side that doesn’t allow God’s word to change them, not the rocky, superficial soil that only focuses on likes and dislikes and doesn’t allow God’s word to go deep, not the thorny soil choked by worldly anxieties and pleasures that cares too much about the things of this world and not enough about the things of God. Good soil, Jesus says, bears fruit, and not just some fruit, but 30, 60 or 100 fold fruit. To have this good soil begins with our listening so attentively to God’s word that we’ll allow it to change us in 30, 60 or 100 ways, and it often involves our recognizing and battling against all those tendencies that tempt us to receive God’s word, God’s invitation to mercy, on hardened, or rocky or thorny soil. The second condition for bearing fruit, Jesus told us during the Last Supper, is to remain attached to him, to draw our whole life from him. In the image of the Vine and the Branches, he tells us, “Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, 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 Sunday is an occasion for us to recommit ourselves to putting God first in our life and prioritizing these means so that we will never be a barren fig tree, but a branch on the vine of Christ that bears abundant fruit in every season.

The divine fertilizer 

As we approach Christ that Vine in the Holy Eucharist, as we draw near him who is the incarnation of the God who said to Moses in today’s first reading “I am who am,” we thank Him for all his blessings — for our baptism, for the privilege to receive his body and blood, for the availability of his life-changing forgiveness in Confession, for his great hope in us — but especially for giving us more time this Lent to bear the type of fruit that he expects and that we, deeply, in the depth of our heart want to bear. The most fruitful tree that has ever existed was the Tree of the Cross, the new Tree of Life, and it’s here in Mass that we become truly united as branches on the Vine with Christ on the Cross so that together with him we will indeed bear much fruit. In the Mass, from the Cross, Jesus is fertilizing the soil of our souls so that we will bear abundant fruit, fruit that will last, fruit that will bring us to salvation and by God’s mercy save others too. Jesus tells us that if we do not repent, we will all perish suddenly without being ready. But if we do repent, if we do respond to his mercy, if we heed his warning and the warning of St. Paul in the second reading, then we will experience what we prayed in today’s psalm, that the Lord redeems our life from destruction, crowns us with eternal kindness and compassion, and will bring us to that place, with Mary and the saints, where our soul and all our being will bless God’s holy name forever!

The readings for today’s Mass were: