3rd Sunday of Lent
(Sunday 28th February 2016)
Do not be afraid of the Lord of Mercy for he is meek and humble of heart
– (Luke 13:1-9)
In St Luke’s Gospel we hear of this strange happening of how the blood of the Galileans was mixed with the blood of their sacrifices by Pilate, a gesture which was supposed to scandalise, which it undoubtedly did. But when these people come to Jesus to tell him this, what is their intention? Perhaps there was a sense of self-righteousness in their telling, that at least they were not the ones who died this way, that these people who died this way must have done something terrible in their lives to deserve such a death. But Jesus dispels such notions from them, letting them know that those who died were not worse sinners due to the manner of their death and how we die does not determine how we lived. Look at the Lord himself, he would die as a perceived criminal in one of the most excruciating deaths on the cross and yet he is the innocent one who came to take our sins away.
But the Lord gives us a very clear message: repent, or we too will perish. In Lent we are called to repent of our sins, we are called to be renewed in our relationship with the Lord and to live in the grace of God.
The parable of the fig tree maybe helps us to understand what we may need to do this Lent to be renewed. The owner of the vineyard has seen little fruit from the fig tree and he no longer wants it to take up space in his vineyard and so he becomes impatient with its fruitlessness and wants it removed. It is an attitude we see a lot in our world today, when people or things are no longer useful to us we part take in this ‘throw away culture’ that Pope Francis speaks about. We see the world dispense of people like they are mere things when they no longer seem useful, the value of human life has become cheap, and we unfortunately see this in the sin of abortion.
But this is not the way of Jesus. He is patient, he is gentle with us, he wants to invest in our lives and make us strong. He wants to dig a space around our lives, a place that separates us from the world, a place where the Lord and you can lay fertile ground and grow together. The Lord desires nothing more than for us to bear fruit in our lives and so he will always be merciful to us to give us that opportunity. But we to have to actively co-operate with him. If we imagine for a moment that we are the gardener looking after the fig tree, the gardener had to make an effort to dig around the tree and plant the manure, then he had to water it and care for it daily. It Is the same as our spiritual lives, we must attend to our spiritual lives every day, we must water our souls with prayer, we must surround our lives with the scriptures and the sacraments and we must be patient to see growth as our spiritual lives grow in silence just like the figs on the tree. And just like Jesus asks us in the Gospel, we must shake off spiritual death through the sacrament of confession and put on new life in Christ this Lent. In this year of Mercy, let us not be afraid to meet the Lord of Mercy in confession for he is meek and humble of heart.
Fr. James Devine