REPENT OR PERISH. That is what we hear our Lord saying today in the Gospel of Luke. 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. And the God we worship has proven to be loving, forgiving and saving throughout the history of our faith.
There is clearly a sense of urgency conveyed by today’s readings. St. Paul tells the Corinthians that their spiritual ancestors were “struck down” to serve as an example for them. He suggests that this should make them wake up and take notice. “Forewarned is forearmed.”
The Gospel drives home a similar point: Repentance needs to happen now. Jesus makes it clear that the people who died were not singled out in any way; they did not “have it coming to them.” In fact, they were not more guilty, than those listening to Him tell the stories.
Along with the call to repent immediately, our readings also hint at a long history of salvation presided over by a patient God whose hallmarks are forgiveness and abiding care. As long as Moses and the people of Israel fell into doubt and fear and generally stubborn behavior, God gave them another chance. Even the name “I am who am,” suggests an abiding presence that has endured many fitful attempts at faith and will continue to do so.
St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, and Jesus in St. Luke’s gospel warn us against becoming complacent. St. Paul reminds the Corinthians that even though the Jews had been chosen and delivered from Pharaoh and fed in the desert, many turned to false gods, or indulged in their own pleasures, or forgot what God had done for them and grumbled against Him. Not all entered the promised land. They were punished because they did not believe fully in the saving power and love of God. He warns us, “Those who think they are secure should take care not to fall.”
This is really the central message of the Gospels. “Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand.” 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.
Jesus points at us, His followers today and says, “Stop running around assessing sin and judgment on people in this world. Stop looking for other people’s sins and condemning them. Look at yourself and repent of your sins, or you too, will die.”
In today’s gospel, Jesus tells about a fig tree that never bears fruit. Like any sensible farmer, the owner thinks it is probably time to get rid of it. But the guy who works in the field has a better idea. I will give it a big dose of loving care and then we will 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.
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 cannot blame God for being dissatisfied. He decides to remove us. But Christ intercedes and 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 Jesus5 Christ our Lord, or some variation of this thought.
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.
It is 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 is 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. God has planted us in the midst of His love and grace. Our families and our friends have given us love, our schools have given us education, and our Church has given us God’s holy presence, love, and graces. God has offered us His tender, loving care in abundance.
How have we responded? How will we respond? Will we just wave our pretty leaves in the air or will we feed the world’s hungry and be about the tasks of bringing order out of the injustices and chaos in the world around us?
God wants us to finish the story for ourselves. You have perhaps noticed that the parable of the fig tree had no real ending. It just sort of stopped and we do not know what eventually happened to that fig tree. The same is true for you and me. God has given us life and launched us out into our world with a script to follow along with a director to guide us. But how our individual life stories are eventually written depends entirely on how we respond to what God has given us. A merciful God has spared us all, many times over, up to this present moment.
Of what use and just how fruitful will be the rest of your life . . . and mine? We have no idea what happened to the fig tree. We can have a pretty good idea about what will happen to us. Will we do nothing, or will we give God useful and productive lives spent in accomplishing His work? The responsibility rests upon us – not God.
You notice, at the end of the parable, Jesus does not say whether or not the owner came back a year later and found the fig tree growing. The parable does have an ending, though, because it is connected with all of us. How we live will be the ending. If we allow ourselves to enter deeply into the spirit of Lent and allow God to work within us, we will be — like that fig tree – alive, vigorous and full of life. And ready4 to follow Jesus. St. Peter tells us that God is not willing that any should perish, but, that all might come to repentance through Christ, (Peter 3:9) – “The Lord does not delay His promise, as some regard “delay,” but He is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”
Lent is an ideal time “to dig around and manure” the tree of our life so that it may bring forth “fruits of repentance.”
We do not have to rely on ourselves alone to become more fruitful followers of Jesus. He is with us always to empower us to become the individuals God has created us to be. He is with us in the word we have heard proclaimed today. He nourishes us through this Eucharist to give us strength for the task ahead.
The fact that we are alive today does not mean that we are better than those who have died. That is why we should see each day as an opportunity to repent.
As we continue our journey into the Season of Lent, let us make every effort to please God in all ways. The same God who called Moses through the experience of the ‘burning bush’ is calling us to come nearer to Him. When the Lord called Moses, He asked him to remove the sandals from his feet. In the same way, God is asking us to remove all sinful things from our lives that we may be able to stand on His ‘Holy Ground’. We all, from the tallest to the shortest, from the oldest to the youngest, NEED to repent.
I would like to conclude this reflection with the opening prayer of today’s liturgy:
Father, You have taught us to overcome our sin by prayer, fasting and works of mercy.
When we are discouraged by our weakness, give us confidence in your love.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son…
Fr Galadima Bitrus, (OSA)
GOD’S RESPONSE TO HONEST WRONGDOING AND WILLFUL SIN
A Reflection on Divine Mercy and Divine Punishment
Scripture teaches us that the Lord is compassionate and full of grace (Ps 103:8), yet he punishes the evil and the wicked (cf. Isa 13:11; Jer 21:14; 36:31). The former is God’s response to innocent suffering and honest mistakes, while the latter is his response to wilful sin and obstinacy.
In the 1st Reading (Exod 3:1-8.13-15), which is the account of the commissioning of Moses, God reveals himself to Moses in a sign of seeming contradiction: as a fire that was burning a bush yet, was not consuming it (3:2). And Moses saw in this contradiction a marvel to contemplate. For he said, “I must turn aside to look at this marvellous sight” (3:3).
By this very act, Moses opened himself for communication with God who called him by his name (“Moses! Moses!”, 3:4), revealed his holiness (“the place you stand is holy ground”, 3:5) and his history with Israel’s ancestors (“I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob”, 3:6), as well as his commitment to get involved in the present circumstances of the Israelites (“I have marked well the plight of my people in Egypt…I have come down to rescue them…”, 3:7-9), ultimately seeking Moses’ collaboration in this commitment and commissioning him to be his instrument in its realization (3:10-12).
Here, we see God intervening with grace over the people’s innocent suffering and we learn to live open to surprises and life’s complexities. Instead of being scared off by the surprises and complexities of life, we can learn to marvel at them as Moses did and so like Moses, open ourselves to experience the God of our fathers (the one we have known in certain ways in history) to reveal himself to us in still new ways of our present realities.
God, in fact, describes his identity in a complex statement composed of a repetition of the same future verb (“Ehyeh”, lit. “I shall be”) joined by a relative pronoun (“asher”, lit. “that, who”). When asked by Moses to tell him his name so that he can better explain his mission to the Israelites (3:13), God said to Moses: “‘Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh’ (lit. ‘I shall be who I shall be’)…thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh (‘I shall be’) has sent me to you” (3:14).
Note too, that even when describing his past relationship with Israel’s ancestors, God does not just describe himself as a monolithic experience of all the three ancestors but as God of each of them uniquely, hence the repetition, I am “the God of” Abraham, “the God of” Isaac and “the God of” Jacob (3:15), not simply the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
In other words, God defined himself in terms of being and becoming, and not one pre-defined notion. We cannot preconceive God; we can only know him as he reveals himself in the banality of our everyday experience. He is the same and at the same time, not the same; he is that fire burning the bush but at the same time not burning the bush (Exod 3:2).
The 2nd Reading (1 Cor 10:1-6.10-12) presents the memory of the Israelites during the Exodus, how they enjoyed God’s presence (“our fathers were in the cloud”, 10:1a; cf. Exod 13:21; 14:19-22) and God’ salvific intervention (they “all passed through the sea”, 10:1b) under the guiding leadership of Moses. In some sense, the second reading presents the fulfilment of the commitment God makes in the first reading, to intervene in favour of an oppressed people, Israel.
Despite his show of grace in Israel’s time of need, God’s relationship with Israel is not defined only in rosy terms. There was a time when “with most of them [the Israelites] God was not pleased” and “they were overthrown in the wilderness” (10:5; cf. Ps 106). In other words, God shows himself as merciful, yet he also punishes, and this seeming sign of contradiction should surprise and marvel us and make us open to learn the ways of God with every experience of him. For God will be who he will be (Ehyeh asher Ehyeh), not just whom we once knew him to be.
The Gospel Reading (Lk 13:1-9) is a decisive call for conversion and bearing of fruit or else… The consequences are portrayed in terms of perishing and of being cut off from among the trees of a vineyard, thus showing that although God gives us the time to repent and to bear fruit, he will not put up forever with a heart that refuses to change for good or refuses to bear fruit in due season.
The episode has two parts: in the first part (13:1-5), Jesus comments on two tragic events that are reported to have befallen Galileans and Jerusalemites, a report found only in Luke. Pilate is said to have massacred some Galileans and mixed their blood with the blood of their sacrifices, and some persons had come to tell Jesus about it, apparently to hear what he will say about this kind of tragedy or who to blame.
In Jesus’ response, he mentioned a similar incident in which the tower at Siloam had fallen upon eighteen Jerusalemites. Thus, we have a report of evil befalling innocent people, the evil of human agency, on the one hand, and on the other hand, apparently the evil of natural disaster. Jesus does not attribute these disasters to the sins or fault of the victims, as it was common to correlate sin and suffering; rather, he makes it clear that they suffered these things not because they were more sinners or more guilty than their townsmen.
However, sinners who refuse to change their hearts will also perish (“homoíōs apoleĩsthe” or “hosaútos apoleĩsthe”). Thus, Jesus acknowledges the existence of both unjustifiable suffering (of human or natural origins) as well as justifiable suffering (suffering caused by our sin or through our own fault), which can be avoided by a change of heart or repentance (metanoia).
The second part of the passage (13:6-9) is a parable about a fig tree that fails to bear fruit. A similar story is told in Mt 21:18-19 and Mk 11:12-14, with some major differences reflecting their different contexts and focus. Although the owner of the vineyard is clear about his intention to cut off the unfruitful fig tree, he listens to the intercession to be patient and give a little more time to see if the tree will eventually bear fruit, else, it will be eventually cut off.
This shows God’s patience with us when we do not bear fruit, but also clearly shows that God’s patience with us is to give us the possibility to change our ways, such that if we persist in our fruitlessness, he will just have to cut us off. As the second letter of Peter admonishes, “Think of the Lord’s patience as an opportunity to be saved” (2 Pet 3:15).
We are, therefore, reminded of the reality of both divine punishment and divine mercy. Hence, when we have made mistakes, we do not have to get hopeless as if there is no future for the sinner. God acts mercifully and graciously towards our honest mistakes, willing to give us time to change our ways. But for our willful sin and obstinate fruitlessness, there is accountability before God.
