Jesus the Divine Gardener

I gave this homily at Saint Bernard's parish in Crawfordsville this weekend.  I was there giving a "mini-mission" to the parish.  My mission talk was recorded (well, 90% of it was recorded), so if I get the audio/video from that, I'll make sure to post it as well.

I'm off this week back to Saint Meinrad to begin the Good Leaders, Good Shepherds program with a bunch of priests from my diocese.  Looking forward to being back on the Holy Hill!

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Homily: 3rd Sunday of Lent – Cycle C

A couple of weeks ago, I visited a woman named Mary in a nursing home.  This home was not her residence; rather, she still lived at home by herself for the most part, but about three months ago she had contracted pneumonia and so was sent to the hospital.  Mary’s no spring chicken and so it took her a couple of weeks of treatments in the hospital for her to overcome the pneumonia.  Her doctors, however, didn’t feel like she was strong enough to return home, so they transferred her to this nursing home for rehabilitation.

My visit to her wasn’t a random one.  Rather, Mary had requested to see a priest.  When I arrived I asked her how she was doing and began to inquire about why she felt that she needed to see me.  What I found was that Mary was depressed.  She hadn’t been home for a couple of months.  She missed her cat and, basically, she was homesick.  Add to that the rigors of daily therapy sessions, which for her didn’t seem to be helping her to get any closer to returning home and she, understandably, was beginning to feel frustrated and a little hopeless.  The thing that made her call for her priest, however, was that the administration had told her that she had one week left to show some effort and progress before they were going to cut off care completely.

Thus, when we talked, she would say things like, “I’m tired” and “I’m ready to give up.”  She also said, “I don’t see why God is keeping me here.  I don’t feel like there is any purpose left to my life.”  Then she turned to speculating about God, saying, “Why would God take my two daughters from me and leave me here?” and “I guess God must not be ready for me yet.”  All this time, I tried to listen and offer some supportive words.  Eventually, however, came the deep, fundamental question that she was grappling with: “Do you think that God is punishing me?”

Ever since ancient times, people have struggled with the idea of suffering.  For the most part, suffering seems to be illogical: meaning, the when and how of suffering is usually not connected to any discernible cause in our lives.  In ancient times, including the time of Christ, peoples made sense of suffering by connecting it to God and punishment for sin.  Thus, when the people in our Gospel reading today come to tell Jesus about the Galileans who were killed by Pilate’s henchmen on the very altars where they were offering sacrifices, the question on their minds was “for what sin were these men punished?”  Because Jesus could read the hearts of men, he also knew that some of them would be pondering the same thing about another tragedy, the eighteen people who were killed when a tower near the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem collapsed on top of them.  In their minds, such a random event could only have been the work of God; and since, for the Israelite people, God was good and just, such a work of God could not be the result of malice and, therefore, must be an act of justice, punishing those people for some sin of theirs that was unknown to others.
As I saw with Mary on that day in the nursing home, this notion that suffering is somehow a punishment inflicted on us by God is an idea that remains with us even today.  Even with all of our technological advances, we still have not been able to answer the question about suffering.  Thus, we inevitably turn to where we’ve always turned to answer the unanswerable: to God.  For some, that produces an image of God who is vengeful, cold and distant.  For others, it produces an image of God who is impotent and unable to save us.  Yet for others, it produces and image of a God who just doesn’t care about us.  For Christians, however, it should produce in us hope.  Divine Revelation has shown us that the God we worship is none of those things, but rather he is the God who is all good and just, slow to anger and rich in mercy.  Nevertheless, when the rubber hits the road and we find ourselves in a moment of suffering, it is often easier for us to begin to think of God in one of these other forms.

Jesus, however, turns this thinking around.  When these people come to him to tell him of the men that Pilate had killed, Jesus knew that they were expecting him to say, “Those men must have been great sinners!  Thank God that you are not sinful like them and so have been spared this suffering.”  Instead of saying this, however, he turned the focus back onto them: “Do you think that they were greater sinners than all of you?  By no means!  Repent now from your sins so that you do not suffer the same fate as them!”  Then to emphasize his point, he refers to the people killed by the tower of Siloam in order to show them that his admonition includes all of the Jews: “Whether you are a Galilean or are from Jerusalem, your sins are just as worthy of punishment as all of theirs.  Repent from them now before you die in your sin!”

On the surface, it can look like Jesus is reinforcing the idea that God directly punishes people for their sins.  And so, Jesus offers a parable to help dispel that myth.  He speaks of an orchard owner who plants a fig tree in his orchard.  Now no orchard owner would plant a tree in his or her orchard unless he or she expected that it would produce fruit.  Thus, after three years, when the owner finds that it has produced no fruit, he orders it to be cut down so that the nutrients of the soil could be preserved for a tree that will produce fruit.  It is not to punish the tree that he cuts it down, but rather to preserve the soil so that the other trees may continue to bear fruit.
Jesus’ point, therefore, is not to say that God is punishing people for their sins, but rather that these tragedies should be a wake-up call to remind you to look at your own lives and to root out sin without delay, for none of us know when our final day will come.  And this is Saint Paul’s message, too, in his letter to the Corinthians: For he says that, although the Israelites were close to God in the desert—they stood in the cloud of his presence, they ate the miraculous food from heaven and drank water from the rock—they grumbled against him and were struck down in the desert before they reached the promised land.  He says that these are signs for us to be vigilant against sin and to repent without delay.

The great Christian author, C. S. Lewis, said that “suffering is God’s megaphone.”  In other words, it’s God’s way of getting our attention.  Thus, when we see tragedy—or experience it ourselves—our task is not to question if God is punishing us, but rather to ask, “Am I ready to meet him?”

If your answer is “No” or at least “I’m not sure”, then don’t be afraid.  Remember that in Jesus’ parable there was a gardener who interceded on behalf of the tree that produced no fruit.  This gardener won for the tree another year and promised to cultivate the ground around it and to fertilize it for nourishment.  As we profess at the beginning of our liturgy in the Penitential Rite, we believe that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us.  Therefore, if we have survived tragedy in our lives, it is likely due to Christ’s intercession for us before the Father.

Christ is our Gardener before God, the Father, in whose orchard we have been planted.  This Year of Faith is the year that he has won for us to produce fruit and this Lent is specifically a time for the ground to be cultivated around us—to root-out all that prevents us from producing fruit.  And the fertilizer?  Well, that’s the Eucharist.  The Body and Blood of Christ is all the nourishment we will ever need to produce fruit for our Heavenly Father.

After my meeting with Mary a couple of weeks ago I had a thought.  She had been wondered whether or not God was ready for her.  Perhaps, however, what she should have been thinking—which is something that we all should be thinking—is that maybe we aren’t quite ready yet for God.  May Jesus, Our Divine Gardener, cultivate his love in our hearts so that we may fill the world with its fruit and be ready on the day when he calls us home.

Given at Saint Bernard’s Parish: Crawfordsville, IN – March 2nd & 3rd, 2013