A garden ready to bloom

 Homily: 3^rd Sunday of Easter – Cycle C

          Many of you may know that I speak Spanish.  (Well, “ecclesiastical Spanish”, anyway.  I know a lot of “church” Spanish, but still get lost with “everyday” Spanish… but anyway.)  When I was first starting out as a priest, even my church Spanish was rough.  Thus, my merciful first pastor suggested that, after my first six months in the parish, I go take a three-week “refresher” in the same place where I first studied Spanish as a seminarian (in Antigua, Guatemala).  I thought it was a great idea and so jumped on it.

Now, I feel like I can sum up my “refresher” experience in a few words that another student at the school where I was studying had said to me after I told him how long I would be there (three weeks).  He said, “Oh, three weeks is the perfect amount of time to forget both how to speak Spanish and English!”  Certainly, he wasn’t completely right.  Nevertheless, there was a lot of truth to what he said.

          In particular, I remember feeling very frustrated during my last few days there.  When I arrived in Guatemala, I thought that I had already been speaking Spanish pretty well and that this time was just going to reinforce what I had already been doing.  What I found, however, was that I had been hacking things up pretty bad and, thus, I spent much of my time in lessons being corrected by my teacher.  After a couple of weeks, this began to wear on me.  By the third week, I began to feel like I never really knew how to speak Spanish in the first place and that I certainly didn’t know how to speak Spanish anymore.

          One evening, however, as I was trying to process this frustration, I realized something.  It wasn’t that I hadn’t been speaking Spanish; but rather that I had been speaking it poorly and so I had developed some bad habits.  What I came up with that night was the image of a garden that isn’t tended through a summer.  Now many of you are gardeners and so you know that if you don’t tend to a garden throughout a whole summer what you’ll end up with is mostly weeds.  Thus, if the garden was my ability to speak Spanish, then by the time I went back to Guatemala it had been completely overgrown with weeds: the bad habits I developed trying to speak it without practicing the proper form.  Thus, the hard work of receiving correction was the hard work of weeding out that garden.  In the end, it didn’t look like I had much to show for it.  In reality, however, what I had was a garden that was weeded and cultivated and thus ready to produce more fruit, even though it looked like just an empty space of dirt.

          This is not unlike the seasons of Lent and Easter for all of us.  As you all well know, Lent is a time of penance: of prayer, fasting, and giving alms—and the goal of those works is never penance itself, but rather the weeding out of sin from the gardens of our souls, thus preparing them to bear fruit once again.  Just like my work in Guatemala, Lent is a lot of hard work and at the end it doesn’t seem to result in very much: just an empty space of dirt.  The first part of Easter, then, is about planting the seeds of new life—the life of the Resurrection—so as to cultivate the beginnings of new growth.  If we are doing this, then by Pentecost our garden should be ready to burst forth with flowers or vegetables… the fruit of the Resurrection that has been planted in us.

          This is the work that we see both beginning in and being completed by Peter and the disciples in the readings today.  In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we see the disciples after Pentecost, reaping the fruit of the Holy Spirit that was planted within them.  They were out in the streets and in the temple area teaching about Jesus, healing in his name, and calling all persons to be saved by his name through baptism and many persons were quickly joining the Church.  These disciples were making such a stir that the religious authorities questioned them and ordered them to stand down, but they wouldn’t.  The power of the Resurrected Jesus had blossomed in their souls and it could not be contained.

          In the Gospel reading, however, we see them just days after Easter.  They had been following Jesus for about three years, leaving off everything from their past: that is, rooting out every weed that had grown up in the garden of their souls and kept them from being committed disciples of Jesus.  But Jesus’ death had shaken their faith.  The news of Easter Sunday, however, had amazed them and already Jesus had appeared twice before them.  In spite of this, they were still unsure of what to do with this incredible news.  In other words, the ground of their souls had been prepared and the seed—which is the joy of the encounter with the Resurrected Christ—had been planted, but it hadn’t yet begun to sprout.

          The ever-impulsive Peter gives in to his need to do something and tries to go back to what he did before—fishing—and the other disciples join him.  What they find, however, is that there’s nothing in that: they spend all night casting their nets in darkness and come up with nothing.  Then Jesus breaks into the scene to begin to show them what his Resurrection means for them.  He shows them—and Peter in particular—that they will continue to be his followers, but now is the time when they will begin to lead others to him.  And in the days and weeks that followed this, Jesus continued to appear to them so as to complete these preparations for the work that he was going to send them forth to do.

          So it is with us.  After our forty days of Lent—that is, after these forty days of clearing out our gardens from all of the weeds of sin—we now find ourselves in Easter, ready to cultivate the seed of new life within us.  It may look right now that there isn’t a whole lot to show for it and, like Peter, we may be tempted to go back to what we were doing before.  To do so, however, would be fruitless.  The fruit of the Easter season comes, rather, from our continued encounters with the Risen Christ who comes to us to show us what it is that he is calling us to do now that we are ready to bear fruit.  And all of this is so that on Pentecost we will be ready to receive the Holy Spirit anew and to be sent forth into the world to pour out the fruit of what has been planted in us.

          My brothers and sisters, this means that we still have work to do.  Just as much as I have to continue to work on the fundamentals of Spanish to keep the garden that I had cleared out in Guatemala free from the weeds of bad habits and poor speaking, so do each one of us need to continue to work on the fundamentals of faith—prayer, good works, and active participation in the sacramental life of the Church—if we want to see the gardens of our souls bear the fruit of Easter within us and around us.

          Let us take up, then, this good work of building virtue and fighting off vice (which, by the way, is a work that knows no age limits) so that God’s Spirit will be able to produce its fruit within us: the fruit of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control—the very signs of the inbreaking of God’s Kingdom!—and let us never fail to trust in the Risen Christ, who waits to meet us in the darkness so as to bring forth light and who invites us ever anew with those same words he said to Saint Peter… follow me.

Given at St. Joan of Arc Parish: Kokomo, IN – May 3^rd, 2025