Homily: 3rd Sunday of Lent – Cycle C
Previously, when I was primarily in parish ministry, I made
a lot of visits to the elderly, especially those who were sick. While each of the visits were unique, some of
my visits were more memorable than others.
One, in particular, happened a number of years ago when 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 prior she had contracted pneumonia and so was
sent to the hospital. Mary was no “spring
chicken” at the time and so it took her a couple of weeks of treatments in the
hospital for her to overcome the pneumonia (kind of like Pope Francis now). Her doctors, however, didn’t feel like she
was strong enough to return home, so they transferred her to a 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 two of my 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 often 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 wrongdoing. 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 (literally,
the most humiliating way they could think of being killed, aside from crucifixion),
the question on their minds was “they must have sinned really badly, right (like, way more badly than I have ever sinned)?”
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, because the same
fate is possible for sinners of any magnitude!” 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,”
he seems to say, “tragedy can strike anywhere and to anyone, so repent now from
your sins so that you do not die in them!” Or, to put it another way, Jesus is showing
them that they are asking the wrong question: not, “How badly do I have to sin
before something bad like that happens to me?”, but rather, “Am I ready to meet
God, even if something bad like that happened to me?”///
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 them and us to look at our 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 avoided tragedy or survived
great suffering in our lives, especially if we weren’t ready yet to meet God,
it is certainly due to Christ’s intercession for us before the Father. ///
My friends, Christ is our Gardener before God, the Father,
in whose orchard we have been planted.
This jubilee year of hope 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, along with his
word that has been handed down to us in these Scriptures, is all the
nourishment we will ever need to produce fruit for our Heavenly Father. ///
After my meeting with Mary that day 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 to
meet him on the day when he calls us home.
Given at St. Augustine Parish:
Rensselaer, IN – March 22nd & 23rd, 2025
Given at Sacred Heart Parish: Remington,
IN – March 23rd, 2025
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