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Third Sunday of Lent Homily by Deacon Robert McCormick

Today my brothers and sisters in Christ, we mark the third Sunday of Lent.  We hear in the first reading the calling of Moses to do God’s will in bringing the Israelites out of Egypt.  We hear in the second reading how having been freed, the Israelites began to desire of evil things. They find themselves falling into another form of slavery, the slavery of sin, much more different from, and much more grave than that slavery from which they had just escaped.  They grumble and became overconfident and arrogant in their liberation from the pharaoh. And this dissatisfaction they succumbed to, this arrogance, this disobedience came while they were in the very presence of God Himself. They were eventually destroyed, struck down in the desert, having been freed from one form of slavery to give in to, to be taken by, another form.

Finally, the Gospel highlights how we respond to those bad things happening to us, by accusing God of punishing us, by becoming like that fruitless fig tree. This is the cycle we find ourselves in many times during our lives.  We are rescued from the slavery of sin, then our complacency, our arrogance, leads to discontentment, until finally we return to that fruitless life, that sinful life again, and all the while we blame God for our own impotence. Christ tells us that we must repent or we will suffer the same as those Galileans, as those who were killed when the tower fell. We will suffer the same if we are not prepared.

That, though, is one way to understand the readings today.  But it is not the only way. As the Psalmist says, the Lord is kind and merciful, pardoning our inequities, healing our ills and redeeming our lives from destruction. During this time of Lent, during this time of sacrifice, we know that we are moving toward something better, something grander than we are, something miraculous. As we prepare ourselves this Lenten season, we are moving towards that moment when Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, out of love for us, purchased our salvation with His very own blood.

Let us look again at what we have just heard in the readings today, but not through the eyes of the unrepentant, not through the eyes of the arrogant, the over confident. Let us look at these readings through the eyes of one who knows the miracle of Christ's passion, death and resurrection. Let's us look through the eyes of those who understand the missionary nature of the church today. We now serve the resurrected Christ and as everything inspired by God is, we look through the layers of meaning to bring forth more truth.

Moses is being called by God, to bring His people out of Egypt, out of their slavery.  This task which God assigned to Moses, this is also our call. Instead of confronting the pharaoh, our call is to evangelize, to approach the sin enslaved peoples of today, and to let them know that we speak in the name of God, that He, the almighty, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, has witnessed their affliction, that He has heard their cries, and that He desires only to free them from their suffering and enslavement.  We become also as the burning bush, burning not with fire but instead with love for our brothers and sisters in Christ as we bring the message of God to them, as God speaks through us in our actions and words and deeds. We bring God's word to the enslaved, our only task to love them and to pass this message of hope along to them, this message that they have not been forsaken, that God still has His sight on them, and that he desires what is good for them, for this is a message that many find hard to believe.

In the Gospel, we see Jesus dealing with that which today still seems to occupy the minds of many, that when bad things happen to people, that it must be because of something that they have done, some sin that they have committed. When bad things happen to good people we tend to ask why we are being punished or why God had abandoned us. But Jesus tells the parable of the fig tree in which we see God's true love for us, see the patience he has for us. We are the fig tree and when we do not bear fruits in our life, when we do not serve our master, our God, then truly what good are we? But the gardener speaks up for us, offering to tend to us and care for us, to cultivate the ground and make it fertile once more. We are by no means abandoned, for we know who the gardener is. Do we not?

We know that Christ intervened for us. We know that he acts on our behalf before the Father. So too should we act in a similar manner. In our evangelizing, we seek out the fig trees which bear no fruit. Instead of watching them be cut down, we offer to care for them, to make fertile the ground, to help cultivate, to teach, to mentor, to guide our brothers and sisters in Christ, back to a state in which they can bear fruits for the kingdom of God. In doing so, we become fruitful ourselves.

So during this time of Lent, let us make the decision to repent and to evangelize. To prepare ourselves and make known the Lord to others. Let us not grow arrogant or become overconfident in our salvation, let us guard against the fall. We can, though, be confident that Christ's sacrifice opened heaven up for us once more. Let us be as the burning bush through which God speaks. Let us be as Moses and proclaim the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the name to be remembered through all the generations. Let us remember that He is merciful and gracious with us all. And let us remember the patience He has for us and not put it to the test. Let us be just as patient and merciful and graceful to all we encounter.

Another year, said the gardener to the master. Leave it another year. I will tend the ground around it and make it fertile again.

 




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