Lent 3

Readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9

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The season of Lent is offered to us 
as a time of self-examination.
But why would we need to examine ourselves?
Normally when we speak of examining things
we are trying to find out something that is 
somehow obscure or hidden from us.
Doctors examine patients 
to see if there might not be ailments
that are not immediately apparent.
Teachers subject their students to examinations
to find out what knowledge they have 
hidden away in their heads.
Juries are invited to examine evidence 
to uncover the truth of what has occurred.
So why should we need to examine ourselves?
Can I be obscure to myself,
hidden from myself?

The fact that the Church calls us 
to self-examination during the season of Lent
suggests that this may actually be the case.
It suggests that we may have a way of hiding from ourselves,
deceiving ourselves about the state of our own souls,
convincing ourselves to ignore certain truths about who we are.
Jesus himself suggests as much in today’s Gospel,
saying that if we find ourselves thinking
that those who suffer tragic misfortune
must have been great sinners,
and a lack of tragic misfortune in our lives
must be a sign of our virtue,
we are fooling ourselves.
Jesus breaks through such self-deception,
saying, “I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!”
Paul makes a similar point 
in his letter to the Corinthians.
After he recounts the unfaithfulness 
of the Israelites in the desert after the Exodus,
he warns his readers not to grow too smug 
about their standing before God;
the unfaithfulness of their ancestors in faith
should rather stand as a warning to them:
“whoever thinks he is standing secure
should take care not to fall.”

We human beings, it seems, 
have a propensity for self-deception.
Saint Catherine of Siena said that this is why 
we must make self-knowledge 
the foundation of our spiritual lives;
we must dwell, as she put it, 
in the house of self-knowledge.
But how do enter into 
this house of self-knowledge?
How do we examine ourselves 
so as to overcome 
our propensity to self-deceive?
Is self-examination simply a matter 
of cataloging our sins and failings,
of minutely poring over all 
that we have done wrong?
I don’t think so,
for we are not only more miserable
than we will admit to ourselves,
we are also far greater 
than we are willing to recognize.

Saint Catherine says that we 
cannot come truly to know ourselves
without knowing God.
And what we must know 
about ourselves and about God
is that God is, as he declares to Moses,
“I am who am”—the One who is—
and we, in contrast, are the ones who are not.
What Catherine means by this 
is that it is God’s very nature to exist,
and that everything else in the universe
has been created by God from nothing.
So while God is the One who is,
we are beings who have been drawn by God
out of nothingness into existence, 
in an act of unimaginable love.
When Catherine says 
that we must know that we are not,
she is saying that we must know that we exist
only because God has loved us into existence,
and we must also know that 
when we turn away from God
we begin to disappear back into nothingness.
To dwell in the house of self-knowledge
we must both acknowledge ourselves 
as artifacts of divine love,
and understand how catastrophic it is for us 
to turn away from that love
to a fruitless love of ourselves. 

During Lent we should ponder 
this double truth about ourselves,
the grandeur and misery of our condition.
We should hear Jesus’ words, 
“if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!”
not as a threat of divine punishment,
but as an invitation to let grace turn us back
to the God who has loved us 
out of nothingness into existence.
We should hear St. Paul’s words,
“whoever thinks he is standing secure
should take care not to fall,”
not as an exhortation to anxiety and fear
but as an invitation to us, who are not,
to plant our feet more firmly
on the solid rock of the One who is.
Our recognition of our own poverty
should make us only marvel more
at the richness of God’s grace
that has been bestowed upon us.

Our Lenten self-examination,
if it can pierce our self-deception,
should lead us to sincere sorrow 
for our sins and failings,
but also to a deep gratitude to God
for our creation and redemption
and our hope of eternal glory.
We begin Lent as the fruitless fig tree,
having done little with the time bestowed on us,
but given by grace one more season to turn 
from the sterile self-love that pulls us into nothingness
back to the embrace of the God who loves us.
And within that embrace we can become
like the thorn bush from which God spoke to Moses,
ablaze but not consumed by the fire of the One who is,
beacons that draw others into the embrace of God.

In this Lenten season,
may we come to know ourselves
as we come to know the One who is,
and may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 3

Readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; 1 Corinthians 10: 1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9

It has been an interesting week to be a Catholic.

Of course everybody who has access to any form of media

knows that Pope Benedict’s resignation from the papacy 

took effect on Thursday

and that the Church has entered a period of sedes vacans,

or the empty chair of Peter,

as we await the election of a new Pope by the college of Cardinals.

In my mind, this event is framed 

by two other events from this week:

on Monday the Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned

amidst accusations of sexual misconduct with several priests,

and on Friday the Archdiocese of Baltimore issued a statement

that one of my brother deacons had been suspended from ministry

after his arrest for possession of child pornography.

Sad to say, for all too many people 

such news has ceased to be shocking,

because it has come to seem like business as usual 

from the Catholic Church.

And I find myself praying that God will seize this opportunity

to send us a leader who can make the Church into the kind of place

where at least such things regain their capacity to shock.

So what does the Word of God offer us today?

We hear in the Gospel the parable of the fig tree,

which for three years produces no fruit,

after which the owner of the orchard, 

justly and understandably frustrated,

tells the gardener to cut it down 

so that it will no longer deplete the soil.

But the gardener pleads with the owner 

to give the tree one more year,

during which he will tend it and fertilize it.

Early Christian interpreters such as St. Augustine

saw the parable as a warning to Christians that,

while we have been granted another season of grace

in which to bear the fruit of good works,

a day of judgment and reckoning is coming

for those whose lives remain barren.

But perhaps this parable 

is not just about us as individuals,

but also about us as a Church.

Events not just this week but over the past ten years

have led me often to wonder whether our Church

has become like the fig tree,

exhausting the soil around it

while producing no fruit but scandal upon scandal,

sucking life from the world

and offering nothing in return but one more excuse

for the cynicism that so pervades modern life.

Is time running out for our Church to bear good fruit?

Could the day arrive when God decides 

that the time has come to cut it down?

Christ said that the gates of hell 

would not prevail against his Church,

but we must also remember the words of St. Paul:

“whoever thinks he is standing secure 

should take care not to fall.”

These are dark thoughts to have on the eve of a papal election.

And they bring with them the temptation to think

that what is needed to fix the Church

is a Pope who fits with my particular agenda:

whether that is a Pope who will ordain women to the priesthood

or impose the Latin Mass on all parishes,

or change the Church’s teaching on contraception

or excommunicate all the bad Catholics.

These might be good ideas or bad ideas,

but a solution more radical than any of these is called for,
a solution that fits neither a “conservative” agenda nor a “liberal” one, 

a solution that is hinted at in the parable of the fig tree.

The gardener in the parable says

that he will cultivate the ground around the tree and fertilize it.

What our translation rather primly translates as “fertilizer”

is the Greek word kopria, which really means “excrement.”

A Pope from many centuries ago, Gregory the Great,

said, in reference to this parable, that the fertilizer that can make

the unfruitful tree of our souls fruitful once again

is the remembrance of the dung of our past sins;

the frank acknowledgement of the stench of our own misdeeds 

can pierce our hearts

and move us to begin bearing 

the fruit of good and godly deeds (Homily 31).

And what is true of us as individuals 

is just as true of us as a Church.

The Church must clear away all of the weeds that are choking it:

the desire to protect careers and images at all costs,

the denial that the world’s evils are found in the Church as well,

the denigration of any who would dare to call us to account.

The Church must be fertilized by facing up to the foulness of her failings,

and let her heart be pierced by the stench of her own sins,

so that we can in due season bear fruit

that will feed a world that is spiritually starving.

Perhaps our next Pope can help us to do this.

But the Church stands 

on the promise of Christ to remain with us,

not on the dream of a Pope 

who will fix everything that is wrong with us.

Still, we should pray in this time of sede vacans 

for God to send us a leader

who, like the gardener in the parable,

will cultivate and fertilize the Church with honest repentance.

And we should not only pray, but pray with confidence,

because we know that while our past is ours, and we must own it,

our future belongs to the God 

whose grace can make a barren fig tree fruitful

and make a desert bush burn with the fire of God’s presence,

the God whose Spirit, 

despite our best efforts to quench it,

still burns as a refiner’s fire within the Church, 

the living body of Christ.