This God Has Done
Piety
For what the law, weakened by the
flesh was powerless to do, this God has done: by sending his own Son in the
likeness of sinful flesh and for the sake of sin, he condemned sin in the
flesh, so that the righteous decree of the law might be fulfilled in us, who
live not according to the flesh but according to the spirit. Romans 8:3-4
He said to him in reply, “Sir,
leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and
fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.”
Luke 13:8-9
Study
In one breath of today's Gospel, Jesus warns of our destruction. In the next breath, he is telling us the
story of the kind gardener who will nurse the fig tree back to life and
productivity. How do we reconcile these messages?
Jesus as the Gardener is there to save the fig tree from destruction. Jesus
is living the life of the Spirit. He is
concerned with life and with peace, not with destruction.
St. Paul calls on us to pursue the concerns of the spirit…life and
peace. He places these opposite to the concerns of the flesh (life and death).
While this is an interesting duality, it also points out that there is another
possibility: life without peace. Yet it is only through the combination of life
and peace do we pursue spiritual aims.
Psalm 24 gives us a road map to this goal of life and peace. We cannot pursue any means to achieve a just end. The means must be
congruent and justify the end we seek. The notes in the New American Bible Revised
Edition (NABRE) point out the deeper meaning of what has changed after Jesus
died on the cross:
Through the
redemptive work of Christ, Christians have been liberated from the terrible
forces of sin and death. Holiness was impossible so long as the flesh (or our
"old self"), that is, self-interested hostility toward God,
frustrated the divine objectives expressed in the law. What is worse, sin used
the law to break forth into all manner of lawlessness. All this is now changed.
At the cross, God broke the power of sin and pronounced sentence on it.
According to St. Paul, Christian life is the experience of a constant
challenge to set aside the temptations of the body by replacing them with a
life of the spirit. However, success can only come through the four keywords in
today’s readings: This God has done.
We are powerless to overcome the forces and temptations of evil alone.
The parallel emphasis in both Romans 8 and Luke 13 is on the graceful character
of God. Like the barren fig tree, we need the gardener to “cultivate” our lives
and our environment. The “gardener” will
“fertilize it” with the concerns of the spirit. Only when we recognize that God
has done this for us will we bear fruit in the future.
The late Fr. Tom Keating reminds us that the parable of the barren fig
tree recalls the theme of the “barren made fruitful by the Lord's direct
intervention.” Immediately after telling the disciples this parable, Jesus
heals a woman in the temple on the Sabbath. However, Jesus then must defend
himself. The leader of the synagogue reprimanded
Jesus. The image of the barren fig tree
evokes the sense that the religion of the day was not producing the desired
results of mercy and grace for individuals as well as the overall community.
The religion of that day – as represented by the leader -- was not
producing what God intended. As represented by the woman who was crippled for
18 years, despite her attendance at the temple, her faith had borne no fruit in her
life and health.
This new sign -- of the resurrected fig tree -- becomes a metaphor of
the sign of God’s grace and patience in our lives through the person of Jesus.
God gives us – the proverbial the fig tree – one more chance by sending us a
gardener in the person of His Son. Through Jesus, God gives us the life-giving
nutrients (bread and wine transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ) that
we need to produce results.
As the late Fr. Keating reminds us, “it does not matter if we do not
succeed in our own estimation or in that of others.” God has done this. Thanks
to the patient cultivation and fertilizing by God, we as individuals and members of the community can then witness the concerns of the Spirit – life and peace
– rather than death.
What is special about us is God's incredible solidarity with our
ordinary lives: with our sense of failure, futility, getting nowhere
spiritually, and our lack of inner resources to cope with our particular
difficulties. In the parables, daily life is so clearly the place where the
kingdom is working that symbols of success are very irrelevant. They are like
icing on a cake. We cannot live on icing. We need food that is more substantial.
Trust in God disregards the evidence of everyday life that God is absent or forgetful
of us and brings us into direct contact with the God of the everyday. The God of
pure faith is so close: closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer
than choosing, closer than consciousness itself.
Action
Today, we may not have a barren fig tree in the back yard but we do
have fire engulfing people and property in California. Not to mention physical and spiritual hunger,
diseases affecting our bodies and minds, homelessness, war, greed, and social
needs that Jesus never encountered.
Yet the daily readings force us to focus on cultivation and fertilizer.
We know that the fallen leaves and the barren fig trees become mulch for spring
growth. Despite the cold dormant winter that lies ahead of us, new growth will
emerge.
The connecting tissue for me is the line about repentance. Jesus the
gardener is telling us -- his branches -- that if we do not change the
direction in which we seek happiness, then we shall shrivel up like this fig
tree. He is willing to nurse us back to life in the spirit if we are willing
to submit our lives (lives now dedicated to the flesh) to Him. Jesus is willing
to make us His own if we are willing to make us His.
Such a transformation requires both of us -- our humble surrendering
our will and Jesus' generous act of saving our spirits. What shall it be?
Surrender and change or grow under your own control and die?
This choice reminds me of Phil Russell's favorite passage from the
Bible during our preparation for many Cursillo weekend including the Men's 108th.
"I
am the vine. You are the branches." What does it mean to be a branch
of Jesus' vine? One might see that a vine grows when the branch nourishes it. A
vine does not have a life separate from the branch. If cut off, it will wither
and die. That is just a biological fact.
What does it matter? Cut off from Jesus and a life in which He dwells
in us, then we might as well not go on. If on the other hand, we dedicate our
life to grow in the direction the branch determines, then we will live
according to the rules of the branch (the two great commandments?), and will bear
much fruit.
I am the vine. You are the branches. Whoever remains in me
and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.
(John 15:5)
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