By Father John P. Cush, STD
The Gospel we proclaim this Sunday offers a simple message, a message that is at both the heart of the liturgical season of Lent and, perhaps even more importantly, the basics of the Gospel: “REPENT!”
The U.S. Southern American writer, Flannery O’Connor, who was a devout Catholic (as well as an avid student of Saint Thomas Aquinas) was fond of using a certain Southern Gothic style designed to shock her audiences into truly perceiving what was being said. O’ Conner states:
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures” (Flannery O’Connor, Mysteries and Manners: Occasional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1969), 33-34).
That is precisely what Our Blessed Lord, Jesus the Christ, is doing in the parable he gives to us today for our reflection in today’s Gospel. He’s trying to shock us, trying to “scare us straight,” so that we might be able to recognize what really and truly matters, to acknowledge what our Lenten campaign is really all about, “to repent and believe in the Gospel,” as we were admonished when the ashes were imposed on our heads at the start of Lent. Our Lord, Mercy himself, offers us this parable of the fig tree in the orchard that is permitted to grow for a while longer, just to see if it eventually bears good fruit.
However, we also need to recall that it is Christ, the Divine Justice, the Divine Judge, who ultimately stands as our judge. Listen to the words of the gardener in the parable from Saint Luke’s Gospel:
“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.”
Yes, this Gospel is given to us to recall the four last things, the eschatology of our faith, namely: death, judgement, Heaven, and hell. These four last things call us to remember what our lives, which are passing and fleeting, are really all about!
The Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, asked what is our area of ultimate concern. What did he mean? Many people have concerns about certain things in life: education, careers, marriages and their health, however, when asked what their Ultimate concern is, it is harder to answer. Paul Tillich attempted to define religion by saying that it is our “Ultimate Concern.” He defined religion as “the state of being grasped by ultimate concern.”
For Tillich, a person’s ultimate concern is something that they base their lives around; it is the most important thing. He sees this as religion because it is the one thing that will survive when we won’t. All our material possessions that we think are our “ultimate concerns” will vanish after death, however, religion will remain. Tillich said that our ultimate concern should take up a significant part of our life; we should see it as the most important thing and consider it when deciding what to do in situations. He said that this is what religion is.
So what’s really our ultimate concern? If it’s not the salvation of our immortal soul, then we need to reevaluate our lives. With this in mind, recognizing that we are that tree in the orchard with a limited time left, let us repent and believe!
Readings for Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus: 3:1-8a, 13-15
1Corinthians: 10:1-6, 10-12
Luke: 13:1-9
Father Cush is the Academic Dean of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, Italy, and professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical University of Santa Croce, also in Rome.