3rd Sunday Lent C - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2022

In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus commented firstly on a group of Galilean pilgrims massacred by Roman soldiers as they were offering sacrifice to God in the Jerusalem temple. He then referred to another group accidentally killed when a tower collapsed on them at Siloam in Jerusalem. In both cases, they were killed without warning. Jesus clarified for his listeners that they were not to conclude that it must have been the unlucky victims’ own fault, that they were obviously being punished by God because they were sinners. Jesus did warn them, nevertheless, to read the unexpected as warnings, or as calls. As he observed to his listeners in relation to both events, “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”.
 
By what the translation unhappily translated as “repent”, Jesus intended  something like “be alert to and respond appropriately to the opportunities to grow in love that life constantly offers”.
 
The Gospel than added a short story by Jesus about a farmer’s hopes to bring a fruitless grapevine into profitable production by “digging around it and manuring it”. With a little imagination, we might tease that out further by seeing “digging around it” as involving getting down to the roots and radically disturbing them, and “manuring” as putting up with unwanted aromas and other distasteful effects.
 
I have been reflecting over these past couple of weeks about the invasion of Ukraine and the cruel massacre particularly of helpless women and children. It seems too easy to lay all the blame on Vladimir Putin. He certainly is responsible. But I also hear increasingly loudly Jesus’ comment in today’s Gospel, “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”. It is easy to look down on the primitive Hebrews with their “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” — but Jesus’ response to that was “love your enemies”. He said that two thousand years ago — and he said it in all seriousness; and the Eucharist we celebrate today reminds us that he paid the price of his conviction by giving his own life. Fascinatingly, he believed it was possible for us to do so as well; and our presence here is our “Yes” to that conviction, even if we only half mean it.
 
It is time for humanity to grow up and to leave behind the ways of children. We have reached the stage where, with access to one or two of the thousands of nuclear weapons in existence, a single individual can wipe out the whole human race. But even without nuclear weapons, modern warfare has ensured that by far the majority of casualties have become civilians — and overwhelmingly women and children. Warfare has changed; and human consciences must keep abreast of the new situation. Recent Popes have said that modern warfare has made all wars unjust. Just last week Pope Francis repeated that message ever more clearly.
 
Popes are not enough. We need motivated political leaders with vision, with energy and with courage. But they, in turn, need peoples ready to support their vision.
 
I keep hoping that our world may already be moving in that direction. Citizens in Russia are marching for peace at the risk of God knows what. During the Second World War, as a young boy, just eleven years of age, I was thrilled when the Americans dropped their atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. Now there is world-wide distress at the massacres happening in Ukraine. Might God’s Spirit be empowering us at last to take the next enlightened, determined step in the unstoppable evolution of the Kingdom of God — God’s original dream when God created the world so many millennia ago — a world, no longer of enemies, but of brothers and sisters!
 
God’s joyful, creative Spirit inspires us to “think big”!