Our site uses cookies to improve the user experience and we recommend accepting its use to take full advantage of the navigation

Master·evangeli.net

Today's Gospel + short theological explanation

Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Download
Gospel text (Lk 13:1-9): Jesus told them this parable: “There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the gardener, ‘For three years now I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?’ 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.’”

God calls us to the progress

EDITORIAL TEAM evangeli.net (based on texts by Benedict XVI) (Città del Vaticano, Vatican)

Today, the "Parable of the barren fig tree" suggests that progress —in its origin and essence— is a divine plan. To regard development as a vocation is to recognize that it derives from a transcendent call and that it is incapable, on its own, of supplying its ultimate meaning. God is the guarantor of man's true development, inasmuch as, having created him in His image He also establishes the transcendent dignity of men and women and feeds their innate yearning to “be more”.

If man were merely the fruit of either chance or necessity, and man did not possess a nature destined to transcend itself in a supernatural life, then one could speak of growth, or evolution, but not development. Without the perspective of eternal life, human progress in this world is denied breathing-space. Without Him, development is either denied, or entrusted exclusively to man, who falls into the trap of thinking he can bring about his own salvation and ends up promoting a dehumanized form of development.

—Lord, deliver us from the damage of "super-development" promoted with "moral underdevelopment".