Contemplating today's Gospel
Today's Gospel + homily (in 300 words)
So that we may no longer be infants, tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery, from their cunning in the interests of deceitful scheming. Rather, living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole Body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, with the proper functioning of each part, brings about the Body’s growth and builds itself up in love.
Jerusalem, built as a city with compact unity. To it the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord.
According to the decree for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the Lord. In it are set up judgment seats, seats for the house of David.
And he 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.’”
“He came in search of fruit on it but found none”
Fr. Antoni ORIOL i Tataret (Vic, Barcelona, Spain)Today, the words of Jesus invite us to reflect on the danger of hypocrisy: “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” (Lk 13:6). The hypocrite pretends to be what he is not. This falsehood reaches its peak when someone feigns virtue (in the moral sense) while living in vice, or pretends devotion (in the religious sense) looking out for himself and his own interests instead of God. Moral hypocrisy abounds in the world; religious hypocrisy harms the Church.
Jesus’ criticisms against the scribes and Pharisees—clearer and more direct in other passages of the Gospel—are truly severe. We cannot read or listen to these words without feeling them pierce to the depths of our hearts, if we have really heard and understood them.
Let me speak in the first-person plural, because all of us experience the gap between what we appear to be and what we truly are. We are hypocrites when politicians exploit their country while claiming to serve it; when law enforcement protects corrupt groups in the name of public order; when medical professionals suppress lives—either at their beginning or their end—in the name of medicine; when the media distorts the truth and corrupts people under the pretext of entertaining them; when public administrators divert funds into their own (personal or party) pockets while boasting of their honesty; when secularists restrict religion’s public presence in the name of freedom of conscience; when religious men and women live off their institutions in infidelity to the spirit and demands of their founders; when priests live from the altar but fail to serve their parishioners selflessly in a true Gospel spirit; and so on.
Ah!—you and I as well, to the extent that our conscience tells us what we must do, yet we fail to do it, preferring instead to focus only on the speck in our brother’s eye while ignoring the beam that blinds our own. Isn’t that so?
—Jesus, Savior of the world, save us from our small, medium, and great hypocrisies!
Thoughts on Today's Gospel
"You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you! In my weakness, I ran after the beauty of the things you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The things you have made kept me from you – the things which would have no being unless they existed in you!" (Saint Augustine)
"Authentic faith, open to others and to forgiveness, works miracles. The fig tree represents infertility, a barren life, incapable of giving anything. Jesus curses the fig tree because it made no effort to bear fruit” (Francis)
"Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to give this dark reality other names would be futile. To try to understand what sin is, one must first recognize the profound relation of man to God, for only in this relationship is the evil of sin unmasked in its true identity as humanity's rejection of God and opposition to him, even as it continues to weigh heavy on human life and history" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n 386)
