Contemplating today's Gospel
Today's Gospel + homily (in 300 words)
For those who live according to the flesh are concerned with the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the spirit with the things of the spirit. The concern of the flesh is death, but the concern of the spirit is life and peace. For the concern of the flesh is hostility toward God; it does not submit to the law of God, nor can it; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; on the contrary, you are in the spirit, if only the Spirit of God dwells in you. Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord? Or who may stand in his holy place? He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain.
He shall receive a blessing from the Lord, a reward from God his savior. Such is the race that seeks for him, that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.
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)
