Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Lent (March 20th 2022)
Given the teaching of Jesus, that we should love our enemies, I wonder if you’ve ever tried to understand why some Christians have sometimes not only supported a war because they thought they had to, as against the Nazis, but also supported the sort of war that Russia is waging at the moment? You can see and her me giving this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_8Jgo5Ap7Q
The answer surely lies in the way some Christians read the Old Testament. Today, in our 1st Reading (Exodus 3:1-15) we heard the great story of Moses being called by God to rescue his people from the Egyptians, and I expect we all know that he succeeded; but if we were to read on (Exodus 17:8-14) we would discover that God supported Moses in leading his people to “Utterly blot out” the people called the Amalekites; and later we would see God supporting Moses’ successor Joshua as he leads his people’s invasion into what we now call the Holy Land, killing any number of people who stood in his way. Indeed, in one city, Jericho, they killed everyone “Men and women, young and old.” (Joshua 6:21) It is passages like this that some Christians have used down the ages to argue that God is on their side, as they slaughter anyone who they think of as their enemies.
Today St Paul shows us in our 2nd Reading a very different way of reading the Old Testament, and we might well take note of it - 1 Cor 10:1-12 – in case we too come face to face with fundamentalists who want to read the Bible, especially the Old Testament, literally, and justify all sorts of horrendous things. Instead of taking the Bible literally, St Paul takes it in a way that we call allegorical, and thus shows all Christians how it ought to be read. We might think it weird that St Paul can say that Christ is the Rock in the wilderness, because we are part of a world that doesn’t very often think like this ; but the point he makes is very important, because he is teaching that the man Jesus, whom he proclaims as a real man who died on the cross, is also the eternal Christ, one with God and revealing God to us humans all through history. How many people sing the Hymn “Rock of ages cleft for me” without realising the full implications of what they are singing about?
In the same way, the Church has always interpreted the fighting and the slaughters in the Old Testament as ways of talking about the spiritual battle that all of us Christians have to face when we follow Jesus. As St Paul writes in his Letter to the Ephesians (6:12) “We are not fighting against flesh and blood, but against ……… the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” In other words, the real battles in our life are within us; and today we can see this happening to Moses. It might not seem like a battle, but if you were to read on through Chapter 3 and into Chapter 4 you would see that Moses has real battle within himself where the selfish side of him is giving all kinds of excuses for why he shouldn’t go back to Egypt to rescue his people. The selfish side is of course the way the power of evil works in all of us when we make excuses for not doing good; and Moses has lots of excuses. He says “Why me?” then, “Who are you anyway?” then, “But they won’t listen to me, they won’t take any notice,” then “But I am no good at speaking,” and finally “Oh, my Lord, send, I pray, some other person.”
This is a powerful message isn’t it, for all of us when we too make excuses for something that we really should be doing or saying. It doesn’t have to be as big as rescuing the people of Israel from Egypt of course. It might be as simple as crossing the road to have a chat to someone we know who’s looking a bit gloomy. Or phoning or emailing that person that we ought to have been in touch with weeks ago. Or making time to say our prayers or go to Mass. Or saying thank you to the person we live with. Or it could be something rather more daunting, like making a complaint about something wrong in our community that is affecting many people, but no-one has the courage or the time to get round to complaining. They all say with Moses “Oh my Lord, send I pray some other person.”
We need to remember that when we struggle like this, like Moses, then this is an act of repentance. You see repentance doesn’t simply mean saying sorry for things we have done wrong; it actually has a deeper meaning. It means turning towards God and to what God wants, which of course is what Moses was struggling with. So, when in our Gospel today (Luke 13:1-9) Jesus says “Unless you repent you will all perish as they did,’ we might feel that he is being rather negative, insisting on us being sorry for the things we’ve done wrong; when actually he’s more interested, not in what we might or might not have done wrong, but whether we are turning to him for help, whether we are turning to God to guide us, whatever we’re facing in our life at the moment. This turning to God can be a very wonderful thing, like recognising God’s presence in the flowers of Spring, or in a new-born baby, or maybe more challenging like finding God in a slightly annoying toddler, or an even more annoying teenager! It can equally be a very tough thing indeed, as Jesus showed when he agonised with God in the Garden of Gethsemane before his arrest, “Not my will but thine be done.”
But let’s also get encouragement from the second half of the Gospel, for there may well be times when we will feel like an unfruitful Fig Tree. Here “the Vinedresser” / “The man who looked after the Vineyard.” is Jesus of course. Jesus is the one who pleads for us before God the Father. Jesus is the one who digs round us and feeds us so that we may bear fruit eventually. Jesus is the one who never gives up on us, even when we feel we’re not much use, when we feel we are far from God and what God wants. Moses bore fruit by going to Egypt and taking his people on the road to the Promised Land. We may not bear fruit quite so dramatically as Moses did, though remember even Moses failed in some ways, and had many a problem with his task until he almost gave up. No, we may not have such a big task as Moses, but in many small ways, with Jesus to help us, we may bear fruit almost without realising it. Let us turn to him with all our hearts, for he is “Compassion and love” (Ps 103:11-14)
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