3rd Sunday in Lent

In today’s gospel, we are confronted by a certain version of Jewish theodicy. Theodicy is the branch of theology that wrestles with the question of how an all-powerful loving God might allow evil. At the time of Jesus, many Jews, following the lead of the Sadducees, did not believe in a life after death. For this reason, God’s justice could not be deferred to the afterlife – divine reward and punishment had to meted out in this world. So any suffering you got in this life was suffering you deserved, as a punishment for your sins. Many Jews attempted to resolve the problem of the suffering of the innocent person by concluding that it was their parents who sinned and they are enduring punishment for their parents sins. In our gospel today, we hear the disciples telling Jesus about the people who were killed by Pilate and their blood mixed with the blood of animals. In relating this story to Jesus, they are obviously hoping that Jesus will do something to resolve the problem of theodicy. In responding to his disciples, it is interesting that Jesus does nothing to solve the mystery of theodicy, he simply distances himself from the idea that these men deserved to die because of their sin, and then uses it as a pretext to urge people to conversion. This is quite remarkable, because for so many people in the world, theodicy is a huge stumbling block to faith. How many of our friends and perhaps even relatives have we heard say to us: “I can’t believe in your God, because if God were all-loving and all-powerful, God would certainly not have let innocent people suffer.”

Why didn’t Jesus there and then, when the opportunity presented itself, take the time to remove this obstacle to our faith and make it clear to us the reasons that we have to endure suffering? If he didn’t, it wasn’t because he wanted to keep us in suspense, it was deliberate on his part. If Jesus didn’t give us an answer to this question, it was because he knew that there were no good answers to be had to this question. Perhaps Jesus is reiterating the same message that we find in the book of Job – that we should not question the Creator of the Universe, for we will find no useful answers to these idle questions. Such questions have no good answers to them, because they represent our desire for control. We must realize, together with Job, that we simply cannot fathom the mind of the creator – and not even the Son of God sought this form of control. For this is precisely what searching for an answer of this type is: a desire for control. If we can at least understand the reason for which something happens, we can attempt to control the process. Our contemporary technological society is driven by our understandings of cause and effect. We have learnt to dominate and manipulate nature in so many ways because we have learnt the reasons behind why things happen the way they do. We now know how to avert a drought by cloud-seeding, we now know the reason behind people’s sicknesses and can therefore cure them. There are few things beyond our control – and yet we remain mortals – exposed to the elements and at the mercy of our own finitude. Jesus leads us away from seeking such answers because there is a time that we must acknowledge our creatureliness and the fact that we do not understand. He calls us to just let God be God.

So instead of launching into reasons for why Pilate killed these people and mixed their blood with that of their sacrifices, Jesus plots a different course and uses their death as a cautionary tale. This story serves only one purpose for Jesus to point us to what is most important: repentance, conversion and bearing fruit. Instead of plying us with reasons and discourse, Jesus, gives us a stark image: that of a barren fig tree, sucking up minerals from the earth, but not returning anything to the earth by bearing fruit. We might liken the fig tree to our contemporary technological society that is extracting huge amounts of resources from the earth at an unsustainable rate, from fossil fuels, to metals to the precious minerals that form the essential components of our electronic gadgets, smart phones, tablets and computers that ply us with a glut of information, but do not really help us to bear fruit. For a number of years now, we have been inundated with news about the various wars taking place in our world and social media is awash with pundits who offer up their own analysis of these conflicts and how they will affect the global world order, all in an attempt to help us make sense of a situation that in many regards defies understanding. An eminent French theologian, Bernard Sesboüé, says that it is the very nature of evil to defy understanding. If God is the source of rationality and goodness that make sense, then evil is all that does not make sense and fights against the order that God has ordained. It is a futile task to try and understand evil. The best antidote to evil is to redouble our efforts to convert our own hearts in order to root out any evil that might have taken root there.

In our first reading today, we see Moses being invited by God to take off his shoes for he is walking on holy ground. Perhaps the invitation to us is to put aside our technology – to take off our shoes before the burning bush – to be naked and vulnerable before the living God in silence as we expose our hearts to the Lord of all that God might convert our hearts of stone into hearts of love. In order to do this, we must agree to relinquish our desire for control. Moses’ shoes might become for us a metaphor of the technology that we have become so accustomed to as a modern generation that enables us to control our lives. The call is to take off our shoes and delve into silence and there let God touch our hearts hopefully to enable us to become more loving people.

Questions for reflection

1. Am I consumed by trying to find reasons for my own suffering and the suffering of those around me? Is this a good use of my emotional and physical energy?
2. In what ways might my society and my own life be like the fig tree that consumes resources without bearing any fruit?
3. How might I try to give God and the earth a better return on their investment in me by making more efficient use of the resources invested in me?