A Reflection for Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Unusual Time
Find today’s readings here.
“It might bear fruit in the longer term.” (Lk 13:9)
Today’s Gospel offers the somewhat rare experience of Jesus telling us what to not imagine.
“Do you think that that because these Galileans suffered in this manner they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? Under no circumstances!”
This is maybe some of the liberating of all of Jesus’ teaching. He mainly says to us, “Do you are feeling like it’s essential explain and justify why bad things occur to good people? Well, I’m not going to attempt to justify what happened to those Galileans, and also you shouldn’t either. Under no circumstances.”
Sometimes, especially in moments of tragedy, well-meaning people will say, hoping to supply comfort, something like “God never gives you greater than you possibly can handle.” That’s certainly one of the few spiritual claims I do know of that could be empirically disproven. Whether or not we should say that God gives it to us, we regularly get greater than we are able to handle. Definitely those Galileans did.
Jesus doesn’t attempt to clarify or justify persecution or tragedy in reference to the sinfulness of the victims or some concept of God’s plan.
I can remember moments in my very own life, especially after the death of relations, where people have said such things to me. I do know that they were attempting to be comforting, but it surely actually didn’t make me feel comforted. As an alternative, my response—which I ultimately got here to acknowledge as an authentic encounter with grace—was that a God who parceled out tragedy in some type of measured dose, in response to what I might be expected to “handle,” was not the loving God whom Jesus reveals and trusts. Even less so a God who’s imagined to measure out calamity in proportion to sinfulness.
Jesus doesn’t attempt to clarify or justify Herod’s persecution of the Galileans or the random tragedy of the 18 people killed by the falling tower at Siloam, either in reference to the sinfulness of the victims or some concept of God’s plan. As an alternative, he takes it as a jumping off point for repentance—which is to say, conversion and transformation. Despite the fact that his approach to this focus shouldn’t be particularly comforting itself (“in case you don’t repent, you’ll all perish as they did”), it reminds us that we’re all in the identical boat relating to tragedy. God finds us there not insofar as we’re particularly guilty, but slightly because all of us stand in danger and none of us is guaranteed the secure or easy road. So repent and be transformed, Jesus tells us, to satisfy God as a companion slightly than imagining him as a tyrant.
The parable of the fig tree at the top of today’s Gospel can perhaps help us toward that conversion of imagination. The owner of the orchard is able to cut down the tree, however the gardener shouldn’t be so precipitous. He has a plan, not for what the fig tree is predicted to “handle” nor an evidence of why it has failed, but to provide it what it needs, to cultivate and fertilize it. In other words, his response to the fig tree’s seeming failure is to accompany it more closely, for perhaps “it might bear fruit in the longer term.” That’s the plan—not a justification of bad things prior to now, however the openness to assume higher things possible in the longer term. That’s the God in whom Jesus invites us to position our trust.
