True leadership

Today’s readings: Exodus 3, 1-8.13-15; 1 Cor. 10, 1-6.10-12; Luke 13, 1-9.

It is with a heavy mind and heart that I attempt a reading of today’s Scriptures in the light of the deep alienations and desolation that shadow the Lenten season this year in our country. While the drums of ‘war’ rumble day-long in our ears, the Church is on mute mode.

Churchgoers are made to believe that it is business as usual, being provided with Lenten talks and pilgrimages and many parishes just gearing up for the end-of-season tourist attraction processions of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

This is an unusually perturbed Lent, with much unrest and disillusionment. We cannot settle down with a religion that simply runs parallel to political life. Besides, it would be too illusory on our part to take the Scrip-tures as simply calling for individual and personal repentance, necessary as that may be.

The warning of Jesus “Unless you repent you will all perish”, is an eye-opener on clear and present dangers, among them the risk of faith fading away. This is a very tangible risk, represented in today’s gospel by a fig tree that bears no fruit.

Lent is the time to reclaim who we truly are and who we desire to be.

Politics has gone shallow, and for many it’s just a deep alienation. In fact, it is also a modern-day form of oppression.

The fig tree account in the gospel is very telling of how the Lord keeps persistently coming back to his vineyard to look for fruit. Our story risks becoming a story of lost opportunities.

Bleak as things may appear, the Church, like Moses, is called to discern life as graced even in the desert, and to give its lead. We need to ‘take off our shoes’, to be bold in the Easter proclamation that is the foundation of our faith and that lies underneath all that is being highlighted in the Scriptures throughout Lent. Otherwise, like the fig tree, we risk being cut down because we are irrelevant and voiceless.

The gospel readings throughout Lent seem to be a prolongation of the account of the temptations Jesus had to endure in the desert. Suffering and oppression are examples of temptation we all have to endure in life and which are provoking where faith in God is concerned.

For many, these are synonymous with a God who went deaf. Many lament of this, that God does not listen to their prayers.

In suffering, it is not easy to be still, to let go, to trust. But in Exodus we read how God was irked by the sufferings of His people oppressed in Egypt. He did not remedy for that miraculously but through Moses, who gave the lead against all odds.

Our culture wants remedies, fast solutions, explanations. The Scriptures invite for a different approach.

Like Moses, we want to understand what’s happening, we search for answers, we want God to make Himself present and identifiable. But God invites us to make time, He teaches us to step on ‘holy ground’ where we can meet up with Him.

When Moses took off his shoes, then the Lord Himself stepped in, not to explain but to strengthen him with a new vision of reality. Lent gives us this new vision that makes transformation possible.

We may have a thousand and one reasons to stick to life as it comes across perceiving hope and healing as out of reach. But God’s enduring love and patience provide the sure foundation for our spiritual well-being that ultimately bears fruit.

God is at work even in a dry, painful and dark time. But to grasp that and to voice it, we need the wisdom of discernment and the strength of the Spirit who gives us the grace to act with integrity. Failing to achieve this would render us all sterile, a fig tree that unrelentingly bears no fruit.