Third Sunday in Lent, Cycle C. Today’s readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9
The shocking images of the war that has been raging on for the past three weeks or so in Eastern Europe cannot but elicit a cry of lament. From the depths of our hearts a question also arises: why all this suffering? What on earth did these innocent people do to deserve all this pain?
Today’s gospel reading that makes us stare at the reality of suffering straight in the eyes. Jesus’s words ensure that we do not fall into the temptation of spiritualising suffering or of explaining it away. Neither does Jesus give the textbook reply that we use about suffering being due to our own wrongdoing. If this might be said for the example presented to him by his disciples – of when Pilate sacrilegiously mixed the blood of some secessionist Galileans with that of their animal sacrifices – Jesus gives them another example where such reasoning does not apply. The 18 men who died innocently after a tower collapsed on them cannot be attributed to human wrongdoing or sin, but only to a natural disaster, presumably an earthquake.
In both cases, Jesus offers the same reflection: “If you do not repent you will all perish in the same way.”
There are some other instances of suffering that just happen irrespective of human sinfulness. Tragedy and death are simply the result of the human condition. In any case, irrespective of whether suffering is caused by human agency or not, Jesus calls us to repent and to return to God. Failing to do so, Jesus warns us, will result in a worse kind of suffering: being severed from God, the source of all our existence.
Jesus’s point of the urgency to repent and of God’s mercy is put even more eloquently by his parable of the fig tree that year after year fails to yield any fruit. Using images traditionally evocative of the ultimate harvest at the end of time, the gardener suggests waiting for another year before removing the tree that does not produce any fruit.
In the Company of the Poor, by Paul Farmer and Gustavo GutiérrezThe academic and medical community is reeling from the death of Paul Farmer, lovingly known as “kenosis man”. A renowned medical anthropologist and prolific author in global health issues, Farmer worked tirelessly for health justice, spending most of his professional life working in destitute communities in developing countries, seeking to address the social factors that cause ill health. In one of his books, which he co-authored with Dominican priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, In the Company of the Poor, Farmer reflects on the reality of sin in the world and the urgency of repentance.
For Farmer, repentance is the “result of our awareness of the presence of sin in our lives,” and that must translate into “a break with deviant practices”. In practice, it gives rise to solidarity that is destroyed by sin. Only then, Farmer insists, can sinful structures start being addressed.
Repentance is the “result of our awareness of the presence of sin in our lives” and that must translate into “a break with deviant practices”- Paul Farmer
Big or small, our sin adds to the sin of the world, carelessly renting the fabric of society already wounded by suffering. As we journey toward Easter we recall Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. We find echoes of this truth in the first reading, where Moses, prefiguring Christ, is ordered to go to the pharaoh to free the Israelites from oppression and slavery.
The suffering we are seeing daily on our screens is the sacred ground that introduces us to the mystery of Christ, who stepped into our painful chaos to take all upon himself. Jesus inaugurated a new world, a kingdom that stands in stark contrast with this petty one and which beckons us to return to God – our life and our source.