Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Lent
23 March 2025
Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; Psalm 103; 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9
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Lent is a time for repentance, for turning back to God and making a new start, in all sorts of ways. In today’s gospel from Luke we hear two stories which are unique to Luke. One story is of Pilate mingling the blood of Galileans with their sacrifices. These Galileans were killed summarily and without prior notice. They had no time to repent. The second story is of 18 people crushed to death when the tower of Siloam collapsed. Once again, the people had no time to repent.
The simplistic popular belief of the time was that those who suffered such deaths must have been greater sinners than their companions. The scripture scholar Luke Timothy Johnson reminds us that ‘Rabbi Eliezer had declared that a person should repent the day before death.’ Given that a person could die any day, the Rabbi’s disciples taught that all of life should be one of repentance. Johnson says, ‘The repentance called for by the prophet Jesus is not simply a turning from sin but an acceptance of the visitation of God in the proclamation of God’s kingdom’.[1] The disciple is called to this repentance every day.
The message is simple. Repent now for you do not know when your time is up. And a tragic fate is not punishment for past sins. Like the Galileans in today’s story, Jesus was to suffer a tragic fate at the hands of Pilate. But there is no way that he was being punished for his own sins.
Having told these two arresting stories, Luke then gives us his variant on the encounter of Jesus with a barren fig tree. In the other gospels, Jesus gives the tree short shrift. In Luke’s account, Jesus tells a story about an owner of land and his gardener debating what to do with a fig tree that has failed to produce fruit over three years. The gardener wins out, telling the owner: ‘Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.’
We are all given time, now, to repent.
As Johnson says, ‘The fig tree is not summarily cut down. It is allowed to have time; indeed, it has already had time to bear fruit. The comfort to Jesus’ listeners is that the Prophet is still on his way to the city; there is still time to respond. The warning is that if they do not, they will surely be cut off.’[2]
Today I concentrate on the scriptural exegesis of Johnson because I am reading his latest book Imitating Christ: The Disputed Character of Christian Discipleship. The book is a distillation of a lifetime of teaching. Johnson, a Catholic scripture scholar, has recently retired from 50 years of teaching scripture and theology to thousands of very bright theology students, mostly Protestant, at Yale and Emory Universities. He writes: ‘Increasingly, I had the sense that my students and I were talking past each other. We did not share the same instinctive sense of sacrament and church. And when we talked about discipleship, we seemed to be operating within quite different spheres. Whereas my default understanding of discipleship was becoming a saint, this language was utterly strange to them. They thought of discipleship in terms of changing the oppressive systems of society, and this understanding was abetted by the steady diet of liberation discourse they were fed in theology and ethics classes.’[3]
What is it for the true disciple to bear fruit? Johnson trying to reconcile or put right the imbalance he perceives in his students speaks of ‘those salient traits that the Gospels ascribe to Jesus: a radical faith in God and a love of neighbour that is expressed through self-donative service’.[4] Speaking of the saints to be emulated, Johnson says:
‘Their faith is radical because it is not exhausted by conformity to creed or custom but responds with obedient hearing to God’s summons as they discern it in the circumstances of their lives. Their faith is radical because it loyally persists in the face of scorn and rejection. Their love of neighbour is neither notional nor momentary but is embodied and consistent, with the neighbour being whomever God places in their path through life.’ Johnson describes saints as those who take up the cross daily not by constructing wooden beams to carry around but by practising self denial and selfless service within their cultures.[5] Dare I say it: I think both Johnson and his students were partly right. Together in the classroom over those five decades they came close to the complete picture of discipleship. We are called to sanctity while we strive to change the oppressive systems of society within our own sphere of influence, even if that sphere be restricted to our own personal relationships.
As disciples, we are called to follow Jesus on the path of sanctity committing ourselves to love of God and love of neighbour, recalling the words of today’s psalm that the Lord secures justice and the rights of all the oppressed. In word and sacrament, we are on hold ground as we make our way on that path of sanctity. Like Moses in today’s first reading, we hear the Lord proclaim: ‘Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’
We pray:
The Lord is kind and merciful.
The Lord pardons all our iniquities,
heals all our ills,
The Lord redeems our lives from destruction,
crowns us with kindness and compassion.
The Lord is kind and merciful.
The Lord secures justice
and the rights of all the oppressed.
Merciful and gracious is the Lord,
slow to anger and abounding in kindness.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so surpassing is the Lord’s kindness toward us who fear the Lord.
The Lord is kind and merciful.
Fr Frank Brennan SJ is serving as part of a Jesuit team of priests working within a new configuration of the Toowong, St Lucia and Indooroopilly parishes in the Archdiocese of Brisbane. Frank Brennan SJ is Adjunct Professor of the Thomas More Law School at ACU and is a former CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA). Fr Frank’s latest book is An Indigenous Voice to Parliament: Considering a Constitutional Bridge, Garratt Publishing, 2023 and his new book is ‘Lessons from Our Failure to Build a Constitutional Bridge in the 2023 Referendum’ (Connor Court, 2024).
[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991), 213.
[2] Ibid, 214.
[3]Luke Timothy Johnson, Imitating Christ: The Disputed Character of Christian Discipleship, William Eerdmans, Michigan, 2024, 8-9.
[4] Ibd, 190.
[5] Ibid, 191.
