Our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel reading warrant serious attention because He chose them both seriously and deliberately; and they demand, considering the state of our blatantly sinful world, our most serious consideration:
I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!
We may learn how very seriously Jesus viewed what would be such a travesty of
God’s saving desire. by the fact that, He first of all doubled-up on His
original account of the tragedy of the Galileans by recalling those Jews so
surprisingly killed at Siloam, and then repeated emphatically His own words:
IF YOU DO NOT REPENT, YOU WILL, ALL, PERISH AS THEY DID.
PERISH AS THEY DID: People of God, notice that Jesus is saying that, for those of His
hearers who remain unrepentant, death WILL
come upon them just as unexpectedly
and disastrously as it had befallen
those Galileans and Judeans He recalled.
What does that word ‘repent’ mean in
that context?
Our first reading was all about Moses himself having
to understand more deeply the sublime HOLINESS of God before speaking, in His
name, to the enslaved Israelites; our second reading from St. Paul to
the Corinthians was a warning against spiritual self-satisfaction, attending
only to the formalities of Christian worship while ignoring the duties of
Christian morality and witness in their daily living; as for Jesus in our
Gospel passage, you have heard how He warned explicitly about the lack of
repentance and humility before God, and of the dangers inherent in a fruitless
Christian life:
He told them this
parable: “There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard,
and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the
gardener, ‘For three years now I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree
but have found none. (So) cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?’ He said to him in reply, ‘Sir, leave it for
this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; (by My Gospel Truth, My saving Death and life-bestowing Resurrection),
it may bear fruit in
the future. If not, you can cut it down.’”
Bearing all these aspects in mind, we
can say that ‘repent’ means ‘a change of mind’: a TURN-FROM careless, unthinking,
evil ways, a TURN-TO serving, looking for and responding to, the God of
all holiness and goodness. Indeed, ‘repent’
can be regarded as being on a level with Jesus’ deliberately provocative warnings
such as:
Do not think that I
have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the
sword.
There, Jesus’ teaching is to be understood according to His other words
such as: love your enemy; or, If your leg, arm, eye hinders you in God’s
service, cut it off, pluck it out: Intentional exaggerations to emphasize a
most important spiritual teaching:
Whoever finds his life
will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 10, 34-39)
Dear friends in Christ, ‘Repent’ can
be accurately understood as the decisive effort a disciple needs to make
in order to understand more, appreciate better, and more humbly try to adopt
into his own style of life, all of those words of Jesus where He demands first
place and supreme love for God and for Himself as Son sent by the Father, and our, His disciples', total
death to selfishness.
We are all called to Our Lord, to
Holy Mass each Sunday, as was Moses called in the first reading, Moses! Moses! Moses answered, Here I am Lord as he walked towards the burning bush:
God said, ‘Come no
nearer! Remove the sandals from your
feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’
Moses had been drawing close to God
from curiosity:
I must go turn aside to
see this great sight why the bush is not burned.
The ‘repentance’ God so urgently
required of Moses was shown as he drew nearer to the bush:
Moses
hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
We too should present ourselves at
Sunday Mass with a sincerely repentant attitude; not necessarily an emotional one, however; that is, a sincere
intention to worship God as best we can; to try to learn more of His glory and goodness, wisdom
and beauty; to seek His will, His way forward for us, as we hear the Scriptures
read and the homily delivered; and, above all,
we should be most intent and committed in offering Jesus’ self-sacrifice
of love through the ministry of His priest: most humbly joining our own sacrifice-of-self with
that of Jesus, to His Father, for the praise and glory of His most holy
Name.
Finally, it is most desirable for us
to leave Holy Mass not only with a repentant and grateful heart, but also with
a certain awareness of how we can make progress in our efforts both to please,
and draw ever closer to, the God and Father Who so loves us.
Saint Paul gave us such advice
adapted to our every-day living:
DO NOT GRUMBLE; You are trying to put yourself into God’s
hands; God is now --- if you will let Him -- arranging your life; learn by
patiently, consistently, persistently, trying to do His will as best you see it in
those unexpected – but not infrequent -- times of apparent ‘nothing-ness’ or
perplexity; and, whoever thinks he is standing
secure, take care not to fall.
Do you fear that all these warnings
might make life burdensome and tiring for you?
Dear friends in Christ, His warnings
are not against you, they are to protect you, and they are covered in the
saving, fertilizing, blood of Jesus, so that they may:
Cultivate
and fertilize (your souls) that (they) may bear fruit for the future.
Rescue us and lead us
into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey,
our very homeland, where the Father
is waiting to embrace us as did the all-forgiving father in Jesus’ parable:
This son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has
been found.’ (Luke
15:20–24)
The ‘boy’ had suitably repented …. so may we all do likewise, in Jesus, by His most Holy Spirit, before the Father.
