Good, evil and mercy

This is my homily for the weekend now ending, the Third Sunday of Lent for Cycle C (I say "now ending" because this will post before midnight Central Time, but the blog is in Eastern Time, and it is already Monday on the East Coast).

I should explain that not all parishes hear the same readings for the past Sunday.  Parishes with RCIA candidates would celebrate the Third, Fourth and Fifth Sundays of Lent as Scrutiny Sundays, and for those occasions, the Lenten Sunday readings from Cycle A (Matthew's year) are used for those weeks, even if the actual year is Cycle B (Mark's year) or Cycle C (Luke's year).  Those parishes with RCIA candidates would have heard the lengthy Gospel reading of the Woman at the Well this past weekend.  For parishes that have no RCIA, each year has its own appointed readings for those Sundays of Lent.  Our parish doesn't have any RCIA candidates this year (which is worrisome - RCIA has become pretty moribund in our parish since the pandemic started) so we're using the appointed Cycle C readings.  This homily is based on those readings, which are here.  In that selection, the first reading is the familiar story of Moses and the burning bush, while the Gospel is the parable of the fig tree that bears no fruit.  Here is my homily text:

My father grew up during Hollywood’s golden age.  Like a lot of children from that era, he was a big fan of Westerns.  Today my dad in his 80s and he still loves Westerns.  

The plot of just about every Western film ever made featured a battle between good and evil.  In High Noon, it was the upright town marshal, Will Kane, vs. the man he had sent to prison, Frank Miller.  In Shane, it was the poor homesteaders vs. the ruthless cattle baron who coveted their land.  

High Noon and Shane are considered great films, but Hollywood also churned out hundreds and hundreds of B-movie Westerns.  In those B movies, which were my dad’s usual Saturday matinee fare, every male character wore a cowboy hat and rode a horse and had a six-shooter holstered at his waist.  The good guys didn’t look much different than the bad guys – it could be hard to tell them apart.  So a convention developed that the good guys always wore white hats, and the bad guys always wore black hats.  

And honestly, you really didn’t need to know much more than the color of the hat to follow the plot.   They didn’t vary a great deal.  After much business involving saloons and cattle and horseback chases and pretty girls, the good guy and the bad guy would have a climactic confrontation, and the guy in the white hat would kill the guy in the black hat.

There is a reason those Westerns were so popular.  The battle between good and evil resonates with us human beings.  We tend to divide the world into white hats and black hats, good guys and bad guys.  That’s surely the reason sports are so popular: every game is a battle between good vs evil.  Bears vs. Packers.  Cubs vs. Cardinals.  Blackhawks vs. Red Wings.  And on and on.  Less trivially, the same tendency is the basis for our dysfunctional and corrosive politics these days: if you’re conservative, then liberals wear black hats; if you’re liberal, it’s the other way around.  Entire television networks and social media ventures exist to exploit and reinforce our desire to politically crush the people we perceive to be the bad guys.  And in the business world in which I’ve spent my adult life, the same dynamic is in play in the competitive marketplace: our company is good, while all our competitors are bad.  Dividing the world into good guys and bad guys is very human.

Anthropologists tell us that human brains are wired this way: we’re all wired to defend our tribe against the tribe on the other side of the river.  This is why Westerns draw us in: because we’re already pre-programmed to see the world as this death match struggle between white hats and black hats.  

I mention all this about Westerns and the way we’re programmed, because Christianity has a different view of the truth, the reality of human nature, and that view helps us to understand today’s parable of the fig tree.  Christian anthropology doesn’t accept the premise of white hats vs. black hats.  In the Christian view, none of us is all good, on our own.  All of us have evil in us.  In some of us, evil is a seed planted deep down, waiting for the right conditions to sprout.  In others, evil is already in full bloom.  But none of it, whether still a seed or in full bloom, is hidden from God.  We’re good, because God made us; but we’re also bad, because we’ve rebelled against God.  It’s as though each of us is both the good guy and the bad guy; we wear both color hats at once.  If we’re good, it’s due to God; but if we’re bad, it’s due to us.  

The reality is, all of us, members of every tribe and race and ethnicity are sinners.  All of us need cleansing and redemption.  All of us long to cast off the black hats we’re all wearing, but without God’s intervening salvation, we’re not able to.  

What are we to make of this parable of the fig tree?  One of the techniques to understand a Gospel parable is to figure out which character in the parable we’re supposed to be.  For example, in the parable of the prodigal son, some of us might identify with the younger son who has squandered his gifts, while others of us might identify with the older son who is too self-righteous to welcome a repentant sinner back into the family.  

Here's the thing about today’s parable of the fig tree: we’re the tree.  God planted us, which is good; but we’re not producing good fruit, which is bad.   And so the owner wants to give up on us and cut us down.  

But then the gardener intervenes on our behalf.  The gardener is Jesus.  He’s telling his father, God the Father: don’t give up on us yet.  Be patient.  Be merciful.  We still might be salvageable.  We might yet produce good fruit.  

True, we’ve blown chance after chance.  But our gardener, Jesus, isn’t going to leave us on our own.  He is going to cultivate and fertilize us.  He’s going to tend us and water us.  He’ll water us with the waters of baptism, those life-giving waters which will help us grow.  He’ll feed us the bread of life, which is himself, and which will help us to bear good fruit.  We don’t have to figure out how to turn away from sin and turn to God on our own; Jesus will help us.

This is the true understanding of our human condition: we’re not one of the good guys by default.  Without God’s help, we can’t really be as good as God would like us to be.  But fortunately for us, God isn’t a cold or uncaring or temperamental God.  He’s a God full of love and compassion and mercy.  And so he sends his Son Jesus to help us.  

But let’s be clear: that saving help isn’t what we deserve.  It's not ours by right.  What we deserve is to be uprooted and chopped into firewood.  That we’re being given another chance is purely because God is merciful.  He remembers that we were good when he made us, and so he’s giving us multiple chances to turn away from evil.

When we understand this true state of things, that we don’t deserve God’s help but God mercifully helps us anyway, then several things become clear.   One is that we owe God our thanks.  We should be looking for ways every day to thank God for not giving us what we deserve.  The Eucharist is our opportunity to gather and give thanks to God.

Another is that we need to rethink our tendency to divide the world into us and them, good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats.  The truth is, the members of our tribe and the members of all the other tribes hold this in common: we are all equally in need of God’s saving love.  We’d all be better off, and the world would be a better place, if we would try to help and support one another, rather than try to destroy one another.

Finally, each of us needs to take advantage of this opportunity we’re being given.  This could be our last chance.  None of us know what will happen to us tomorrow. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus mentions Galileans put to death by Pilate, and people in Jerusalem killed suddenly when a tower collapsed.  Sudden, unexpected death happens in our day, too.  I understand the members of a collegiate golf team were killed in a terrible auto accident this past week.  We may not have as much time as we think.  Now is the time to repent.  Now is the time to change our ways.  Now is the time for us to turn to God and ask for his help to produce good fruit.