Third Sunday of Lent: Fruitful Trees and Negative Ions

(Excerpt from Luke 13: 1-9)

Then he told this parable: ‘A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” ’

(Excerpt from John 4: 5-42.)

Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’

Which Gospel you hear this weekend will depend on whether there are catechumens in your parish. For the catechumens who have gone through the Rite of Election, this is a “time of scrutiny, a time of self searching and repentance and a time to bring out, then strengthen all that is upright, strong, and good” (from the RCIA Document). All Catholics are encouraged to engage in this time of scrutiny.

At first glance, the two Gospels from which I have taken excerpts are disparate in theme. What precedes the first excerpt above is Jesus sternly warning people that unless they repent they will suffer the same fate as some other Jews who were killed by Pilate or were killed when a tower fell on them.  In the second Gospel, Jesus is speaking to a Samaritan woman and offering her living water. He doesn’t warn her that unless she repents she will suffer death and punishment. He is gentle and compassionate in his interaction with her.

The Fruitless Fig Tree

The reason I pulled out the parable of the fig tree that bore no fruit from the first Gospel is because of our natural propensity to hear condemnation and not hear the solution. It would be so easy to listen to that reading, squirm inside at the “hellfire and damnation Jesus” and miss what he was really saying to the people. The owner of the fig tree feels the tree is useless and wants to cut it down. But the gardener wants to work with the tree and fertilize it and bring it back to health. The gardener wouldn’t have suggested that if he thought it was a useless exercise. In this parable, Jesus is the determined Gardener. He was telling the people that no matter who they were, they needed to repent. Just because some Jews suffered and died in different circumstances didn’t mean they were more sinful than the ones Jesus was talking to. Everyone is broken. As Paul says in Romans 3:23“We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” In telling the parable of the fruitless fig tree, Jesus was saying that if they turned to him (repentance), he would be the one to heal them and make them fruitful in spite of the fact that they had all fallen short.

The emphasis and focus in Jesus’ mind was on turning back to God and on forgiveness, not on the sins committed. This emphasis is actually part of the Jewish doctrine. The Talmud holds that a repentant sinner attains a more exalted spiritual eminence than one who has never sinned. Chew on that one for a while.

So, Jesus is the Gardener, the one who desires to tend and feed your roots and bring your dead branches back to life. Your responsibility is to turn to him with a true desire to be changed in mind and heart. You are called to allow the Gardener to do his job, a job that also entails delicate transplantation. He’s going to get you back to the garden if it kills him.

And it did kill him.

The Woman at the Well

Living water: a term we’ve heard so often that it has ceased to have great meaning in our lives, perhaps because water is generally so readily available to us we forget the crucial value of water to all life. But even if we in the first world do have distinct memories of how hard it was once when the pipes froze or when there was a drought in our area and we had to be careful, these memories don’t always translate over to the spiritual life so that we can truly appreciate that Jesus came to earth in order to be Living Water for us.

Living water: the opposite of stagnant water. Living water: healthy water that burbles and flows. Living water: water that pounds and shapes, tumbles and shakes and is turbulent, alive, clear and clean. It is water that not only sustains the life near it but, more importantly, sustains the life within it. We are meant to be within it, not just near it.

The way we experience sacramental water in church is a simple and easily understood sign of something that is, in reality, much more abundant and overwhelming. Jesus came to submerge us in unfathomable oceans of Living Water. Moses struck the rock as God instructed him and good water came gushing out of it. Jesus, the second Moses, didn’t just strike a rock – he became The Rock out of which water gushes for his parched people. Jesus met the woman at the well of Jacob, a well, legend says, where water gushed to the very top and overflowed so that people didn’t have to let their buckets down deep and work to draw it up. How appropriate that Jesus should speak of Living Water at this well.  

I love to walk by the ocean, preferably where the waves are rolling and pounding. I always come away feeling refreshed and more relaxed. It always feels as if the ocean has the power to untie knots. Then I discovered that the ocean actually does have that power. It’s a scientific fact that bodies of moving water – storms, the ocean, rivers, waterfalls, fountains etc. – create negative ions and negative ions have the capacity to alleviate minor depression, relieve stress, improve immunity and are essential to high energy and a positive mood. If Jesus came to earth today and was speaking to us about himself, he might very well say, “I am the Negative Ion.” Or maybe, “I am that I Am Ion.”

The psalmist in Psalm 46:4 says, “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High” and verse 10 says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God!’  The gladness of the River of Living Water is easily missed because it’s so hard to be still long enough to be immersed in the river and long enough to hear the voice of the Lord say to your heart, “You are my Beloved. Come and jump into me. Let me flow into, around, over and through you. Let me soak your roots in my love and forgiveness so that your branches will bear new life and good fruit.” Sometimes you forget that not only do you have permission to wade into his cleansing waters but you are invited to jump into the deep end and get completely drenched. Often, Christ’s followers can be seen off to the side of the river scrubbing themselves and trying to clean themselves up, an activity which is pretty much equivalent to scrubbing off multiple layers of encrusted dry mud with a damp toothbrush when Christ has got torrents of water to do the job and do it completely. That’s why he’s there – to wash you and make you clean in his love. You can’t do the job. No one can.

Jesus came, for you, to be the second Adam, the second Moses, the New Covenant, the Way Out, the determined and stubborn Gardener, the Rock, your Ocean of Living Water and your Stream of Gladness.

What a God!