Jn 4:5-42]
1Some people who were present told [Jesus] about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. 2He said to them in reply, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? 3By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did! 4Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? 5By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!”
6And 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, 7he 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?’ 8He said to him in reply, ‘Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; 9it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.’ ”
A God Who Takes Our Very Sin upon Himself
One stark and uncompromising word runs like a scarlet thread throughout the three readings for today: the word REPENT.
It rings out over a world busy with its own affairs but stopped in its tracks by the urgency of the call. It draws men and women out of the hiding places of the heart, its prideful comfort zones, its illusions of autonomy from God.
Its force, like a whiplash, lays bare the bone-deep knowledge and reality of another word: SIN. In the readings it is described as an enslavement, a loss of freedom (the Israelites in Egypt, and later, in the journey across the waterless desert) as well as barrenness (the fig tree without fruit). And the wages of sin is SUFFERING and, finally, death.
The call comes from God, the offended party. From him one would expect anger, bitterness at his creatures who have rebelled, and the demand for retribution, for the exercise of his right to punish. And punish he does, through suffering and death.
Or does he? The readings tell us a different story which overlays the simplistic picture sketched out, and transforms it. The call comes with urgency, but the source of that urgency is LOVE. “If you do not repent, you will all perish as they did” acquires a different tone, not to be read so much as a threat but as the pleading of one who sees the beloved going astray and wants to liberate her.
The Exodus passage shows first of all and above all the reality of a God who can no longer watch his beloved children in their misery, whose heart is moved with compassion, who makes plans to open the way to return to him. As for the suffering that attends sin, one is not to make an equation of suffering as simply a punishment for sin. Sinners bring it on themselves by their misguided choice to separate themselves from God. And God allows suffering in order to be an instrument of purification and repentance. Not all who suffer are more guilty of sin than those who do not, says the Lord, pointing to two recent events when many people died at the hands of a tyrant, and also at the collapse of a tower (a modern equivalent would be the victims of the World Trade Center tragedy).
God’s LOVING KINDNESS is more than the tolerance of the master of the vineyard, who allows more time for the fig tree to bear fruit. It is more than sympathy. An encounter with the reality of suffering brings the discovery of a God suffering with us, taking our very sin upon himself. That is how far God’s love is willing to go.