THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR C

March 20, 2022

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N. J.

 

Exodus 3:1-15

Psalm 63:1-8

I Corinthians 10:1-3

Luke 13:1-9

 

From today’s reading from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “Now these things are warnings for us, not to desire evil ...” This verse invites us to reflect on the nature of “warnings” in general.

 

A warning is not quite the same thing as a threat. I’m old enough to remember when the warning first appeared on cigarette packets: “The Surgeon General has determined that smoking may be hazardous to your health.” Tame language compared with today, but the intent was to warn people that if they persisted in smoking tobacco products, they incurred a grave risk of lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease, and a variety of other potentially fatal ailments. It wasn’t a threat but a warning.

 

The distinction, I think, is that a threat has the purpose of intimidation, coercion, and control—and it’s made for the benefit of the party issuing the threat. The word for someone who habitually gets his way by making threats is a bully. A warning, by contrast, is made for the protection and safety of those being warned: like the signs we see on the beach: No swimming: dangerous rip currents! The warning is for our own good, and we ignore it at our peril.

 

If this distinction is valid, then it seems to me that our God doesn’t make threats. But he does issue plenty of warnings: always intended for our ultimate good, indeed for our eternal salvation.

 

In the wonderful Old Testament reading from Exodus about the burning bush, God commissions Moses to liberate the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt. Although the reading doesn’t explicitly mention it, a key component of Moses’ ministry will be to warn Pharaoh and the Egyptians of the dire consequences of their failure to obey God’s command to let his people go—warnings that sadly go unheeded.

 

In the reading from First Corinthians, Saint Paul is warning his readers not to presume upon their baptism, membership in the Church, and participation in the Eucharist as a license to indulge freely in immorality and disobedience without fear of any consequences. During their forty years of wandering in the wilderness, the Hebrews whom Moses delivered from bondage in Egypt incurred God’s wrath and punishment when they put the Lord to the test and defied his commandments. Never mind that they’d been led through the Red Sea and had tasted the heavenly manna. Having received such great gifts, they were even more accountable to God for their behavior.  So, Saint Paul writes, “Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.”

 

The early Church fathers interpreted this point as meaning that the temporal punishments of sinners in the Old Testament serve as figurative or allegorical warnings of the eternal punishments awaiting unrepentant sinners in the world to come. In other words, while we probably won’t be punished for our sins in this life by plagues, serpents, or the earth swallowing us up alive, nonetheless these calamities symbolize the miseries of hell, and hence serve as warnings to repent while we still have time.

 

Our Lord’s message in today’s Gospel is similar. Preaching to the crowds, he’s told of a group of Galileans massacred by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. We don’t know the exact incident referred to here, but those relating it are likely seeking to entrap him. If, on one hand, he condemns Pilate for his brutality, then he can be charged with sedition. If, on the other hand, he says that those Galileans were sinners who got just what they deserved, in effect blaming the victims, then he loses the support of the common people.

 

Jesus sidesteps the trap brilliantly. Yes, those Galileans were sinners, but no worse than the rest of you. Similarly, with eighteen Jerusalemites killed by a collapsing tower in Siloam: again, we don’t know the historical incident referred to, but the point’s the same: they were sinners, yes, but no worse than all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And in both cases, Jesus repeats the refrain: “unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”

 

Our Lord’s point is much the same as Saint Paul’s in today’s Epistle: “these things are warnings for us.” Specifically: the temporal sufferings of the Galileans massacred by Pilate and the Jerusalemites crushed by the falling tower point to the eternal sufferings awaiting us all if we fail to repent. It’s not a particularly comfortable message but hey, it’s Lent, and we owe it to ourselves and to God to wrestle a bit with the Sunday Scriptures that the Church lays before us for our edification in this holy season. 

 

The key theological point is that heaven and hell are choices we make for ourselves. God never sends us anywhere we don’t want to go. If we end up in heaven, it’s because we’ve chosen, explicitly or implicitly, to accept God’s offer of eternal life and bliss; if we end up in hell, it’s because we’ve chosen to hold on to the lesser goods that we’ve put in God’s place and mistakenly believe will bring us the happiness that we seek. The torments of hell really consist of the eternal frustration of forfeiting the happiness and fulfillment that only God can give us. So, heaven and hell are choices that we make for ourselves. In the end, we get what we want.

 

The warnings in today’s Epistle and Gospel are thus given to help us make the right choices. Both Paul and Jesus are warning us to repent, to put God before all else, precisely so that we may enjoy eternal happiness. God does not want any to perish, but desires all to be saved—and indeed gives his only Son to death on a cross to precisely that end.

 

The parable of the barren fig tree drives this point home. The fig tree is us. Even though we fail to bear the fruit that the Lord seeks from us, he doesn’t cut us down right away. When the landowner comes three successive years and finds no fruit, the groundskeeper persuades him to give it yet another season. God gives us not only second chances, but third, fourth, and fifth chances. Christ digs about our roots and pours on manure. (It may seem irreverent to picture God’s grace as manure, but hey, that’s the metaphor right there in the parable!) 

 

The day of judgment will come, when the fig tree must either have borne fruit or be cut down. But the good news is that day is not yet. We still have time to take God’s warnings to heart, and repent and return to the Lord. And we have the promise relayed by Saint Paul in today’s Epistle: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” In other words: by God’s grace, we can do this.