A Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Prince of Peace Catholic Church – 10:00 Mass
Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; Psalm 103: 1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 8, 11; 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9
Audio Recording
We all know that Lent is a season specially set apart for the work of repentance. Lent also teaches us that repentance is a constant work and not something that we do once and then we’re through. The Church in her wisdom brings this season to us each year and encourages all her children, at whatever their stage of spiritual maturity, to again cultivate a repentant heart and to humble ourselves in God’s presence with fasting and prayer.
In today’s first reading, God reveals himself to Moses by saying “I am who am.” God does not just happen to exist as one being among others. He is the ONLY being who exists. EVERYTHING finds its source in him, and apart from him NOTHING can exist. The entire universe and everything in it only has existence by participation in God’s existence.
When God created humans in his own image, he gave us the opportunity to share that unique existence at a profound level. And because he wanted sons and daughters, he gave us the freedom to choose to love him, to willingly return his love and recognize him as the source of everything true, good, and alive.
But what happens if we are deceived by the illusion that we can somehow exist on our own and find happiness, goodness, and joy apart from God? This is the unfortunate state of our fallen race and of so many in our world today.
There are lots of people who seem basically decent; who try not to lie, steal, or hurt other people. So far so good; but if they have chosen a stance of independence from their Creator, if they have insisted that their mind, their body, their possessions, their sexuality, their identity – in short, their lives – belong only to them and are theirs to do with as they choose, and they have been greatly deceived. They have walked away from their Source of life.
The only way to eternal life is the way of REPENTANCE – to turn back – to recognize the truth of who God is and to renounce our private claim on our own life. Not many of us are thieves and murderers. But the pride of independence from God runs deep in all of us, which is why we need to return again and again to the Lord of all. What a blessed season is Lent, a time that sets us firmly back on the road to LIFE HIMSELF.
It’s clear from the Gospels that the call to repentance was at the heart of Jesus’s teaching. This week’s Gospel provides a forceful example of that teaching. In referring to certain recent events that were believed to be judgments of God, Jesus gave his hearers a stern warning: “I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!” Jesus calls EVERYONE to repent, not just those who are living obviously sinful lives.
Today’s readings are some of the most important teachings on our need for both REPENTANCE and CONVERSION.
REPENTANCE and CONVERSION are often used interchangeably, but in fact they are different. They are interrelated and both terms describe an action of turning to God. They’re also dependent upon one another. Repentance leads to conversion and conversion makes us aware of our need for repentance.
Many Christians define conversion as a one-time experience. They think of it as what happened to Paul when he met Jesus and was knocked to the ground. BAM! According to this understanding, CONVERSION is the moment people talk about when they describe an experience of profound grace that awakens them to the presence of God. For our Protestant brothers and sisters it may be what they say they experienced the day they were “saved.”
Some people certainly do have these profound experiences of conversion, no doubt, but most of us do not. For most of us, conversion is something that unfolds DAILY over the course of our lifetime.
Listen to how the Catechism defines CONVERSION: “A radical reorientation of the whole life away from sin and evil, and toward God.” This is important…listen again. Conversion is the RADICAL reorientation of one’s WHOLE LIFE away from sin and evil and toward God.
For most of us this conversion takes place incrementally over time. It’s a slow and steady process of changing how we look at and react to the world around us. It’s the ONGOING process of seeing and thinking the way Christ does. We might also call this ongoing process of conversion SANCTIFICATION, which is defined as the process by which God, through the Holy Spirit, transforms a believer into the image and likeness of Christ. To experience conversion we must learn to hate sin and resolve to sin no more.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us about the critical need for each of us to repent, saying that if we do not repent we will PERISH. He goes on to shed some light on what repentance is through the parable of the fig tree. In the parable, the owner of the fig tree agrees to let the gardener fertilize and cultivate around the tree in one last effort to get it to bear fruit.
Like the owner of the orchard, the Lord is patient as he cultivates and fertilizes us to help us grow. This growth can be thought of as conversion, born of repentance, which allows us to bear fruit. And what is the fruit our Lord is looking for? In the fifth chapter of Galatians Paul tells us that these are the fruit of the Holy Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
Each time we acknowledge and sincerely repent of our sins, promising God that we’ll to do our best to avoid them in the future, we close the gap between living our lives on our own terms and living life on God’s terms. It is in these times that we experience CONVERSION.
Conversion is essential for our salvation so that we don’t deceive ourselves as being independent from God, that we are in charge of our own lives and that we can exist without him.
This morning let us resolve to embrace repentance and desire conversion as we approach Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. As we receive his real presence in the Eucharist let us ask him to reveal to us whether or not we are truly experiencing daily conversion, or are we stymied by ongoing sinful habits and patterns of behavior? Are we truly bearing more and more fruit of the Holy Spirit each day: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control?
Let’s ask Our Lord to change our hearts and our minds so we can become more and more like him each and every day, praying that we can really use this season of Lent to further embrace repentance and experience daily conversion. This, my friends, is the only way for us to avoid remaining barren like the fig tree in today’s Gospel.
Let us each be a fig tree that bears much fruit, rather than being only good for firewood when the master comes to us at the end of our lives.
God bless you.