March 21, 2025
Jesus uses the image of the fig tree to teach us about God’s relationship with us. Here’s a short reflection:
It was a very different homework assignment. In grade school, the nuns usually gave us questions to answer for homework, but one time Sister gave out little plastic cups. Each cup had soil in it. Then she passed out seeds and asked us to push them into the soil and sent us to the water fountain to get the soil wet. We children, dwellers of tenements and housing projects, had little familiarity with plants. Yet, here we were, all at once, little farmers.
When I remember is just how long it took for something green to push through the soil. Every day we would examine our cups, wondering what was going on in the dirt, waiting impatiently for our own little plant to show itself. The biggest lesson for little city kids was not only how to plant a seed and see it grow. Or how to feel personally connected to a plant. No, it was this: in an impatient world like New York City, some things didn’t happen right away. It took time and patience.
I often think of the famous scene in our first reading, when Moses encounters God in the burning bush. Moses was basically in hiding, having made enemies in Egypt; he spent his day watching sheep. But he sees the burning bush and decides to find out what it’s all about. In other words, he had the patience to stop and search. I am sure I would have shrugged my shoulders and walked right by the burning bush.
Yet it is at the burning bush that Moses learns about God, how God has been connecting with the suffering Jewish people during all their time of slavery. “I have heard the cries of my people,” God says, and now he will bring them freedom. Moses learns God’s plan to set the Jewish people free from their slavery in Egypt.
It was not easy. We learn that not only did the Egyptian leader, Pharoah, resist God’s plan; even the Jewish people resisted the idea. Moses practically had to drag them out of slavery and help them see a different future for themselves.
Some things take time. God gives us time. People, at the opening of the Gospel passage, are asking Jesus about tragedies that happened to others. Jesus gives them a parable that says, in effect, all of us have time to repent and experience conversion. God planted us like a seed in the ground. God expects figs from the trees he planted. But God tells the gardener to be patient. Give the plant more time and maybe there will be figs next year.
This is Good News for us. Lent is telling all of us that the point of our lives is conversion. In spite of our preoccupations with the many things in our lives, all of us are invited to a burning bush experience in our own lives, that is, a time when we encounter God and discover God’s infinite love at the center of our lives. In these weeks of Lent, when we see people preparing to enter our Church and receive the sacraments of salvation, God is giving us the time to realize that we have received those sacraments, that we are disciples of Christ, that we all can bring God’s Good News to those around us.
We are often impatient with God, demanding one thing or another from him. But God is patient with us, giving us the time and opportunities to realize God has been revealed to us in Jesus, and Jesus bestows his Spirit upon all who stop resisting.