God gives us time – Luke 13:1-9, Exod 3:1-15

3rd Sunday in Lent, Year C; Holy Infant.

Today’s gospel forever takes away our right to victim blame. That goes for victim-blaming ourselves as much as it does for assuming that anyone else who suffers injury “had it coming.”

Part of our motivation for victim-blaming I think comes from a desire to make sense of the world, to make suffering a bit more logical. Surely suffering would be a bit easier to bear if we could feel like we had, if not control over it, at least some understanding of its logic. But, suffering isn’t logical. Jesus tells us that, as had Tobit and Job before him.

There’s probably another motivation as well when we blame a victim who isn’t us, which is to give ourselves some mental distance from the fear that the same menace might threaten us. I don’t know if how many of you have ever read The Sparrow (it’s a great novel, and I don’t want to give away any spoilers for those of you who haven’t), but something horrific happens to a character called Emilio. Another character keeps interrogating him, bringing up all his flaws, and Emilio comments to him something like: “I understand why you’re doing this. You’re trying to find my one fatal flaw that, even if it didn’t cause this, allowed it, so as you can convince yourself that you wouldn’t have made the same mistake and you wouldn’t have suffered the same fate.” Jesus tells us that’s not how it works, just as Tobit and Job had done before him.

Some of you may have heard that a priest was stabbed while saying Mass yesterday at St. Joseph’s oratory in Montréal. That priest was Fr. Claude Grou, one of my brothers in my religious community, the Congregation of Holy Cross (in fact, he’s one of our former superiors general). In a marvelous work of providence, it appears that the knife broke during the attack. Fr. Claude ‘only’ suffered lacerations and has already been discharged from hospital and is recuperating in one of our houses. Hearing of all this definitely shook me. The immediacy of modern media meant I was getting messages from friends, brothers, superiors, while seeing news articles simultaneously. Once we found out that Claude was going to be OK, what actually shook me most I think was when I made the mistake of reading the comments section of one of the articles and was confronted with ignorant, bigoted, vicious victim-blaming, from people who knew absolutely nothing about Claude, except that he was a Catholic priest and he’d just been stabbed.

If the gospel forbids us from victim blaming, it just as much forbids us from assuming that the fact that Claude survived his attack must mean that God has judged him to be a particularly wonderful human being, or that God loved the 50 of our Muslim sisters and brothers who were injured in the Christ Church shootings more than the 50 who died, or that God cares any more about this than about the over 100 Nigerian Christians killed in a spate of attacks over the past few weeks. Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree that wasn’t bearing fruit and is given care and fertilizer and time. God’s care and nurture isn’t governed by the harsh realities of commercial farming.

But just because the most important realities of our lives – suffering and grace – aren’t governed by pristine logic doesn’t mean we can’t ever try to understand anything. When we find ourselves or our loved ones suffering, we can’t ask what we or they did to deserve this, because that probably isn’t how it was. When we find ourselves with gift, especially the gift of time, again we can’t ask what we did to deserve this, but we can ask why, or, more precisely, wherefore. What fruit does God dream of me producing that he would give me this time and this soil? The parable certainly expresses a desire on God’s part for trees to bear fruit. It also seems to give the impression that the time given, while always generous, isn’t limitless. The other question we can ask is, how can I best make use of this soil? God’s gifts aren’t always neat and pretty. They’re soil, and they’re fertilizer. They’re dirty and they’re smelly, and God invites us to dig in deeply, that we might bear fruit.

We see some of this with Moses in our first reading. Moses might not have been the most obvious choice. He complained to God that he wasn’t very good at public speaking, and he had just fled from Egypt because he’d killed somebody. But God gives him soil and God gives him time. Moses has such a desire for closeness to God that it seems he’s walking straight up to the burning bush. God has to tell him, “Come no closer,” so as he doesn’t get burnt! But, then God says, “take off your shoes, for the place you are standing is holy ground.” The kind of closeness, of intimacy, God invites Moses to is not getting scorched by the bush, but telling him to dig in to the ground, take off the shoes that separate him from the holy ground and touch, skin to sanctity, sole to sand. Dig in deeply. And, we know, Moses bore fruit.

Friends, God has given us time. God has given us holiness to plant our feet in. God has given us dirty smelly messiness in our lives, that can nourish us. God has fruit in mind He has chosen us to bear. Let’s dig in deeply.