Current Homily – Catholic Mass in English

RECTORÍA DE SAN JUAN DE DIOS

THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT, CYCLE C

Ex 3:1-15; Ps 103; 1 Cor 10:1-12; Lk 13:1-9

Fr. Josué Arellano

THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT

GOD'S MERCY IS ETERNAL.

We find ourselves on the Third Sunday of Lent, and the Psalmist helps us focus our gaze on God's compassionate and merciful love. Compassion and mercy that we are invited to imitate as His children.

This Psalm is also a proposal to combat one of the most deeply rooted vices in our daily lives, and also in our spiritual lives; the vice I am referring to is IMPATIENCE.

But it would be helpful to first reflect on who is impatient or how impatience manifests itself.

We understand patience as the virtue or ability to suffer or endure something without getting upset. Therefore, an impatient person is someone who cannot tolerate things not going their way.

An impatient person cannot tolerate others not acting or thinking like them; they are unwilling to wait, because they think others have to adjust to their time and pace.

Impatient people mistakenly believe they have the right to react angrily or get upset when things don't go as they would like. In contrast, the patient person knows how to wait, knows how to endure, without losing peace.

From the above, we can understand that patience is a virtue achieved through knowing how to wait. This is why impatient people lose peace because deep down they don't want to put in the effort to wait and don't understand that things take time, that results are not immediate.

Now, we might ask ourselves, what does all this have to do with us or with the Word of God we have heard? And the answer is found in the parable Jesus tells through the Gospel according to Saint Luke: The fig tree that had not borne fruit. The man who was looking for figs was impatient and made a rash decision. Faced with the lack of fruit, he decided to cut it down. He accused it of occupying the land uselessly. The vinedresser, for his part, begged him to leave it for another year, and with his care, he would wait for it to bear fruit. The Vinedresser is God. He waits patiently for our conversion. He is slow to anger. He does not punish us for the lack of fruit in our lives. He waits patiently for us to bear fruit one day.

We often fall into the same sins, over and over again, but this does not discourage God; He continues to wait, He continues to love us.

This season of Lent, in addition to giving thanks for the patience God has had for each of us, since each day gives us a new opportunity, is a good time to ask ourselves what in my life is preventing me from bearing fruits of conversion, which I fertilize is what is needed for the soil of my heart to be fertile.