THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT, 2010
March 7, 2010
Lk 13, 1-9

FIRST SERIES - THE SACRED TRIDUUM

A ‘triduum’ is a three-day period (the word comes from Latin – tres dies). The Christian ‘Sacred Triduum’ begins on Holy Thursday evening and ends on Easter Sunday.  The Christian Triduum is a three-day period in which Christians celebrate what Easter means to them.  It is the center of gravity of the liturgical year.  These three days are three days of mystery.  Not trivial pursuit!

The Sacred Triduum means the celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus.   These days call to mind the last meal and arrest of Jesus (Thursday evening), the crucifixion and burial of Jesus (Good Friday), and the resurrection of Jesus and the new creation of the universe by his presence in it as risen (Easter Day). 

In Jn 2, Jesus says: ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’ (vv 18-21).  Jn adds that he spoke of the temple of his body.  The Triduum is a symbolic enactment of how Jesus did that.  It is good to see the whole Triduum in its unity.  There is a vital link between the way Jesus lived, the way he died, and the way he rose.  In it all, as Jn says, ‘he gave his life for his friends’ (15,12).  You could say that he gave his life, his death, and his resurrection for us his friends so that we could have a new world.  As Karl Rahner said, the resurrection does not mean a new period in the life of Jesus.  It is the permanent, definitive dimension of the one and only continuing life of Jesus as given to us. 

Holy Thursday.  The Triduum begins on this evening.  In the Synoptic gospels, Jesus, at his last meal, shares (broken) bread and (poured out) wine with his friends, and makes them signs of his (soon to be broken) body and (soon to be poured out) blood.  It is his gift to them.  That scene is absent from Jn’s gospel.  There, instead, Jesus’ gift is expressed by his washing of the feet of his friends.  He abolishes any sense of superiority between him and them: in their group, there is to be no master, and no servant.  ‘I have given you a paradigm: do among yourselves what I have done among you’ (Jn 13,15).  The church in its Holy Thursday liturgy performs the washing of the feet and goes on to celebrate solemnly the Eucharistic Supper of Jesus.  At the end of the Mass, those taking part in the liturgy accompany Jesus into the night, and into the garden of olives, as they think of his arrest.  It is the reversal of every religious expectation.  People usually expect God to help them when they are in trouble.  On this night, we are asked to help Jesus when he is in trouble.  ‘Could you not watch one hour with me?’  In our world, God is weak, impotent.  Only by being like that can God be with us and help us – when we are weak and impotent. 

Good Friday.  Is it a day of mourning?  In some ways, yes, but it is not quite that.  On this day Christians celebrate the love of God that went to the very end of love.  They celebrate the ‘emptying out’ of God.  They see God come down to our level, and lower, on the cross.  It is a gesture of radical humility on God’s part.  It overturns the pagan idea of a dominating god.  God is revealed as love, and only love, nothing but love.  Love given to us.

Holy Saturday.  Is it an empty day?  Nothing happens all day in the church.  No sacrament is celebrated.  It is a day of silence, of recollection, of waiting…for Easter.  Tradition (especially in the Eastern Churches) links it with the ‘descent into Hades, the place of the dead’.  Jesus joins all those who have ever died since history began, to link them all with the coming liberation we call resurrection.  In a way, we sense them all coming to the Easter Liturgy.  Holy Saturday is also the day when families and communities prepare for this Liturgy and for the new life of Easter.

Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday.  From the night liturgy of Saturday to the full light of Easter Day, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, his ‘passover’ from death to life.  God has not left his son crucified and in the bonds of death.  God has raised him up.  God has lifted him out of death.  God has given God’s life to the one who gave his life for God and for us all.  In doing so, God shows that God is raising us all to life in Jesus. 

The Triduum is about our victory over death.  All humanity is involved in it.  We know that the one who raised Jesus from the dead will raise us from the dead also with Jesus (2 Cor 4,14).  The Triduum is a proclamation of a superabundant life, stronger than death, as the Good News of our Salvation.  It is our Passover.  

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SECOND SERIES:  HOW NOTHING WORKS WHEN YOU NEED IT

This is a rather unusual gospel passage for Lent… It is about a fig-tree, cursed by Jesus…

Fig trees are everywhere around the Mediterranean, and they have been there for a very long time.  It is usually said that about 11,500 years ago, humans in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, between modern Turkey and Iraq and Israel, changed their life-style from gathering wild grain to sowing seed of various kinds.  They domesticated their own plants around that time.  An archeological dig at Gilgal near Jericho has found evidence of burned fig trees that are 11,400 years old.  Ancient people discovered that if you planted a limb from a wild fig tree, it took root and became in time a fully branched tree and bore fruit.  Perhaps the fig tree was the first human plant…’in the beginning was the fig tree’?

Fig trees are typically between ten and thirty feet high, and are wider than they are tall.  Some of them get to fifty feet.  They are in their own way quite picturesque.  They lose their leaves (they are deciduous).     There are times in the year when the fig tree has a lot of leaf and times when it is rather bare.  They have two crops a year. 

The main crop, coming from the main new growth on the tree, is in the late summer or the autumn. The trees are male and female: the fruit of the male tree is dry and not tasty, but the fruit of the female tree is sweet and juicy.  [Unripe figs were considered not to be proper for a Sabbath meal, but to be acceptable as an offering to the poor.]

It is said that sometimes there is an early crop, a small one, from the growth of the previous season, in the spring. Another source suggests that in male figs, the figs come three to four times a year, even when the tree is completely without leaves. It seems to depend on different varieties of fig trees.  In some varieties they give early crops, the figs and the leaves coming almost together.    Sometimes the leaves are a clue to a coming event (the figs), and sometimes they are the confirmation of a surprise event (unexpected crop). 

In the book of Deuteronomy, the Land that God promised to the people of Israel was described as ‘a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig trees, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey’… (Dt 8,8)  In Jeremiah 8,13 YHWH complains that ‘there are no grapes on the vine, no figs on the fig tree: even the leaves are withered’.  In the same vein, Habakkuk laments: ‘for the fig tree is not going to blossom, nor will there be any fruit on the vine, the yield of the olive will fail, the fields afford no food…’ (3,17)  In the Song of Songs, 2, 8-13, we read: ‘the fig tree puts forth her green figs, … arise, my love, my fair one, and come away’.

Jeremiah (24-29) uses the image of figs to talk about the exile and the return from it.  There are those in Jerusalem who are like rotten figs and they must be uprooted and driven out into exile where they cannot sprout.  But there are those too who are like good figs, and they are the returnees from the exile, and they have ‘a heart to know Me’ and enter Covenant with Me and ‘return to me with all their heart’. 

Matthew says that ‘As (Jesus) was returning to the city in the early morning, he felt hungry.  Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it and found nothing on it but leaves.  And he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again”, and at that instant the fig tree withered.  The disciples were amazed when they saw it, “what happened to the fig tree” they said, “that it withered there and then?”’  Mt also, 24,32-, says ‘When its branch is tender, and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is nigh: so likewise, when you see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.

Luke (in today’s gospel) knows this text of Matthew and puts it in his own way. ‘He told this parable.  A man had a fig tree in his vineyard, and he came looking for fruit on it but found none.  He said to the man who looked after the vineyard, Look here, for three years now I have been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and finding none.  Cut it down: why should it be taking up the ground?’

In Lk 19, 28-28 this parable and many other teachings of Jesus are located at the time when Jesus is quite near Jerusalem, on his way there through Bethphage and Bethany.   In Lk 19, 29 ‘as he approached Bethphage and Bethany, he sent disciples to find a donkey and a colt for Jesus to ride on…’ It is in preparation for Palm Sunday and the entrance of Jesus to Jerusalem.    The time is springtime, coming up to Passover. The word Bethphage means the house of unripe figs.   It is not the time for the main fig harvest (that would be in the fall), nor even the time when fig trees are beginning to evidence small figs on them.

These places are around the area of the Mount of Olives.  Could the real context of the ‘fig-tree’ incident actually be on the Mount of Olives?    There is one significant place, quite nearby, where, as well as olives, there were fig trees (without fruit).  It is Gethsemane. 

In Gethsemane, Jesus experienced interior, mental suffering in an excessive, extreme way.  We know that the pressure he felt in all of this made him speak out loud.  We know from Mark that he cried out to Abba! and asked Abba to help him, to get him off the hook.  There was only silence from his God in reply.  I wonder if we could understand Jesus’ words to the fig tree in Gethsemane as another painful outburst in his agony.  In Matthew, Jesus says ‘may you never bear fruit again’, and instantly the fig tree withered.  It is like a curse, not just against the tree, but against any positive result from any situation.  This is really how Jesus felt.  In Luke, Jesus wants the tree cut down – he wants it to stop taking up the ground.  Why should anything be fruitful in the face of the Passion and Cross?

Again, in Matthew, Jesus tells the incredulous disciples to have faith and to pray, and even they can handle this kind of situation. In Luke, there is a suggestion that some longer-term patience is needed too…. When we talk to the Jesus of Gethsemane, about our own small Gethsemanes, he says, ‘you can do it…you can do it, too’.

Do you ever feel that nothing you really need is there when you really need it?  Living with that is called patience.  It is a good way of sharing – this Lent – in the patience of Jesus.