Cultivate the Ground
Homily for Sunday, March 23, 2025: Third Sunday of Lent
Why do bad things happen to good people?
It’s one of the fundamental questions of our faith, and not one that has a good or easy answer. It fundamentally upsets our sense of justice.
Maybe that’s why people so often try to convince themselves that no – bad things don’t happen to good people. We want to believe that bad things only happen to those who deserve them.
And so we come up with rationalizations. A young woman is attacked at a college party - we might ask how she was dressed, or how much she had to drink. If a young man is gunned down in his neighborhood at night we might be tempted to wonder what he was up to, to assume it was nothing good. The bad thing happened because of something they did.
There was a time, around the Eighties and Nineties, when it seemed especially fashionable for some TV evangelists to blame natural disasters and national tragedies on whoever was their latest culture-war flavor-of-the-month.
I think sometimes we take comfort in the idea that bad things happen to people who deserve them, because that way we can distance ourselves from the tragedy. We can more easily imagine that it would never happen to us. These things happen to those people, not to me.
Jesus answers this way of thinking in today’s Gospel. And the answer he offers comes in three parts.
First: Do you think that those who suffered these tragedies were greater sinners, were more guilty, than anyone else? By no means!
Bad things do happen to good people. Blaming people for their own misfortune is not generally very productive. It works against the sense of Christian charity we should be trying to foster within our own hearts. And it’s unfair to the victims to blame them for something that could have happened to anyone.
Second: Jesus reminds us that if you do not repent you will all perish as they did!
Seems a bit severe, doesn’t it? What is Jesus saying to us here?
Many of you may remember a few weeks ago when the Bishop was here for Mass. He began his homily by saying that when he – when any of us, really – preaches this kind of harsh accusations and calls to repentance we are first and foremost preaching to ourselves.
I think this is what Jesus is reminding us of. It’s a variation on a theme we hear from Matthew’s Gospel when he tells us before you address the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye, you must look to the wooden beam lodged in your own.
If we feel compelled to pass judgement, we should look first to ourselves.
It’s especially true through this season of Lent, that we look inward and address our own sins and failings, and try to amend our lives and do better. It’s a practice that we should remember to keep up even after Lent is over, with regular examination of conscience, regular practice of the Sacrament of Confession.
Third: Jesus gives us a parable – an example, I think, of the kind of right mindset to cultivate in our hearts. Cultivate here being the operative word, because that is the heart of the parable.
If none of us is any more or less deserving than anyone else, we are all that unproductive fig tree. We are all deserving of being cut down and disposed of. But Jesus cultivates each of us with the patience and loving care of the gardener who is willing to give us the time and the care we need.
God’s time is not our time. So even through those times of discouragement when we might feel as though we are doing nothing productive, that we are bearing no fruit in our lives, we can know that Jesus is still working on us. It takes time and patience.
Which means, of course, that he asks the same of us. The time and the patience we receive from him, we are called to give as much to those around us. And that is the fruit he seeks from us: to give time and patience, care and cultivation to those around us, those who need it most.
So why do bad things happen to good people?
Maybe it’s an opportunity. A chance for us to respond with compassion, to be Christ in someone’s life.