Repentance for the Kingdom

Third Sunday of Lent
Gospel: Luke 13:1-9
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032325-YearC.cfm

On the surface, today’s gospel is about personal repentance. We don’t know what will happen so we must repent and always be at the ready. Our eternal soul is more sacred than our temporal body. Our life could be taken at any time. Therefore, we must always be ready.

Jesus might be sharing something deeper than this. What if Jesus is talking about the kingdom of God? The kingdom is fully established when all are with God bearing good fruit; when we all take care of each other. Our world is not fully in the kingdom yet, and it certainly wasn’t in Jesus’s time. At the beginning of today’s gospel, Jesus references two events: one where lives were lost by government sanctioned murder and one where lives were lost by vaulty architecture.

Our reality is grim because of our sin, by what we’ve done and what we’ve left undone. For us to bring about the kingdom, we must fully repent and change our ways. We must actively strive to make God’s kingdom a reality. We must strive to not only redeem ourselves, but redeem our culture and our world. Repentance goes beyond us individually, it goes for all of us collectively. Complete redemption only occurs when it occurs for all. This was Christ’s goal and should be the goal for us as followers continuing the mission.

The parable of the fig tree is about the kingdom as well. Our world is the fruitless tree that has the potential to bear fruit (become the kingdom). The potential is there, but how we are collectively living is not producing fruit at all. In the parable, we are the gardener. Regardless of how helpless the world may seem, we are to keep faith that it always has potential. The world may deserve to be cut down because of how we have neglected it; that’s why we are called to save it. The arc of history is the kingdom of God. We are called to bring it to fruition.