III Sunday Of Lent Year C
Readings: Ex 3:1-8,13-15; 1 Cor 10:1-6,10-12; Lk 13:1-9
In this Gospel passage (Lk 13:1-9) Jesus rejects the Jewish tradition that suffering and death are God’s punishments for man’s sins. The Jewish and then the Roman world’s ethical-legal mentality then also often presented Jesus’ death as a necessary sacrifice to provide adequate satisfaction for man’s infinite offense against God through sin.
But the cross of Christ was not “the necessity of the will of a God eager for reparation for his offended majesty…The misunderstanding of this theology consists in accepting the Father as the murderer of Jesus. Divine wrath is not satiated with vengeance on the sons, Jesus’ brothers: it extends to the only-begotten Son. To such a gruesome vision we must reject all Christian legitimacy, because it destroys all the novelty of the Gospel… Such a representation has very little to do with the God-Father of Christ… God takes on the features of the cruel and bloodthirsty judge, ready to demand every last penny for debts that relate to justice… But is this the God we have come to love and turn to, based on the experience of Christ? Is he still the God of the Prodigal Son, who knows how to forgive? The God of the lost sheep, who leaves the ninety-nine in the fold and goes out into the meadows to look for the one lost one?”(L. Boff).
The model of understanding elaborated instead according to the Greek mentality seems more in keeping with Jesus’ revelation. Such a conception starts from this reflection: God created man out of love: but being infinite, unlimited, eternal, in order to create someone who could be his partner in love and thus be other than himself he had to create him finite, limited, mortal. Pain is therefore not a “punishment,” but part of the biological order, of our being creatures and therefore “not-God,” and therefore deprived of his perfection (Catechism Catholic Church, nos. 302,310). In other words, faced with our usual question, “But why does God send me this sickness or this grief?” the Christian Faith answers, “It is not God who sends you evil. Evil is part of our creaturely condition. On the contrary, God is deeply moved by the condition of the beloved, and at the very moment that He creates him finite, He thinks up for him the way to make him share in His infinite life: that is why God plans the incarnation of the Son, through which He Himself will take upon Himself the limitation of man and creation to the point of death and, by His resurrection, bring human finitude into the eternity and immensity of His divine life (Rom. 8:17). God therefore not only does not send us misfortunes, but suffers with us, carries our crosses in his Cross, dies with us, descends to hell with us, to destroy by his resurrection our sufferings and our death.” As St. Athanasius says, “God became man so that man might become God.”
What a journey of conversion we have to make in order to move from the conception of a judgmental God to that of a God “who observes the misery of his people…, hears their cry…, and comes to deliver them” (First Reading: Ex. 3:1-8,13-15), to a God “who so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn. 3:16)!
This God who asks us today only two things: to “not murmur,” that is, to live a joyful Christianity, without constant grumbling or complaining (Second Reading: 1 Cor. 10:1-6,10-12), and to bear fruits of Love, generosity, and service (Gospel: Lk. 13:1-9).