Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. One of the early lessons we learn as a child is never judge a book by its cover. There are many stories (some true, some invented) which seem to give credence to this maxim. I don’t read a ton, but I can tell you that I often decide whether or not I want to pick-up a book by the cover. There was also a story a year or so back about how wine labels have changed to try to encourage people (especially those of the female persuasion) to buy the bottle without knowing what the wine tastes like.
Our Lord seems to be saying that we should judge a book by its cover. After all, good fruit equals a good tree; bad fruit equals a bad tree. Doesn’t seem too complicated, and seems to make perfect sense. And I’m certainly not here to contradict the words of the Son of God.
Even St. Paul today in the epistle spoke about the conversion of the Romans, how they had been slaves to sin, but they were now slaves of God. If St. Paul would have defined the Romans by how they had acted before their conversion, he would have simply written them off as damned. But instead he called them to new life in Christ. So how do we understand the words that we heard in the Gospel?
Part of it, I believe, has to do with a reading of the other parables of our Lord, rather than this one. In another place, Jesus talks about the weeds sown among the wheat. He says to let the weeds go until harvest time, when they can be sorted from the wheat. That sorting would only take place when the “fruit” of the stalk of wheat had come to fruition, when the harvest was ready. But, at that point, you would be able to tell the good fruit from the bad fruit, the weeds from the wheat. And perhaps this is what our Lord means when He talks about He says that we can judge a tree by its fruit: it is only at the end that it becomes apparent what the fruit is.
Think about it in terms of your own life. Unless you are the Blessed Mother, you have, like me, had moments in life of which you are not proud, where you wandered away from the love of God and His law. At that moment, you and I were not bearing good fruit. So, perhaps we should be cut down and thrown into the fire. And yet, God did not do that. God was patient with us, like the farmer in the Gospel parable who sees the fig tree not bearing fruit, but waits one more year to see if it bears fruit. God is patient with us so that we can stop being slaves of the flesh, slaves of immorality, and start being not only slaves, but friends of God.
Does this mean that we rest on our laurels, and just coast until the end of life? It is interesting that, no matter what times weekday Masses are celebrated, it does tend to be older people who attend. There is a certain sobriety that comes when you realize that you have more years behind you than you have in front of you. But that seriousness, that wisdom of being a senior, can be had by us now, and not just about going to Mass. The danger with putting off true and deep conversion until the end is that we never know when our particular end will be. I could die any day, and Jesus could return any day. If I am in the habit of delaying my conversion, the change of my heart for our Lord, then I could be caught unawares, and the judgment may come to me like a thief in the night.
Each day we are invited to, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” We do battle and put the old man to death, while trying to be receptive to the grace of God which makes us new men and women in Christ. Inasmuch as we do this, we are, likely bearing good fruit, which is a good sign. Inasmuch as I strive for holiness by the grace of God, I am pointing towards heaven. And, making a regular habit of confession, and perhaps knowing a very short but good act of contrition in case of extreme danger, God knows that I am doing my best to stop being a slave of sin.
But even in our attempts to follow Jesus, that sin of apathy, or we might say sloth, can creep in. ‘I am doing what I can, and I may not be perfect, but at least I’ll get to Purgatory,’ we might say to ourselves. As one professor in seminary told me, humans often have a way of not getting their target, so aim for heaven, in case you fall a bit short. Don’t aim for Purgatory, because if you miss, well, you get the picture.
Further, our Lord reminds us that lip service is not enough. Words are cheap, and actions speak louder than words. Even the demons know the truth, but they reject it. We can know the truth, but do we embrace it? Do we strive to go by the grace of God on the narrow way to salvation, or do we figure that, because we are in the Church that Jesus founded and have received the sacraments, we don’t have to worry or respond to the gift of salvation each day?
“The wages of sin is death,” St. Paul tells us (in grammar that only works in Greek). If we embrace the death of sin in this life, we know what will await us in the next. Our fruit, at the harvest of our particular judgement, will be bad. But if we embrace the life of our Lord each day, our fruit, at the harvest of our particular judgement, will be good, and we will enjoy eternal happiness in the kingdom of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.