The Divine Gardener

 III Lent, C

One of the key words of Pope Francis’s pontificate, of which we just celebrated the twelfth anniversary, is accompaniment. In his vision, this is the work of the Church and her sacred ministers, to accompany the People of the God and the grace at work in them.

As a priest, this makes sense to me. Jesus is the Shepherd, not me. The Holy Spirit is the Teacher, not me. My job is to help people recognize, discern, and embrace what the Blessed Trinity is up to in their lives. That’s pastoral accompaniment.

However, though it is the duty of the Church and her sacred ministers to accompany the People of God, all this in service to how God himself accompanies us. We see this divine accompaniment in our readings today.

The first reading tells us how God heard the cry of his people suffering in the slavery of Egypt. God reveals himself to Moses, the one who will lead the Israelites out of Egypt in the Exodus. God reveals his name to Moses, a name that is not a name in any normal sense, but something mysterious and obscure.

God says to Moses, “I am who am!” And he adds, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites: ‘I AM sent me to you.’”

I am who am!

It’s not enough to say that God exists. God exists par excellence. God’s being is more real than anything else – creation, ourselves, the good we do and, yes, especially our sins.

All this serves to remind us that God is with his People, and his presence accompanies us always and everywhere – even if we perceive it only dimly because of our human condition after the fall of our first parents – this presence is greater, stronger, and more real than we ourselves and our sufferings and difficulties.

And just as this divine presence, this I-am-who-am accompanied the People of God in the desert, in that pilgrimage that followed the Exodus, so God accompanies us in the desert of our pilgrimage, in this valley of tears, as we pray in the Hail Holy Queen, in this meantime between our baptism and our final destiny with God in heaven.

We see this in the second reading from the first letter to the Corinthians. St. Paul draws our attention to the episode of the thirst of the Israelites in the desert, and how God quenched their thirst, through the ministry of Moses, with water from the rock. (Ex 17:4-5) and St. Paul says: the rock was Christ.

Why? Because Christ is God with us, Christ is our Emmanuel as we say at Christmas. Christ is the divine companion, the Word who comes to dwell among us. (Jn 1:14)

And just as God, through the rock that was Christ, gave water to the Israelites so that they would not die of thirst, so for us Christ gives living and spiritual water to us on our journey through the sufferings and difficulties of a life in this world. This living water is the grace of our Baptism. And as Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, if anyone receives this water, it will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. (Jn 4:14)

All this prepares us for the parable at the end of the Gospel that we just heard. Entering into the logic of the parable, we can see ourselves as that fig tree that has not yet borne much fruit.

Cut it down then! Why should it exhaust the soil? says the owner. So, we too, in our sins, are worthy of eternal damnation. But the Gardener promises to work on us, digging around and adding fertilizer. The Gardener is Christ, and His work is our growth and salvation, if only we let Him work.

So, let us abandon ourselves to the Divine Gardener, so that He may prune and care for us. His fertilizer is the grace that comes to us through prayer, faith, and the Sacraments. His gardener’s hoe is the Cross, which, if we embrace it in our lives, transforms our sufferings and labors into sacrifices pleasing to God. Through this care from Christ the Divine Gardener, we grow spiritually, begin to bear fruit, and flourish. We give rebirth to ourselves, born again as the new creature that God has already seen in us on the day of our baptism.

As St. Francis said to the friars,

"Let us begin, brothers, to serve the Lord God, because up to now we have done little or nothing!" (First Life of Thomas of Celano, VI, 103)