Growing and Flourishing

Homily for Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Fruit trees can be tricky to grow. Even when gardeners do everything correctly, the tree still might not produce fruit because of other factors such as weather, insects, or disease. Someone committed to the tree’s flourishing and fruitfulness, like the gardener in Jesus’ parable, will do as much as necessary to ensure it survives and thrives.

God’s patience with and love for us is like the gardener’s affinity for his fig tree. His greatest desire is that we grow, and flourish into exactly who we were created to be. He tends to us, nourishes us, and gives us everything we need. Our free will allows us to give into temptation and sin – our version of “weather, insects, and the disease,” – but the Lord is there with his refreshing and life-giving grace and mercy. While he is patient with our faults and failures, using them to teach us how to be better, how to be more holy, God always calls us back, drawing us back so that we are not overcome by the things of this world.

St. Paul understood the temptation to sin all too well. He addresses this in his Letter to the Romans, recognizing the difficulty of making good choices: choices between the flesh, those things that draw us away from God – and the spirit, those things that draw us toward God. Choosing the flesh leads to death. Choosing the spirit brings fullness of life. Our God is a God of love who wants only the best for us and allows us the freedom to make our own choices, whether for good or for bad.

Thankfully, God has not left us on our own in our decision-making. He has given us the gift of his Son, who frees us from the law of sin and death. God has also given us the spirit, who dwells within us. All of this is freely given that we might indeed “blossom and flourish” – becoming who God has called us to be. Let us draw on the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to choose life with God and to be fruitful witnesses to God’s love.