This third Sunday of Lent gives us some traits of the face of God through two parable images: a burning bush and a fig without fruit. They both tell us of God’s love, highlighting two aspects about others: his compassion and his mercy. According to the midrash, God speaks to Moses from the bush, surrounded by thorns, because he personally participates in the sufferings of his people. The fig tree reveals to us the mercy with which the winemaker of the parable decides to grant another year to its sterility, to see “if it will bear fruit for the future”. Between these two images, the liturgy gives us the strong appeal of Jesus to conversion. We are no more or less sinners than the Galileans killed by Pilate, or the eighteen men killed by the collapse of the tower of Siloam. Evil continues to present itself in our history in all its absurdity and we remain without words able to explain it. And rightly so: there are no words that can justify or explain its nonsense. But there is a word that we can always say, conversion, to move from the absurd logic of evil to the logic of God, those represented by the bush and the fig tree: his compassion and his mercy.

Commentary by Comunità di Dumenza

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves, Prinknash Abbey