Homily for Third Sunday of Lent

Readings:Ex 3:1-8, 13-15;1Cor10:1-6,10-12; Lk13:1-9

Repent and live

One of the special acts Christians are encouraged to do in this season is repentance. All the three works of piety of prayer, almsgiving, and fasting are meant for purification through repentance. Repentance and the resultant righteous living are a synonym of life, inversely, sinfulness is a synonym of death.

The first readings contain these sentiments. Moses meets God in the burning bush and as he tries to comprehend this more, dialogue starts between the two. This ends in the commissioning of Moses. As he seeks a mandate to carry out the mission Moses asks for God’s name which is given as I AM. I AM means timeless, eternity, and life. As such God calls his people to life. This is the life that God demands of his people through the commandments. The people live by adherence to the commands. Their journey out of Egpyt to the promised land is a prefigurement of the journey that they were to walk from sinfulness or death to righteousness or life. This is echoed by St Paul who was by crossing the Red Sea, our forefathers were born again as in baptism. So the call was to Moses an invitation to the people to turn from their evil ways and live just as Paul urges his listeners to be righteous because of their Christian calling and live.

Jesus in responding to the self-proclaimed righteous points out the need for all of us to repent if we want to live. He says the evidence is the ability to bear fruit just as a well-cared-for tree does. He shows that we can only bear fruits if we repent and do God’s works.

Let us all in this season head the call by God to repent and so be able to live and bear fruit for the salvation of souls.

Have a blessed Sunday.