Seeking a Meaningful Life, We Walk with Hope: 3rd Sunday of Lent
On this third Sunday of Lent, we encounter a text that first presents people who come to tell Jesus about events they do not understand and need Him to help them interpret.
Jesus immediately responds with a parable. This parable speaks of a fig tree that, in good times, bears delicious fruit. It produces two harvests a year: figs and early figs (or brevas). But in this story, the tree is barren, and its owner orders it to be cut down. He is right—it bears no fruit.
In our daily lives, we may sometimes recognize ourselves in this tree, losing our sense of purpose, direction, and feeling that life has lost its meaning. We have become accustomed to living this way, far from the project of God made human. Instead, we have chosen what the world offers: a permissive, comfortable, violent, corrupt, and indifferent society… These influences have infiltrated our communities and families, gradually extinguishing life in us, leaving us empty, barren, and hopeless.
It is time to remember, to turn our minds and hearts back to God. He has given us gifts for good, to share the best of ourselves, to build relationships and healthy connections, where milk and honey flow, in fraternal spaces where justice and peace embrace. This is God’s dream: united peoples committed to caring for our common home.
The time has come to return to God, to walk again alongside others, to seek in this jubilee time the means to be freed from so many accumulated debts—those we have not faced and those we have not healed.
The moment has arrived to take life seriously. Let us welcome the gardener who offers us another opportunity to change, to find our lost way again. Let us welcome the Lord and bear the fruits of conversion, which translate into concrete attitudes that touch the heart of our compassionate and merciful God, who embraces us.
Thus, today we are given the opportunity to live under His protection, to rediscover a meaningful life filled with hope. This means being people who are aware of the urgency of caring for life and our common home, being creative in fostering community spaces where everyone belongs, being prophets in these complex times, standing in solidarity with the small and the poor. We give thanks to the Lord, who calls us to be like Him: men and women of hope, ready to exchange our hearts of stone for hearts of flesh—compassionate and merciful. That is why we pray:
May Your grace transform us into devoted cultivators of the seeds of the Gospel, so that they may make humanity and the cosmos flourish, in the confident hope of new heavens and a new earth, where, once the forces of evil are defeated, Your glory will be revealed forever.
