By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily on the Third Sunday of Lent, March 24, 2025, at St. Pius X Parish in Fort Lauderdale.
In today's Gospel reading, some people spoke to Jesus of the Galileans whom Pilate had executed. And, they also spoke of those killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed. (Luke 13: 1-9)
But Jesus warns them -and us - not to see these events as somehow the wrath of an angry God.
Evil came into the world not by God’s willing it, but through the devil and human sin. Jesus says in the Gospel: “Don’t think that those Galileans were the biggest sinners around. Don’t think that those who died in the tower were guiltier than anyone else.
The God of Jesus Christ, the God of the Bible, the God who reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush is not an angry or indifferent God. “I have observed the misery of my people”, God tells Moses. “I know their suffering; I have come to deliver them”.
Today, and, indeed, from the beginning of our exile from Eden, we experience this world as a “vale of tears.” We live in a fallen and thus imperfect world. And oftentimes the even forces of nature, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and other natural disasters, can suggest that our planet itself is “in rebellion” against the original order of a loving Creator God. And that rebellion seen in nature, from the perspective of faith, can be said to mirror the rebellion of the human heart. But when faced with our misfortunes or those of others, we can be tempted to ask ourselves: What did we do or what did these people do to deserve this?
Of course, many times, we do suffer because of our bad choices. The scriptures do say: the wages of sin is death. And, in one way, as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve who lost for themselves and for us the original blessings of Paradise, we experience that rebellion of nature because of their bad choice, their original sin of turning away from God which made all of creation “subject to futility” (Romans 8:20).
But as followers of Jesus, we cannot rush to blame victims for the evil visited upon them, nor can we blame God, whom Scripture reveals as all loving and all merciful. That doesn’t mean we will come to an easy understanding of why bad things happen to good people. And we do want to know, especially when those “good people” happen to be us. But most times we will have to wait with the patience of a Job to learn the answers to those questions which God will surely tell us, but not necessarily on this side of heaven.
Jesus however does give us an insight on how God deals with the tragedies that afflict us. God does not remain remote from or indifferent to the plight of his fallen creation. God spoke to Moses in the burning bush, and in the fullness of time that spoken Word became flesh. In Christ, the Word became Flesh. God became man. Rather than distancing himself from people and their tragedies, he draws close to them. From the Cross, he stands in solidarity with all the pain experienced by us in our fallenness. Despair, destruction, death will not have the last word: rather the transformative power of his resurrection will.
Today, tragedies like collapse of the tower of Siloam or like the murder of those Galileans by Pilate are not unknown to us today. Jesus tells us that those who suffer these tragedies were not worse sinners than the rest of us. “By no means”, Jesus says, “But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did.” Jesus suggests those tragedies should heighten the awareness in us of the fragility of life and hopefully bring us closer to God.
We are at the mid-point of our Lenten observance; our efforts should be about cultivating our spiritual lives to produce the fruits that God expects of us.
But, in the face of trial and tribulation, we also ask God to strengthen our faith by calming the storms of anxiety, doubt, and fear that rage within our hearts.
We know that God can bring good out of evil. Indeed, when a tragedy strikes, we see this in the many acts of solidarity of neighbor helping neighbor. These acts eloquently witness to what God’s Providence inspires in the hearts of men and women of good will.
In 2010, I was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a few days after that earthquake that killed almost 300,000 people. I visited one of the churches that collapsed in the quake. The only thing that survived was a small shrine outside where the church had stood with a crucifix made out of concrete.
A journalist came by a looking over the rubble and asked: “Where was God?” An elderly woman who was praying in the ruins of her parish church just pointed to the crucifix and said, “There he is.” Her faith told her that God had not abandoned his people, but he was there sharing in their pain and suffering.
Strengthened in faith, and transformed by God's mercy, we continue our Lenten journey – indeed we make our life’s journey as “pilgrims of Hope”, because Jesus through his passion, death and resurrection has won for us the victory. We will not be overcome by any adversity but will overcome evil, whether physical or moral, with good.
Repent, says the Lord, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.
