Our Gospel reading from Luke talks about bearing fruit, and it’s important that we understand what this means. It’s a metaphor, of course, because you and I are not fruit trees. However much you try, you’re not going to get apples or figs to pop out of the top of your head. The fruit that human beings bear is good works—things we do in the world that show God’s love and mercy and power.
The trouble is that we often have a hard time doing these good works. The people in the Gospel get in trouble because they aren’t living the way that they should be. The first, most obvious metaphor is for the Lord’s own people, the descendants of Israel, and their leaders. This is where we can remember all of those places where Jesus points out the hypocrisy of the scribes and the Pharisees. You know the law; you teach the law, but you do not do the law.
But the second reading is even more universal. The Fathers think we have to see both of these things here. Jesus isn’t just talking about Israel. He is talking about you and me. The metaphor takes a pretty hard turn here. If these trees—these people—don’t get their act together and start bearing fruit, they will be cut down. They will be judged.
Jesus makes it pretty clear that the way they will start bearing fruit is repentance. Repentance is that act of turning around, changing course, admitting that you’re headed in the wrong direction. You realize that what you said or did to your friend or your spouse or your parent was horrible, and you say, Hey, I’m so sorry I did that to you. Will you please forgive me? Repentance is crucial for our relationships with one another and with God. You can’t do good until you come to grips with the ways that you’re doing evil.
In a lot of ways, that is what this season of Lent is all about. We’re supposed to spend time thinking about our sins—time in confession and penance, time redirecting our life so that it can bear more fruit.
But how do we do that? When we think about Lent—and this whole idea of repentance—it is easy to focus on the negative. What am I doing wrong? What should I stop? But sometimes, I think, that kind of negative focus doesn’t really help us get to the kind of good work Jesus seems to want for us. It’s just kind of sad and dark.
To find the right kind of repentance, we need a positive vision of where we’re headed. This is where, a little strangely, we get that reading from Exodus. It’s the story of the burning bush, where Moses encounters God in the wilderness of Sinai. When Moses approaches the fire, God tells him, Hold on, take off your shoes, for the place where you walk is holy ground. And Moses hides his face because he is too scared to see God.
What does that even mean? It’s a strange thing for us. God is holy, and for Moses, that holiness is terrifying and awesome. We don’t really think of holiness like that. We think of holiness as being the sweet old lady who prays the rosary a lot. Or we think of it as a nice person who never cusses and always holds the door open for people and has a nice little halo around his head because he’s always thinking happy thoughts. But in the Bible, holiness means something different. It means, actually, different. If something is holy, it is separate, distinct, different from the ordinary. So, for example, a church is holy not because it is magic or because when you enter it God likes you better. It is holy because it has been separated from other places for a specific purpose: for the worship of God. This is why if you asked a pastor to play a big game of capture the flag in a church where the base is up under the altar, the answer would be no—not because games are somehow evil, but because that is not what this place is for. It is holy.
And so when we talk about God’s holiness, we need to extend that thought. God is different, separate, other. God is not like us. He is not just the biggest thing around. He is not “the man upstairs.” He’s not a man, and he’s not upstairs. He’s nowhere, and everywhere, and completely and absolutely unique.
That kind of holiness is dangerous. The Bible often treats it like a white-hot energy. Think of it like the sun. The sun is good. The sun gives us life. But you can’t look at it directly. If you get too close, you burn up.
Still, for Moses, the encounter with that dangerous holiness is what inspires him to go off and lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. It is what inspires him to lead the people of God through the wilderness to the promised land. He knows that this God is so holy, so powerful, so awesome, that anything is possible.
Maybe it is even possible that we can be holy—that we can somehow participate in the power and the beauty and the goodness and the love of this God who is so strong, so good, so blindingly perfect and incomprehensible that we dare not even approach him.
In fact, we can, and we must, because that is what he calls us to do. This God calls us this Lent to approach him, to look on him, in all his glory and terror, so that this vision can help us understand exactly how we personally need to repent and change so that we can better bear fruit and live in a way that is worthy of that glory and beauty.
This is the main point that I want to make: You can’t know how you need to change, you can’t repent, until you look at the holiness of God. It’s so easy to think of Lent as a time of self-improvement. And so we give up chocolate or gluten or Netflix or whatever because it might help us look more like that image that we think we ought to be. That’s not the holiness of God. It may be the holiness of Hollywood, or the latest mental health trend, or my own imagination. God is something else.
This means that there is no substitute for making Lent about God. After all, as Evelyn Underhill once famously wrote to the Times, God is the interesting thing about religion. Yes, we should try to do good. Yes, we should repent. Yes, we should repent so that we can do good and bear fruit. But the only way that we can ever get there is if we pay attention to where we are going, if we pay attention to this God who shows us exactly what the good life looks like in his son Jesus Christ. Until we look to him, and to his holiness, and try to see it, and understand it, all of our attempts to repent and do good and live well will amount to nothing.
We have four more weeks before Easter. Make the most of it. Look to Jesus. Look to his life and story. Look to the witness of the prophets. Because Jesus is clear: We will be judged, no matter how much power or popularity we have in this life. Trees without fruit will be cut down.