Good Trees Receive Good Care

Homily for Eighth Week of Ordinary Time—Year C

Mar 02, 2025

Jesus teaches a good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit. Obviously, he is using this parable to call us to be good and seek goodness in our lives.

So the obvious question is how do we do this?

We can begin with an understanding of the word good. In Mark 10:18 a man approaches Jesus and calls him a good teacher. He admonishes the man and says no one is good except God himself.

Now here in Luke, Jesus calls us to be good like the good tree. The word for good is the same word used in Mark, so, therefore, the good we are called to be is most matched by how close we are to doing God’s will.

Good means doing God’s will

So how does one do God’s will. We must be in deep contact with God, in deep relationship with him and as the commandment says we must seek to do his will. So, if Jesus is calling us to be like the good tree and bear good fruit, we cannot do this unless we root ourselves in Christ and seek to be most like him.

This is why I am always calling us to be people of prayer. We have to be in contact with God in order to be good as defined by God.

However, how does a good tree bear fruit. It does not do so on its own. It needs the care of the arborist, the man who cares for trees. In order for us to bear good fruit, we must not only be people who are in contact with God through prayer, we also must allow God to care for us and to know his care as well. This is why when we have difficult times, we bring our experience to prayer to find a solution through God’s guidance. We allow ourselves to experience the love and mercy of God. This is essential.

One of the great struggles we are encountering with different elements of our Church is that in our Christian life we have to do good things so that we can be good enough to get to Heaven and when we get to Heaven we can encounter Jesus face to face. This is wrong and please throw it away.

Catholicism is all about encountering God

What we need more than anything is to be encountering God now and allow him to touch our lives by engaging in prayer and knowing his answers and his presence.

Obviously, this is what the sacraments are all about and therefore our understanding of the sacraments is to be an encounter with Christ.

One of the greatest problems with many in their perception of the Sacrament of Reconciliation also known as Confession is that it is a requirement to remain in a state of grace and to receive communion if you are not in a state of grace.

Actually, that is a legalistic understanding of Confession. Instead look at it as an encounter with Christ in our imperfections including sins and through it know the love and mercy of God.

I learned that some priests only want to hear mortal sins and will ask people not to confess if they have no mortal sins. That is ridiculous. Confession is aways an encounter with Christ so it is always an opportunity to experience that love and mercy of God. God help those priests who use confession to sternly rebuke the penitent sinner or even turn away those who only have venial sins; he will have to answer for those attitudes for not fostering an encounter with Christ in his love and mercy.

Our deepest struggles when brought to prayer can lead us to know Christ in all his goodness. It is then that we ask God to help us find a solution and then seek to expect he will in fact do this. Sometimes that requires a wait and maybe persistence in prayer, however, that encounter allows us to understand that God is indeed caring for us and allow that to happen.

So we need to experience God’s care in our lives and this is an essential element of who we are as Catholics.

We cannot experience that care if all we know is rules that must be follow so that we can earn our place in Heaven. Besides that being a heresy, it is a terrible way to seek to know Christ and to bear fruit.

We are living in interesting times in our world and country today and part of it is that it is driven by that form of Catholicism I just mentioned. It is endemic in our Church and you can recognize it when it sounds like we joined the Marines. We have to work harder and be tougher in our Catholicism so that we can go to Heaven.

We are not Marines

You cannot experience God’s care when that is your attitude because you are too busy showing God how tough you are.

Remember God cares for you and you can only know that if you allow it to happen. Make sure in the most difficult times you are experiencing you bring everything to prayer but also in good times be thankful for what you enjoyed.

You know that are have really grown in your prayer when you are praising God when everything is going wrong for then you know that God will lead you through it a way that will you skills and holiness you never dreamed to have.

Good trees receive good care by farmers, ranchers and arborists. Allow yourself to experience the good care of the Lord and open yourself to God’s mercy and love through the sacraments, the fruits of prayer in your daily life.

Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA

The parish podcast is at CatholicAudioMedia.com

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