Homily 533 | 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time | Year C
Many of our sins are similar to the fruit of a tree. If you want to change the fruit, you’ve got to heal the root.
Video Link: https://youtu.be/4U2q90Hpyyg
700 years ago, Dante Alighieri wrote perhaps the most famous poem in history. It spans three volumes and three worlds. It is known today as the “Divine Comedy.” People are perhaps most familiar with the first volume, “Inferno.” This is Dante’s depiction of Hell. He will eventually make his way up Mount Purgatory and into Paradise, but there is something right in starting with Hell. We have to go down to up.
In today’s homily I look at the second volume as a backdrop for what we are about to enter in the season of Lent. Here Dante climbs up the seven story mountain of purgatory. At each step, he is purged of one of the seven deadly sins… pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. The Church has long used this idea of there being seven sins that seem to be at the root of all the other sins we might commit. This is exactly the kind of language we hear in today’s first reading and Gospel, “For every tree is known by its own fruit.”
Whenever we try to eliminate sin from our life, we normally start at what could be compared to the fruit of a tree. We find the things that are most apparent. With Dante, we would do well this Lent to look more closely at how it is that our tree is bearing bad fruit. What are the more fundamental sins that are causing all these others? That’s why the seven deadly sins are also called the seven capital sins, or cardinal sins. They are the head and beginning of every other sin.
So, if you want to eliminate the bad fruit from your life, to produce good fruit, you need to look as it were at the root of your tree. Is there a particular one of the seven deadly sins that you struggle with most? In the gospel, Jesus refers to us having a log in our eye that we can’t see. Dante is marked on his forehead with symbols of the seven deadly sins which, obviously, he can’t see either. So we need some help. Dante has the poet Virgil as a guide and we have the Church with her sacraments, especially confession.
Climbing a mountain is hard. It’s easier to do down. Sometimes we have to go so far down that we “hit bottom” before we’re ready to change. Dante did this… and then he started climbing. At each step up the mountain of Purgatory, Dante became lighter and lighter until, at last purged of all sin on the summit, he begins to fly to heaven. That’s our goal this Lent, to be purged of the weight of sin so as more readily to fly to God. We actually are a good tree. We just need to do some healing at the root.