because they suffered this? No, I tell you. But unless you change your ways, you will all perish, as they did. And those eighteen
persons in Siloah, who were crushed when the tower fell, do you think they were more guilty than all the others in Jerusalem? I tell you: no. But unless
you change your ways, you will all perish, as they did.” And Jesus continued, “A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he came looking for fruit
on it, but found none. Then he said to the gardener, ‘Look here, for three years now I have been looking for figs on this tree, and I have found none. Cut it
down, why should it continue to deplete the soil?’ The gardener replied, ‘Leave it one more year, so that I may dig around it and add some fertilizer; perhaps
it will bear fruit from now on. But if it doesn’t, you can cut it down.’”

Reflection

In today’s gospel, Jesus uses two stories culled
from everyday life. These are calls to repent, to
change the direction of one’s life because they too
could “likewise perish,” unexpectedly caught up in
circumstances beyond their control and have their lives
snuffed out in an instant. That is why they have to be
ready always. For bad things too could happen to good
people. It is not always that they are punished for their
transgressions. The natural law of the universe does not
discriminate the good from the bad. Violence, accidents
and the likes could happen to anybody regardless of their
moral life. That’s sobering. We don’t like to think about
it, and to be blunt, most of us don’t consider that life
is really like this. But it is. There are no guarantees. But
independent of accidents that could victimize the
good and the bad, there will be judgment in the end
of time. The quality of our life determines what kind
of sentence we will receive. And so, if we are like the
unproductive fig tree, we still have time to bear fruit. May
we not waste this precious time for we know not when
the Judge will come.