*...Someone who withdraws from society and breaks with its prejudices - of course he's going to be different.  Think of an artist who has maintained - or rediscovered - a childlike perspective, who doesn't see things in the ordinary way.  The crowd simply does not understand him.  They only know how to see what they have already seen.  It's the same story with a person who has a deep interior life.  She becomes a puzzle as soon as she plunges into the very depths of the soul, and when she returns to everyday existence again, she seems enigmatic.  When we hear about Cure of Ars lighting his fire with bank notes, we think he's crazy.  And Catherine of Siena shows an equal lack of common sense when she spends the night talking to an assassin, and accompanies him to his execution the next morning, receiving his head in her hands.  We're amazed at Francis de Sales when he breaks his fast by peacefully munching nuts - which makes it impossible for him to celebrate Mass.  From his point of view, it was more important to give pleasure to the friend who had presented him with this gift.  And we have just as hard a time understanding the Son of Man as he approaches the fig tree.

You remember that day when Jesus, followed by his disciples, comes upon the fig tree which has no fruit.  Jesus curses it, even though the Gospel says "it was not the season for fruits."  Voltaire lets out a guffaw.  Bertrand Russell, one of the leading thinkers of our time, is exultant: "Look at what Jesus did; he was neither wise nor even very smart."  And there's nothing more enlightening than to tell the story of the fig tree, or any of the hundreds of paradoxes in the Gospel, to respectable Christians: their faces are suddenly overwhelmed with incomprehension, bewilderment, even panic.  They're like cattle on a cement prairie.  As if what Jesus was talking about were figs!  In fact, the story challenges all of us who are so quick to plead necessity or common sense, to defend our habits or our laziness, so clever at offering explanations, so ready to justify, to erase, to invoke time or age or the season as excuses.  Men and women are made for the unexpected and the impossible - the Gospel keeps reminding us of this.  We may even have to pluck out our eye in order to see.  "God" means there is nothing that 's impossible.
-Jean Sulivan