When I was young, movies about the Living Dead scared me a lot. For what could be scarier than dead people moving around, walking like normal ones, desiring to kill the living. We see many such "living dead" somehow come to life in our present reality: merciless assassins killing the innocent, malevolent human traffickers victimizing women and children, ungodly government officials dehumanizing societies with their corruption.

We who seek justice may consider such people unfitting for human society: they might as well vanish for good. However, in God's eyes, full of mercy, as long as a person still breathes, there is always that hope of changing for the better, that hope of becoming human once again. This hope of human transformation is possible because of God's divine mercy. "Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down." Today's Gospel reminds us that the more we cannot understand how God works, the more we are invited to trust in his merciful heart.