March 23, 2025, Saving the Fig Tree, Luke 13:1-9 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ March 23, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

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Remember that you are dust. And to dust you will return.

Jesus has a very Ash Wednesday kind of message in the gospel today. Some people come to tell him about the Galileans who were slaughtered by the Roman governor, Pilate. “Do you think those men died because they were bad?” he asked them. “How about those people in Siloam – eighteen of them – who were crushed to death when the tower collapsed? Do you think that happened to them because they deserved it somehow?”

Not at all, he told them. They died because death comes to every human being. Just like you’re going to die, sooner or later. You are dust. And you’ll be dust again. So now is the time to repent. Today is the day to get right with God, because you can’t ever be sure of having another day, just like Pilate’s victims, just like the people in the tower – death comes when it comes. Be ready, Jesus said. Now. Today. You might be able to avoid paying taxes if you’re clever, but death is the one real certainty you will never escape.

And then, he told them a story.

Which is incredibly important, because it’s his parables that Jesus uses to teach us how to see things, and how to hear things, and how to understand things.

We’re all going to die, yes.

And we have no way of knowing when we will die, yes, true.

And therefore we had better make the changes in our lives and in our hearts that need to be made without any more dillying or dallying, yes, absolutely.

But is all of that the pronouncement of a fierce God, who wants to literally scare the hell out of us so we’ll get our act together right now or else? Or – is it not? Is it something else entirely? Well, it’s the parable that will make that clear.

It’s a garden parable, a parable of the earth. A man has a vineyard. So first of all, any Jew would know that we’re talking about God here. The prophet Isaiah wrote, “I will sing for my beloved a song of his vineyard…” The Old Testament story of the vineyard is the classic story about Israel, and about her sins, and about God’s judgment. God planted his vineyard, the story goes, and he cared for it tenderly, but it didn’t yield good fruit, only wild grapes, sour and worthless. And so God destroyed the vineyard, dug it up, and broke down its walls so that the wild beasts could swarm in and finish it off.

Now, the little fig tree in Jesus’ story is no better off than Isaiah’s grape vines – it is barren, fruitless, worthless. The owner of the vineyard comes to look at his fig tree and he’s not pleased. “Cut it down!” he tells the gardener. “It’s just a waste of good dirt!” So that sounds like Jesus is indeed talking about judgement. And condemnation.

Except. Except, that’s not the end of the story. Because the little fig tree in Jesus’ parable has an advocate. “Let’s give this tree a little more time. Let me dig around it and soften up the soil. I’ll spread some manure on it and give it a good feeding. Then, if another year rolls around and still no fruit, well and good, you can cut it down.”

And now we have come to the point of Jesus’ parable. Yes, we are all going to die and the day of judgment might be way closer than any of us think. Remember, you are dust, and to dust you will surely return. But the point of the story is not that God is standing over you with a chainsaw, saying: “Repent, or else.” The point of the story is that God is by your side, tenderly caring for you, feeding you, protecting you. Making you fruitful, as only the gardener can do.

God sent his Son to be your advocate, because even though these bodies will almost certainly die, it is not his will that any of us should be lost. The point of the parable is that we have a God who is merciful, who loves us, who came to share our mortality so that we can share his abundant life. And it is with that assurance that we do the work of repentance, today and every day, listening for his voice, and following his ways, with all of our mind and with all of our heart and with all of our strength, for as long as we live.

This season of Lent that we are traveling through is all about repentance. On Ash Wednesday we entered the journey with these words: “I invite you in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” And this isn’t just a nice spiritual exercise; there is an urgency to our journey. The world is full of suffering and fear and division and hunger of many kinds, and our time here is finite. As the psalmist says, “Today, when you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

But the hands and the heart of the Gardener are with us, to strengthen us, to feed us, to make us fruitful people, lights in the midst of a dark world. We prayed this morning in the Collect, that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves. But the good news is that we aren’t making the journey by ourselves. It’s by his power and mercy that we live and grow and work and bear fruit, today and every day, until the day that we rest in him. +