Sermon on March 23, 2025
“The Fig Tree and God”
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan
“Spring is a lovely reminder that change can be beautiful.” I read this on a greeting card the other day, and it’s stuck with me. If I’m honest, I think one reason it stuck with me is that I’m not sure how much I agree with it. Spring has its lovely moments, of course, but personally I’m more of an autumn girl. I love inhaling crisp air, watching leaves change color, pulling out my favorite sweaters, and indulging in both the drama and the coziness of the season. For me, Spring is great, as long as it’s not too muddy, and my allergies don’t act up, and I’m not overly anxious about how soon we’re going to be dropped into a miserably hot slog of summer. Can you see why I loved going to school in New England for a couple of years? Nothing beats Boston in the fall!
However, I digress. Spring, in the northern hemisphere, is the season of new life, and I imagine that’s what the greeting card sentiment was getting at—that change doesn’t have to be hard or scary, that change can look like a fluffy yellow chick or a baby bunny or a field of daffodils. I’m just a little skeptical about all that. I know that the outcome of change can be new life and something beautiful, even sacred, but in my experience the process of change is almost always hard, not to say frightening.
Which brings us to the parable of the fig tree. Jesus, as ever, shows himself to be quite the realist here. If you want change in your life, which in a previous verse Jesus referred to as repentance, then you’re going to have to be willing to go through some hard and messy stuff. There’s going to be someone digging around at your roots, and you’re probably going to have to put up with quite a bit of…um…manure in the process. I wonder if anyone can hear this parable and not believe that Jesus was a gardener, as well as a carpenter and a preacher and everything else he was. Every gardener knows that new life emerges from a process that is messy, and sometimes smelly, and almost always a lot of work.
Let’s take it as a given that we should imagine ourselves as the fig tree in this parable. Most of us probably tend to imagine God as the person at the top of the social ladder in any parable, so that would make God the owner of the vineyard. But if I’m the fig tree, that means concluding that Jesus believes in a God who is always checking up on me to see how productive I am, and, if he finds me lacking, not bearing fruit, and is ready to cut me down and throw me out. Ugh. Even if I decide to give Jesus the role of the gardener, interceding for us and pleading for more time, I’m still stuck with a theology that says we are nothing more than sinners in the hands of an angry God, and that we better stay on Jesus’ good side or he might not keep us safe from mean old Dad God. And that is terrible theology, completely missing everything else we are taught and know about a good and loving God.
However, everything shifts when we imagine God instead as the gardener. And isn’t that already closer to our professed theology, even in its most orthodox versions, because aren’t God and Jesus one? The gardener is God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit all rolled into one. The gardener planted us and gave us life. The gardener is patient when we don’t bloom and grow exactly on schedule. The gardener is always willing to tend to us and work with us, always willing to believe that we can bear good fruit, and that in due time and with enough love and attention we will.
Now I do have to admit here that my interpretation of this parable (which isn’t original to me, by the way) doesn’t answer the question of who the landowner is if it’s not God. Honestly, I’m not sure there’s a great answer to that, or that it even matters much. There’s always someone who is willing to give up on us, to see the worst in us, to consider us irredeemable. Maybe it’s the devil. Maybe it’s that voice in our own heads that wants to shame us, to mire us down in self-criticism and doubt. Maybe it’s the unending drive of capitalism, insisting that a person who isn’t producing fruit on schedule has no value at all. I think you get to decide that for yourself.
Back to the fig tree. What the gardener proposed to do, to dig around it and add fertilizer to it, strikes me as a pretty good metaphor for repentance, one of the traditional themes of Lent, or really for any positive change that requires us to undergo the rigors of transformation. Notice that if we’re the fig tree and God is the gardener, then we’re not the ones fixing or saving ourselves. God is doing that work.
In Lent, we pray to a God who “has given us eyes to see ourselves as we truly are and a heart to accept the gift of grace.” It is God, not our self-improvement schemes, who gives us the gift of seeing that we’re a bit of a mess, that we have lots of ways we might want to grow. In Lent we consent to the process of change and growth, letting God help us dig around in our souls, maybe pulling up some weeds and making room for a few more good roots to spread out and go deep. And we may also need to agree to go through some patches of manure, such as acknowledging and processing our darker emotions, our grief and rage and resistance to change, in order to find better health and vitality and fruitfulness on the other side.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the parable of the fig tree presents a much more complex and compelling understanding of change than the pretty “happy Spring” greeting card I saw the other day. It recognizes that change and growth are two sides of the same coin, that true fruitfulness is different than productivity, and that what looks like muck or filth when you’re slogging through it may be a necessary part of the path to healing and transformation. As Anne Lamott wisely says, “All miracles begin with a hopeless mess or bad news.”[i] Probably because until we reach that point, most of us are unwilling to step out of the way and let God be God.
There’s one more thing I’d like us to consider about this parable. Notice that it is open-ended. We don’t know what happens next after the gardener’s plea, or how long it takes for the tree to bear fruit. If we switch the lens one more time, and set aside our usual, individualistic mode of interpretation, something interesting happens. Maybe the fig tree isn’t us as individuals. Maybe the church, or our community or country, or even the whole world, is the fig tree, and we are called to tend to it, collectively, as a loving gardener. We are called to look at the hopeless mess and bad news that is all around and respond with determination, patience, attention, and love. Even if it’s messy and hard, growth is a miracle. Change is a miracle. New life is a miracle. Maybe it’s time to get down on our knees to tend the soil and get our hands dirty, for the sake of the world that God so loves. Amen.
[i] Lamott, Somehow: Thoughts on Love (Riverhead Books, 2024).
