In the OT lesson a man confronted a plant that embodied the divine. In the gospel lesson a man who embodies the divine speaks about a plant. I think it’s about more than that, don’t you? It seems to me that in today’s gospel, the plant is a plant and this is good husbandry. I also think it could be a figure (pun alert, sorry!) for Israel or the Church. One more year, pleads the gardener; give me one more year to turn things around. I’ll dig around it and give it fertilizer. (Personally I’m tempted to try this on a couple of trees - again - this spring, but a hae ma doots about a couple of them: they look like goners to me.) Jesus as the gardener, the Father as the landowner, and the people as the vineyard with the fig tree in it. In California I’ve seen, at the turn to Glen Ellen, roses growing at the end of rows of vines of wine grapes. I’ve been told they act like canaries in a coal mine, as they are likely to show symptoms of stress before they are visible on the vines. Here in the gospel imagery the fig tree is taken as a common accompaniment to vines in the garden. So each of us can shelter under the shade of the tree and eat from the vine; they are companions in the field.
"A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, 'See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?' He replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'"
God has not given up on us yet. Art Hoppe had a wonderful image in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle. There on a cloud are the Lord and the angel Gabriel contemplating, once again, the follies of the human race. The Lord pats his beard, thinkingly. Gabriel is more cheerfully decisive: eagerly he inquires, “Shall I sound the eviction notice?” brandishing his trumpet. But the Lord says, no, no, give them another chance.
How long can this go on?
Perhaps we find out in other vineyard and landlord parables, like the one where the wicked tenants insult and assault the managers’ messengers who are sent to collect the rent, then finally the son of the owner. The message there is that that might not work out so well for the tenants. They can be replaced.
I suppose Gabriel, in the Chronicle story, had something similar in mind.
God gives us another chance. If that is what this parable is about, it is not so complicated. And parables need not be so complicated. They may have one simple message, that we can see because first it turns upside down our common view. Once we look at the world with new vision it changes.
The passage before that confronts us with the common linkage between sin and misery. They must have done something, been worse than other people, or this calamity would not have fallen upon them. But they are no worse than others. Indeed, they are no worse than we are! No more deserving of tragedy, loss, or catastrophe. That does not mean they are without sin. It means that they and we are no more sinful - and perhaps no less - than anybody else.
At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them--do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."
Negligence or police brutality, natural disaster or human turpitude, not victims’ sin.
No grounds for judgment; no grounds for schadenfreude (joy at the pain of others); no secret security for us as better people. And no safe place to hide from God’s inexorable… grace. For he did not come into the world to judge the world, but to redeem it. That is what this season is about; that is what it is preparing us for: the outrageous reality of God’s self-sacrifice, self-emptying gift, to free us from our own prisons of folly, guilt, error, and all the other failings of the human comedy.
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