Dear Friends,
Living in New York State, it’s probably safe to say that you
and I don’t know much about growing fig trees. So, part of Jesus’ parable about
the man who told his gardener to cut down this unproductive fig tree escapes
us.
For one thing, the fig trees in Jesus’ time (as well as
today) were treasured, carefully cultivated, fertilized, watered. Unlike the
average, uncultivated tree growing in poor soil, and left largely to fend for
itself, fig trees were pampered. Precious. No wonder the owner of the orchard
was annoyed! He gave this tree every chance. The care he provided was useless. To
put the situation into an axiom: that which only takes, and does not give can
expect to be destroyed. The gardener, the hands-on figure in the story, had
another thought, namely, to give the fig tree a second chance.(Luke 13.6-9)
In fact, you and I do know about barren fig trees: people in
our families, those we meet in our society, our church, our town or nation or through
the social media and the newspaper. Certain of these people appear to be
barren, but perhaps they are not. Maybe they simply take longer to bear fruit. Faced
with an apparent barren fig tree, our temptation is to give up. What’s really at
stake is our patience and our willingness to suspend judgment. After all, we
don’t know the moment of ripening if it comes at all. Oh, how would we like to
predict it, program it, control it!
Leading up to judgments about the barren fig trees of our experience, we see
signs of failure. Let’s call these signs of failure “falls”. Our society takes delight in pointing out the
falls of others. Think about the relentless cameras of sports coverage
recording the spill of the skater, the missed field goal, the slice into the
third fairway over. These are replayed endlessly. Not just in sports but in
other areas of life, people fall in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons:
infidelities, addictions, lack of discipline, bad choices, distractions. If
we’re honest, people see us fall too. Are
we all bad fig trees? Who is to say? Certainly not Jesus and certainly not Pope Francis. Remember
how Pope Francis echoed Jesus about holding off in much the same way? “Who am I to judge?” he asked reporters during
one of his famous in-air press
conferences when the question turned to priests who identify as gay?
Care is what we are called upon to give the fig trees that
grow in our world. We either stand by,
prune, and fertilize or we chop down or abandon what we judge to be barren.
One way of understanding the spiritual and corporal works of
mercy which are foundational to the Year of Mercy is to see them as a call to
care for the precious but barren fig trees of our world. On his Fridays of
Mercy, Pope Francis spends time with people whom society has cast aside or judged
useless. Most recently, he spent an afternoon with the addicted who are trying
to make their way. With whom do we spend our occasional hours of mercy? For
what fig trees are we the gardener?
This is our Jesus. He captures in this story one of the
age-old tendencies people have – to judge one another worthy of being
discarded. His story has another ending.
~ Sister Joan Sobala
