Third Sunday of Lent 2022

 

The Gospel passage set for this Third Sunday of Lent (Luke 13:1-9) feels incredibly fresh and current. Jesus receives report of innocent people cut down in a supposedly safe place, murdered while at prayer, on the orders of a political leader. The latest representative of a superpower bullying a small neighbour, a land he sees not as an independent nation but as a province of his own empire; making it clear, your god and your faith cannot save you: in fact, your wrongful beliefs only prevent you from receiving the benevolence of the Pax Romana, the stability ensured by Roman rule.

Why did this happen, the people are left asking? Surely these Galileans must have been unrighteous, their secret sinfulness exposed, for God would not allow the righteous to perish. No, Jesus responds, these were not offenders: this is how politics works. It imposes its benefits, by violence if necessary. And sooner or later, it always finds violence necessary. Put your hope in the power of politics to liberate lives, and in the end, you will be obliterated.

It is the same, Jesus says, with the market. If politics is concerned with violence, the market is concerned with money, at any cost. And here, Jesus reminds them of a tower that had collapsed, after corners had been cut in its construction, to maximise profit. Eighteen innocent people had died when it fell. Not because they were under the judgement of God, but because Mammon is a cruel god. Put your hope in the power of the market to liberate lives, and in the end, you will be obliterated.

And then Jesus told a parable. Of a man who owned a vineyard, and who had planted a fig tree in it. After three fruitless years, he decided to cut his losses and instructed his gardener to cut the tree down: not only was there no harvest of figs, but the tree was taking up space that prevented the soil from being fruitful in some other way. However, the gardener pleads for a stay of execution, while he excavate all around the tree and fill the channel with animal dung and leave it one more year. If then, there was still no fruit, cut down the tree.

This is such a beautiful illustration of repentance or changing our mind because of having been with someone. Consider this dynamic at play between the man and his gardener. The vineyard owner sees no fruit, over not one but three years, and determines that the tree must go. His gardener makes a counterproposal. Perhaps the man does not know much about horticulture; after all, that is what he employs a gardener for. A young tree can take several years to produce fruit, and perhaps the gardener does not expect a harvest for another year. But the gardener does not simply dismiss the vineyard owner’s concern; instead, he sees it as an opportunity, and takes the time to teach him the ways of the garden. The job isn’t done when you have planted the tree, it is only just begun. Fig trees do well when their roots are contained or somewhat restricted, and they need an annual mulch of well-rotted manure, not to mention pinching-out half of the growing tips each summer and pruning dead or weak branches each winter. “Here, sir: let me show you how to dig out a channel all around the roots and pack it round with a wall of manure. And if there is no fruit next year, I’ll show you how to cut down the tree yourself. Full circle, from planting to uprooting.”

And, having been with the gardener, the owner changes his mind. He turns away from the political solution, to go in with summary execution; and from the market solution, to replace something failing with something more profitable. And instead, he embraces patience, which is not to do nothing and hope for a different outcome, but to put in the hard work of partnering with God.

Everything in this parable speaks of interdependence. The owner depends on the gardener, and the gardener on the owner. The tree and the soil and the manure are all connected. Animals eat plants for nutrition, and what they cannot process and absorb is dug back into the ground to be nutrition for plants. Life is interconnected, and interdependent. Life comes from the soil and returns to it again. And parables, likewise, work in this way: we are the man (the adam) who owns the vineyard, and the gardener (the Adam) and the vineyard itself and the fig tree within it. And Jesus is the master storyteller weaving all things and every element together.

Lent is the season of repentance, the annual mulching, the sitting together in the dirt with dust and dung stuck to our foreheads, sweat carving rivulets through the muck, arms aching from honest labour, trusting in a harvest in due course of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Or else we can carry on regardless, business as usual. And a year from now, what will the continuation be?