St Mary's

Homily – St. Mary’s in Exile Sunday 7^th March 2010

Dr. Val Webb © Copyright belongs to author. This cannot be reproduced/published without author permission.

Last month, when John sent me today’s Gospel reading, the timing was perfect.  The fig trees in our orchard were bulging with ripe, purple figs and we were eating fresh figs, stewed figs, figs with cheese, fig salad and fig jam.  However, one of our trees has stubbornly refused to bear fruit for even longer than the three years recorded in this parable from Jesus, and so the reading grabbed my attention in a practical way.

This parable isn’t just a simple story – they never are, although we often tell them as if they were cosy little stories affirming how we already act.  The parables that Jesus told were all about subverting the status quo and challenging myths perpetuated by the dominant and powerful in society as to how life is.  Despite Christian art depicting Jesus working with his father in a well-appointed carpenter’s shop, Jesus’ family were at the bottom of the social class – they were landless Galilean peasants and basic labourers, perhaps building scaffolding for stonework on construction sites.  Remember the derisive words when he taught in his hometown and the locals took offense — “Where did he get his wisdom and healing powers — Isn’t this the carpenter’s son whose parents and siblings we know?”  This makes it all the more pertinent when Jesus tells parables about reimagining a world that subverts powerful religious, political and social norms.  When the Samaritan became the hero in the “Good Samaritan” story, the Jewish audience would have been outraged because of their established myths about the despised Samaritans.  And so, if we are to understand this parable of the fig tree, we need to search for clues in the story that tell us what dominant Jewish myth is being challenged by Jesus in his turn-the-world-upside-down style.

The fig tree was symbolic in biblical times – it meant peace and prosperity with its sweet fruit and its shady leaves, but it was also a symbol for the Jewish people themselves.  In another story in two of the Gospels, Jesus looks for fruit on a fig tree out of season and curses it because it had none – a strange story that referred to the Jews — but this parable is the opposite of that story.  According to our Gospel reading, people had come to Jesus to tell him that some Galileans had been murdered by Pilate, assuming that this tragedy happened because of their sinfulness, that same belief that led people to ask Jesus about the blind man “Who sinned, he or his parents?”  Who knows – since Jesus was Galilean, perhaps this was also a cheap shot at Galileans.  Jesus comes straight back at them.  Trying to make direct links between sin and consequent suffering is wrong and totally misses the point, which is that everyone is capable of missing the mark and thus all need to repent our damaging actions.  To prove his point, Jesus pulls in another example.  Apparently some fortification tower had fallen and killed a group of people, and Jesus made the point that, whether a natural disaster like this or deliberate evil like people being murdered, neither was punishment for human sin, but all of us need to repent our wrongs.  It’s also good to remember that repentance was more about corporate repentance in Jesus’ day, rather than individuals counting out the many sins they needed to confess.  Repentance was about collective guilt, about changing one’s mind and ways and coming to a new way of thinking and acting as a people – bringing in God’s reign.

The fig tree parable challenges the Jewish myth that poverty, illness and suffering are the result of sin; and wealth, health and success were signs of righteousness, a theology preached openly in Victorian England and still believed internally by many people today who refuse to address homelessness, poverty and powerlessness.   It’s interesting to imagine who they players are in this parable – Jesus doesn’t tell us, expecting that we can work it out.  It is the owner of the orchard that comes to check the trees and found this non-productive tree.  The owner tells the gardener to cut it down.  Although in the long run, it is about economics – who wants a fig tree with no fruit to sell or eat – the reason given here is “Why should it exhaust the soil?” or, in other words, why should something unproductive be a drain on resources that could be put to better use, namely to support those that are productive.  Does this sound a bit like some of today’s arguments – why pump money and resources into welfare systems or prop up unproductive members of society or, as a corollary, let’s give incentive payments to those who produce results and millions to CEO’s who will get the most profit out of the soil?  It’s the old argument of the best use of limited resources, an argument that always pushes some off the lifeboat.  So who is the owner of the orchard in the story?

It’s the gardener, the hired hand, who stops the hand of the owner, saying that this is not the only solution.  The gardener is passionate about the trees and the soil.  “If you’re worried about exhausting the soil,” the gardener says, “I shall cultivate the ground around the tree and fertilize it so that it has a better chance to bear figs – leave it for another year while I try.  If not, you can cut it down.”  The gardener argues for a reprieve, offering nurture and special care of this unproductive tree by providing better resources which add rather than take away from the whole.  The gardener is not about to give up on it or the exhausted soil.  The story is actually not about the either/or of one fig tree, but about how to nourish all life — the interdependence of soil, air and all the trees – so that everything and everyone flourishes.

I’m so glad that this was the Gospel reading assigned for today because it made me look more closely to see what Jesus might have been saying about the worldview of his time.  I hadn’t noticed how contemporary the parable is, which is exactly what parables are for – metaphors and stories drawing on common life that arrest us with their vividness or strangeness, such that we have to stop and tease them out.  We could think through this parable for all its meanings for hours and not exhaust it – make it your meditation for the coming week.  What does it say about sharing resources?  What about people we think of as “unproductive” or a drain on society’s resources?  How do we measure productivity in people?  Why is it so much about economics in our society?  Who deserves the best care, the extra fertilizer and digging around their roots?  What does it say about mercy, new life, hope, the patience and commitment of the gardener?

So who are the players in the parable?  Interestingly, the owner of the orchard is not God – or at least we don’t imagine so.  We need to give God the compassionate role, the merciful role, that of the gardener who tenderly cares for the plant – and yet we are making that assumption, it is not spelled out as that.  What if the orchard owner is God, the God with whom the Jews who questioned Jesus would relate – didn’t they assume that suffering and death was God’s punishment on sin which, in the case of a fig tree, meant not bearing fruit?  Wasn’t that their original assumption that Jesus challenged – the direct relationship, 2 + 2 = 4 between sin and punishment?  They would be thinking that God was the orchard owner until, wait, the gardener stands up to this God and stays the Divine hand, desiring mercy not death.  So is the gardener the “other” God, the God of the transformed way of living, the God whose “reign” Jesus is all about bringing in?  Is this about the conflict between the ways we have imaged God as the punishing Judge who comes from outside the orchard to give orders, control and to destroy – and the God who gives and operates within the garden, the gardener who nurtures the soil, cares for the trees and promotes the flourishing of everything within the universe, seeing the unique worth of each?

Dare I bring the metaphor even closer?  You’re allowed to do anything with parables.  There is more to life than figs.  In biblical times, the fig tree was valued as a beautiful shade tree, something essential for hot climates.  The leaves were used as medicinal poultices for healing the sick and fig leaves were incorporated into the Genesis story in order to hide the nakedness and shame of Adam and Eve.  They are also a symbol of peace and prosperity – all this without even the need for fruit.  Perhaps the owner of the orchard is the institutional church who only judge the usefulness of a fig tree or congregation by the homogenous crop of traditional fruit or believers it produces.  The orchard owner had to search for fruit on the tree which suggests it had a healthy mass of leaves under which they might be hidden.  St. Mary’s has been about the leaves – sheltering people from the heat of an unforgiving, merciless world; spreading its leaves such that peoples’ fear and nakedness will not be exposed to cruel judgment; making leaf poultices that heal the body as well as the soul; and offering a cool haven of peace and calm in a hostile world where all questions can be asked and discussed.  The orchard owner sees only figs as the point of the tree, but this community has recognized so much more and thus the Spirit of the community, the gardener, asks that it be allowed to grow, to be cultivated and fertilized to see what it can actually become, something beyond the institutional vision.

When I started pondering this parable, I saw nothing of this – it was a fig tree story with a generic idea of God’s care, but it gets deeper and deeper and wider and wider as we apply our own particular experiences and context to it.  This is the beauty of parables – they are free of baggage about truth, doctrine and form, because they loudly proclaim themselves as fiction and thus we are free to take them on board and let them speak to our own situation – Jesus said after one of his parables, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”  He was also reluctant to explain his parables when the disciples found them troubling for exactly this same reason – let them simply speak to where the hearer is in their life.  Some might say, why bother about these old stories?  We can come up with similar examples in our own day, but when so much of the Bible has become outdated with its cosmology, patriarchy and violence and when so much of what is good in it has been smothered by institutional baggage and medieval interpretation, even the person of Jesus himself, it is refreshing to be able to take these stories which, according to contemporary scholars are more likely than other material to have come from the lips of Jesus, and thus feel we are responding to what he saw as the transformed way to live in the world and with each other.

Where do you find yourself in this parable?  Are you part of the soil that nourishes life, or the gardener who never give up on anything or anyone – God has no hands but our hands, so the cultivating and nurturing is ours to do.  Or the fig tree that had a series of bad years and has been rendered unproductive and dying of thirst and nourishment, needing some good soil around you to support and strengthen you – or even simply not to give up on you?  Or do you find yourself more in the role of the orchard owner, striving for profit and success, and valuing everything and everyone around you by the bottom line?  Or, perhaps you are one of the other trees in the orchard, disdainful of the one squandering the soil without giving anything back, or alternately, thankful for a gardener who sees value and potential life in every tree?

From what I have read about this community, especially in the recent book published about Father Kennedy and you all, I see you as the gardener, caring for so many people whom the orchard owner would reject, believing in the worth of every living thing, resisting a society that looks only at productivity and the bottom line and, most of all, living in hope that, with a little bit of cultivation, nurture and tender loving care, everyone of us can flourish and no one needs to be overlooked or eliminated. You are believers in the interconnectedness of all life and the Spirit that lives within you and this garden, caring about its survival and flourishing.  May you continue to be so.