Sermon for March 23, 2025
Lent 3 C
Luke 13:1-9; Isaiah 55:1-9
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
When I was growing up, I always loved to pick pears from my grandma’s pear tree at our family summer cottage. Even before they were ripe, whenever it was time to grill hamburgers outside, we’d pick a few and throw them on the fire. This would impart the hint of pear to the flavor of the meat—it was delicious. The typical lifespan of a pear tree (depending on variety, care, and conditions) is up to 50 years. My grandma’s tree had actually been planted there by her mother years before I was born; so today, that pear tree is a good 75 years old. My great-grandmother must have picked just the right spot to plant it.
There have been a few times when we thought that tree was as good as dead and maybe it was time to cut it down. But remembering the quality of the fruit it produced, instead we’d try pruning the dead branches and giving it some tender loving care, and by the following year it would always be growing more delicious pears. Who knows how much longer it will live? The tree is not as pretty as it used to be, and the trunk is hollowing out and starting to decay in places—but it still produces fruit because it’s in the right soil and it’s been cared for.
The lessons of the pear tree can be applied to the fig tree as well—as in the Parable of the Fig Tree that Jesus tells in Luke 13. “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?” The gardener replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put fertilizer on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not you can cut it down.”
Typically, a fig tree will begin producing fruit in its second year, and certainly by the third year as long as it has the proper care and conditions [figboss.com]. So in this parable, the owner knew his fig tree should already be producing figs by now. But the owner was not the gardener, and the gardener knew the real reason the tree was not producing figs was that its soil needed the proper kind of care. If the environment that the tree was planted in became healthier, then the tree would naturally grow figs.
I see in this parable at least two dimensions to “repentance”, and this reflects what the concept of repentance means in the Bible. “Repent”, in the Bible, means to have a “change of mindset resulting in a change of direction”. This is more than simply changing your mind, like you might at a restaurant and order Pepsi instead of ginger ale. A change of mindset when you order your meal would not be changing from one soda to another; it would be quitting soda all together and committing yourself to drinking only water from now on.
Of course, repentance in the Bible goes a lot deeper than your choice of beverage for lunch. Repentance means embracing a whole different way of thinking about life that results in a whole new way of doing things. Repentance means embracing a whole new attitude about the sin that causes us to rebel against God and against God’s loving purposes, and that causes us to harm our neighbors and even ourselves; and then because of this new attitude, we can therefore turn ourselves towards God and towards following Christ and Christ’s ways of healing and forgiveness.
So, what does “repentance” look like in the Parable of the Fig Tree? One angle is to look at the gardener as a model of repentance. This is individual responsibility for repentance. And in his reply to the owner of the fig tree, the gardener takes individual responsibility by confessing his sins and doing things differently because of his confession: “I’ve had three years to care for this tree so that it grows figs, and I’ve neglected to do it.” This doesn’t necessarily mean he was a “bad” gardener; he may not have even realized how he was falling short. Maybe he’d been caring for all of the other fig trees in the same way, and the rest of them were doing fine—but the particular conditions where this tree was planted meant that it needed to be cared for in a different way. The gardener’s repentance, then, is to stop the owner from cutting the tree down right away, and for the gardener to realize that he needs to treat this tree differently from the others: to dig around it so the rain and the fresh air can get in the soil, and to fertilize with manure so the roots have access to the nutrients it needs to be healthy. That’s a change of mindset that results in a change of direction.
Another dimension of this parable is to look at the tree itself as a metaphor about repentance. Looking at it from this angle, it’s the fig tree that needs to “repent” because it is not “bearing fruit”. Think back to earlier in Luke’s gospel where John the Baptist preaches: “bear fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8). Or where Jesus teaches about how the human heart is capable of producing both good and evil; he offers this analogy: “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit” (Luke 6:43-44). We are, by analogy, like the trees that produce good fruit because of our repentance; or that produce bad fruit because of our lack of repentance.
But how does a tree go about producing fruit, anyway? The owner of the fig tree blames the tree for its failure; he gets angry about the lack of figs even though he’s been looking at it for three years. The gardener realizes that blaming the tree would never make it produce figs. You could look at the tree as many times as you wanted, but that would not make it grow fruit. You could tell the tree to produce figs as many times as you wanted, but that would also never make it grow fruit. The only way this tree will change and grow figs is if it is nurtured and cared for in the soil where it’s planted. But the tree can’t do that on its own. The tree can’t grab a shovel and dig around itself. The tree can’t spread fertilizer around its own roots. It needs a gardener to be responsible for tending, digging, putting down manure. So in a similar way, our own repentance is made possible only when there are gardeners who will take an interest and be responsible for “tending the soil” that we are planted in. This is the communal or social responsibility for repentance.
And in the life of faith we need them both—the world itself needs them both—the individual responsibility, and the social or communal responsibility. Happily, Jesus has planted us in a community of gardeners—we call it the church. And as Martin Luther reminds us in his explanation to the Apostles’ Creed: “Daily in this Christian church the Holy Spirit abundantly forgives all sins—mine and those of all believers.” Luther also explains how Jesus Christ “has purchased and freed me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver but with his holy, precious blood and with his innocent suffering and death. He has done all this in order that I may belong to him, live under him in his kingdom, and serve him…”.
Jesus has given us a community of gardeners to nurture the soil of our faith, and Jesus is the greatest gardener of all. Because of him, there is an element of joy that finally comes from repentance. Joy because of God’s unconditional love—given to each of us in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because he has saved us, and nurtures us in the soil of eternal life, how will we put to use the fruits of the life we get to live in him? Amen.