A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

June 23, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

On Cutting the Fig Tree

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 51:1–12
Romans 6:1–4
Luke 13:1–9

“If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” Luke 13:9 (NRSV)

Some of us have come to worship today as seekers, O God, others as glad believers, but all of us are here to know the power of your presence and the truth of your word. Clear away the clutter of our thoughts, that we may be guided by the mind of Christ and learn afresh the things that make for life and for holiness. For the sake of Christ. Amen.

One morning last spring, while I was still living in Atlanta, I made the mistake of reading today’s passage of the Bible right after I had perused, over breakfast, the “Letters to the Editor” section of a Southern Living magazine. In that magazine, a gardener from Augusta, Georgia, was lamenting about a camellia bush that refused to bloom, one that she had planted several years before on the north side of her house. The editor prescribed sunshine for the camellia, and then he went on to counsel the gardener to please have a little patience. “Remember,” he wrote, “it takes some plants many years to really get to blooming well.” (1)

I finished my breakfast and moved on to my study, where I encountered an entirely different spirit in the parable Luke told about the orchard owner and the barren fig tree. “Produce or perish,” the parable seemed to say. The owner’s patience had long since been exhausted: “I have been coming here for three years looking for fruit from this tree, and still I find none. Cut it down!” he ordered his gardener.

I will not bore you with more information than you want about ancient horticultural practices, but it is interesting to note that in ancient Palestine, vineyards were always planted with fruit trees, so the vineyard also functioned as an orchard. The first three years of a fig tree’s growth were allowed to elapse before the fruit of the tree became “clean” under the covenantal law, (2) which means that actually six years had gone by and still not a single piece of fruit. “Why should this tree be wasting the soil?” the owner asked. On the surface the question seemed mean-spirited, since there is plenty of dirt to go around in the world, but it seems that fig trees absorb an exceptional amount of nutrients and water. (3) This nonproductive fig tree was actually putting the future of the entire vineyard at risk.

The gardener takes up for the tree before the orchard’s owner. He pleads for time: “Sir, please let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.” This is a particularly unusual request. There is no mention anywhere in scripture of this type of fertilizer. The gardener is proposing the most unusual measure imaginable. (4) “If it bears fruit, well and good [we will have given it one more chance], if not then you can cut it down.”

Here is the question: what should we do with this harsh story Jesus told so long ago? Remember, every story he told, whether it concerned a lost coin or a rich fool or a prodigal son, was told in response to a particular situation. The parable of the fig tree was addressed to the covenant people of God, those whom God had elected, set apart to serve in a distinctive way God’s purposes of redemption and justice and righteousness. To them, God had given a great deal, and from them, God was expecting a great deal, but so far, nothing. Those who gathered around Jesus that day from the covenant community were interested in having an abstract discussion about the nature of suffering. Do people suffer because they have committed sins? Is that why the tower collapsed on the people of Siloam? Is that why Pilate’s massacre occurred at the temple in Jerusalem? In some way or another, was God punishing people for their sins? Is this divine judgment? They were challenging Jesus to justify the ways of God to them, but Jesus had little patience for this kind of conversation. What he was interested in was that the people might examine themselves and realize their own responsibility for the way they lived before God. It was to that end that he told them the story of the barren fig tree. In doing so, he allowed them to listen to the ongoing debate that takes place within the very heart of God between justified judgment and merciful grace: “Cut it down!”

“No, let’s give the tree a little more time.”

The covenant people had listened in on the debate for generations as they read the words of their scriptures. In the prophecy of Hosea, “The Lord says, ‘I shall bring Israel to desolation. I shall pour out my wrath upon them.’” But then, “How can I give them up? . . . How can I hand them over? . . . My compassion grows warm and tender” (Hosea 5:9–10; 11:8–9).

In the book of the prophet Jonah, God had firmly decided to condemn the people of Nineveh for their sinfulness, and yet, as Jonah had come to call them to repentance, and with contrition they responded, God had a change of heart—much to Jonah’s dismay. Remember how he pouted under the bean plant? “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, [but do not tell me you are going to forgive the Ninevites?]” (Jonah 3:10; 4:1–2).

The great Jewish scholar Elie Wiesel suggests that what Jonah discovered was that God’s own will may change. That is an astounding thought. God is not immutable stone. Even though judgment is justified and punishment has been programmed, it may be cancelled by the will of God, just as it was set into place by the will of God. Herein lies the great core conviction of our faith tradition: every human being is granted one more opportunity to begin again.

So in the parable of the fig tree, you hear the two voices that resound back and forth. One saying, “For three years I have waited and I am out of patience,” but the other voice saying, “Let’s wait. I will dig and fertilize and see if finally fruit might come.”

It has been suggested that the traditional name of this parable, “The Barren Fig Tree,” is really a misnomer. The more apt title would be “The Gracious Gardener.” (5) I want to challenge you with this thought this morning, that both the mercy of God and the impatience of God are a part of the grace of God. Jesus loved the covenant people, and because he loved them, he wanted them to wake up and realize that something was actually expected of them. To be sure, grace often comes in the form of forgiveness and reassurance, but at other times, grace comes as a radical call to bear fruit while there is still time.

The good news of Jesus Christ is nothing less than the call to repentance and the offer of the forgiveness of sins. Here is the paradox: God is the judge of human behavior, yet God offers all a fresh start. And here is another paradox: the quality of our relationships with God and with one another are obviously of eternal importance, and yet God acts with patience so that good fruit might yet be borne. The temptation is always before us to mix judgment with grace, but as any theologian worth his or her salt knows, the result then is neither judgment nor grace but a tepid, innocuous substance that can neither transform nor redeem. (6)

During the 1980s, I served on a Presbyterian committee commissioned with the task of drafting a new confession, or creed, for the Presbyterian Church in the United States. The confession, called the Brief Statement of Faith, was adopted by the General Assembly that met in Baltimore in 1991. The creed has served our church well and has been well received, except for one brief line in the confession. As we wrote our drafts and as the church has used the confession in teaching and in worship, people have been put off by a line that appears in the middle of the confession, a line that consists of four simple words: “We deserve God’s condemnation.” Presbyterians hate to say that. Hate to think about it. Even with our great traditional interest in such doctrines as total depravity, we have lost any sense of the radical unrighteousness of the human condition and of our need for God’s judgment and mercy.

Dr. Jack Stotts, a friend of this congregation, chaired the committee that wrote a Brief Statement of Faith. He received numerous pieces of mail about that line, several of them making suggestions for changes in the confession. One wrote, “Dear Dr. Stotts, Why not have that line read, ‘Some people deserve God’s condemnation’?” Then there was this suggestion: “Why not let it read, ‘We deserve to be evaluated by God’?”

It is only by facing the actual truth of our situation that any individual, any institution, can ever be turned in the direction of the newness of life made possible by God in Jesus Christ. Across the Roman Catholic Church, there is a growing sense that the abuse scandal is at a turning point. Why? Because the sin has been acknowledged, because the truth has been told.

The 214th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) completed its work yesterday in Columbus, Ohio. After six years of turmoil and self-righteousness on all sides on almost every issue, it seems as if the Presbyterian Church has finally gotten the message that God expects more of us than the bitter fruit that we have produced in recent years. This Assembly intelligently and insightfully realized it was time to move beyond being obsessed with sex, move beyond power struggles about what to say about the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The focus in Columbus was on the faith we share and on the responsibility we bear to be ambassadors of Christ in a world being torn apart by terrorism and war. How can we even begin to be agents of reconciliation in a strife-filled world if we spend all our time and energy arguing with one another? In our world, there are millions who are hungry, millions bound by the chains of injustice, millions robbed of basic human rights. We have been given another chance to bring good news to the poor and proclaim release to the captives (Luke 4:18). It was as if the voice of God had at last been heard, “I am tired of your strife. Bear fruit.”

In his letter to the Romans, Paul pulls no punches as he asks, “Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?” and then he goes on to answer his own question, “By no means!” “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death so that we too might walk in the newness of life?” Whatever else the Christian faith has to say, the faith has always maintained that new life is still possible, that the past does not necessarily determine the future, because God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead. There is a new reality, toward which we are called and with God’s help, we are able to move in that direction.

I want to close with a modern-day parable that leads us, I believe, into the same spiritual reality of the parable of the fig tree that was told so long ago. Last spring, something extraordinary happened in the state of Georgia. A representative to the state legislature from a small town in the western part of the state stood in the well of the House floor and implored his colleagues to pass a bill that would impose extra penalties for hate crimes committed against ethnic and racial minorities, as well as against gay and lesbian people. His name is Representative Donald Ponder. He told the Georgia Legislature that all his ancestors in the nineteenth century owned slaves. He told them that his great-grandfather had fought in the Civil War. He told them how his third grade classmates had cheered when they received the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. He told his fellow legislators of how his college fraternity had ostracized six members because they were gay. He told of the African American woman who had raised him from birth, who had taught him more than anyone else the difference between right and wrong. He told of how one day when he was a boy about to leave for school, she had leaned over to him to give him a kiss on the cheek, and how he had averted his head because he has been taught all his life that black people were not supposed to kiss white people. He spoke of the shame that he had carried ever since that day. Hear Representative Ponder’s own words now:

The day came not long ago when we buried the magnificent woman who had raised me. I pledged to myself that day that never again would I look in the mirror and know that I had kept silent and let hate, prejudice, and indifference negatively impact another person’s life. I finally have figured it out. The only way we are ever going to make progress in this world is when somebody gets up and takes a stand. And so I stand before you today, my distinguished colleagues, and I urge the House of Representative of the State of Georgia to pass this hate crimes bill. (7)

And so they did.

Imagine, after so many years, figs at last.

I have no idea, no way of knowing what brave commitment God might have planted in your heart long ago, but I would bet my life that there is something in you waiting to be born that would make the world a kinder and less hostile place, that would make our church a more hospitable and faithful place, that might make your marriage a more loving community. There is something in you waiting to blossom forth, I am sure of it. I have wonderful news for you: there is still time. Anything is possible. There is no such thing as a hopeless case.

And so the hand reaches back and the hard, sharp wedge of the ax slices through the air toward the trunk of the tree—but wait, another hand reaches and halts the ax. It is the hand of mercy. (8) And then there is the voice, “Let’s give this thing another year.” Hope stirs deep down at the heart of things; there may yet be figs, even now.

Let us pray.

Create in us a clean heart, O God. We humbly ask that you would put a new and right spirit within us and make us brave for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.

End Notes

1. Southern Living, March 2001.
2. Joachim Jeremias, Rediscovering the Parables (Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1966), 135.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. William H. Willimon, Pulpit Resource (March 1998): 43.
6. See Fred Craddock’s treatment of this passage in his Interpretation commentary on Luke.
7. The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, 16 March 2001.
8. Thomas G. Long, “Breaking and Entering,“ Christian Century (7 March 2001): 11.