A Charlie Brown Fig Tree
Luke 13:1-9
At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’
Then he told this parable: ‘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?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” ’
After reading this passage, there was a line that kept running thought my head; this passage jogged a memory that took me a couple days to finally place. The line was “…maybe it just needs a little love.” And I knew the “it” in the sentence was about a tree. Finally, it clicked. it’s from a Charlie Brown Christmas. At the end, Charlie takes his sad little tree and hangs a red bulb, that weighs the tree down into the snow. Charlie walks away, head down, dejected. Linus and company then come upon the tree. Linus looks down at it and says, “I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.” And he bends down, wraps the tree in his blanket as some support, and he and the rest of the gang successfully decorate the tree. It’s such a beautiful little scene, and I realized this memory was jogged because it really mirrors this parable, doesn’t it? This landowner comes upon his fig tree and it just disgusted that it hasn’t produced at fruit for him. He tries to get his gardener to cut it down, but the gardener essentially says to him, “maybe it just needs a little love.”
Thinking of this with this in mind helps temper the kind violent, urgent, and kind of frightening imagery and content of this passage. First we have the description of Pilate slaughtering some Galileans worshipping in the temple; then this image of a tower falling and killing eighteen people. And of course, we have the urgent and anxiety-inducing calls for repentance. And we’ve touched on this before, but I want to remind you what repentance really means—I think the word has gotten a bad rep in contemporary Christian culture. I think we tend to think of it in a fire and brimstone kind of way—like some lowly sinner on their knees begging for forgiveness so they won’t be punished; but remember, repent really just means turning back towards God—it means turning away from the not-so-great ways of being and acting you may have done in the past; it’s something active and real. It’s not just passively begging for forgiveness and then going on your way; it’s really changing for the better, actively and intentionally changing your ways—ways of being and ways of thinking. It’s being better. It’s acting with love.
And what’s even more interesting about the first part of this passage is that Jesus is really bucking norms and ideas about good and bad—“Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you…”. The general belief of the day was: if something bad happened to you, you’re obviously being punished for something bad you did; or at least for something bad your ancestors did. Jesus is saying this isn’t true! Now, frustratingly, he doesn’t go into any more detail, really, about that ever-present, always confounding, often tragic question of why do bad things happen to good people, but what he does say is that those Galileans weren’t worse than ones who live a long happy life; those people crushed by the tower weren’t cursed because of something their ancestors did. We’re all a little messed up in our own ways, and we all need to do better.
This passage immediately brought to mind another story, this time from one of my favorite books; and I apologize, because this will be the third time I’ve used this book in a sermon. It’s from the book When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. It’s from the final section of the book entitled “The Night Gardener.”
The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death… displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth.[i]
I couldn’t help but think of this beautiful passage in its complete oppositeness of this parable of a barren fig tree. But the stories, I don’t think, are quite as different as the initially seem.
Because it got me thinking of modern-day incorrect, often dangerous assumptions and stereotypes about people, about our society; about what is actually good, and what is actually bad. Thinking that an otherwise good person is being punished because of something their ancestors did isn’t, in my opinion, a far cry from the assumption that poor people are lazy, and that they deserve their difficult lives. And what really got me thinking along these lines were the words, “uncontrolled, devastating growth.” Because there has got to be a happy medium between this barren fig tree and the apocalyptic, overabundant death knell of a lemon tree.
In our materialistic world that revolves around money, we’re always thinking growth is good, productivity is good, bigger is better. I was just talking with a friend of mine the other day, just kind of lamenting the state of the world, and she said, “I went on a whole rant to my parents yesterday about how stupid the idea is that there should be [economic] ‘growth’ every single year. It makes no sense!” And I really related to that—because honestly, if I get one more New York Times notification on my phone about how the economy grew X% and Y amount of jobs were added, I am going to scream. Because we can see these “good” numbers for years, but who is this really benefitting? Who is getting rewarded from this supposed growth? Certainly not most of the workers who are making the growth happen. And certainly not the people who need it the most.
Now this landowner was angry about his fig tree not being productive—he was angry that it was just planted there and existing, so he wanted it cut down. And that got me thinking of our modern ideas about productivity. Now, thanks to the internet, computers, smartphones, productivity has skyrocketed over the last sixty years. In fact, it’s gone up 246.3%. Because everything is faster, we can work wherever we have internet, we can work longer and harder. And since we’re working so much faster and harder, surely hourly compensation has matched the growth of productivity! No, actually, not at all. Compared to our productivity going up 246%, our compensation has gone up 114.7%[ii] It is lagging a lot. It’s not keeping up with the rising costs of basic human needs like housing or food. It’s not keeping up with the skyrocketing costs of higher education tuition. We’re flailing because we’re not taking care of ourselves and we’re not being taken care of. And so as the most vulnerable Americans fall farther and farther behind, fall deeper and deeper into debt, the general sentiment seems similar to the landowner—‘they’re not pulling their weight, so burn it to the ground.’
But with this world so out of whack, how do we measure goodness? We certainly can’t through money or productivity. I refuse to believe that Elon Musk is a better person than you average struggling American. I refuse to believe that money equals righteous. I refuse to believe that this country’s notion of productivity equals righteous. Because it seems like in some cases, the more productive we are, the less we’re rewarded. Do we really think the single parent struggling and working two jobs is a bad person because of how much they’re struggling? Do we really think that the 80 hours a week that single parent works is not as meaningful as however many hours per week some bigwig CEO works? I certainly don’t.
It's a big ask to fix such a broken system, a system that prioritizes the wants of the powerful instead of the needs of lowly. We need advocates, and we need to be advocates. The gardener in this passage is this poor fig tree’s advocate. “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it,” he pleads. The tree just needs a little love. We all just need a little love.
We can’t keep living like this. The world can’t keep going on like this. We can’t just throw people to the wolves, or assume people don’t matter if they’re not productive. Because clearly, even when we are productive, we are not rewarded. Even when we work hard, if we can’t afford land or a house even our monthly rent, it’s looked at as a moral failing. But it’s not a failing on the part of the struggling individual—it’s a failing on the part of those in power who are supposed to be representing us, who are supposed to be advocating for us.
And I say we can’t keep living like this, because we truly can’t. Something’s gotta give here— “…unless you repent,” Jesus says, “you will all perish just as they did.” I read this as less of a warning of divine punishment, and more of a warning that, you have got to change your ways if you want an earth as it is in heaven—you’ve got to advocate for one another, for a world in which all people are getting the love they need not just survive, but to thrive.
The landowner in this parable sees a tree that is not producing fruit for him, and he decides to give up on it, and cut it down. He decides this tree doesn’t deserve a little extra care, a little extra work, or a little extra love. Instead of wondering why it’s not thriving, instead of wondering how he could help this tree, he just gets angry that it’s not producing food or income for him. This is what’s wrong with our world—instead of looking at struggling people, struggling school systems or struggling communities and wondering—what is it that is stopping these people, these schools, these towns or cities from thriving, and then helping them to thrive, we punish them for not thriving, because they’re not getting the care the love they need to thrive. We ignore individuals who fall into debt, often by no fault of their own; we ignore school buildings falling apart; we ignore potholes and water and air quality, because they’re not “producing” the way we think they should be. It’s a vicious, vicious cycle. But what has productivity really gotten us? “Uncontrolled, devastating growth” leading to a burning planet and more wealth for the already powerful and privileged. This is why we need to repent. This is what we need to turn away from—these wrong and harmful assumptions this world makes about who is righteous and who is wicked. Because clearly, we’ve got it wrong.
Church, one of the only Christian cliches I really love and really abide by is this: God’s time is not our own. “Sir, let it alone for one more year,” the gardener says, “…if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” So how much longer do we have? How much more time will God give us, how much more time will this burning planet give us before it’s too late? No one knows church. And that’s scary, don’t get me wrong—but you know, I get some hope from the open-endedness of this passage. I get some hope from the lack of response from the landowner, and the uncertainty about whether or not this fig tree bore fruit. We can look at it in a pessimistic way, and realize there’s an apocalyptic end in sight and we should be scared; or we should know that yes, there is a limited amount of time that we have, but we still have time. We still have time to change our ideas of what is good and what is productive; we still have time to change our actions and advocate for those who would otherwise be dismissed by our money-hungry, materialistic world as unproductive and therefore useless or sinful.
We still have time to make sure everyone gets that love they need to thrive.
Now to end my sermon I’m going to read you the end of that passage from earlier about the lemon tree:
I asked [the gardener] how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?[iii]
Amen.
[i] Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World (p. 188). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.
[ii] https://www.vox.com/2019/2/4/18185383/millennials-capitalism-burned-out-malcolm-harris
[iii] Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World (p. 188). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.
