Spiritual Hiccups - A Patient Gardener

Frost on the last two mornings in Columbus seems to have put an end to my gardening for the season.  I don't have space for a big garden, but I manage to plant some tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers each year.  And being from the South, I grow a bit of okra.  (If you've never had fried okra, you don't know what you're missing.)  I think I enjoy gardening because of the concrete results it produces.  Usually my efforts are rewarded with tasty vegetables, often so many that we share them with friends and neighbors.  It is a nice change of pace from my work as a pastor, where the impact of my work is often not so tangible.

However, I am not the most patient gardener.  In the spring, I watch anxiously for my seeds to sprout, or for the first tomatoes to show.  In my impatience, I've occasionally picked something before it was really ripe, or even knocked a tomato or pepper off with my constant examining of the plants.  And if I buy a variety of plant that doesn't produce, you can bet I won't buy it again the next year.

And so I understand the frustration of the landowner in Jesus' parable of the fig tree.  Year after year he comes to see if the tree has produced any figs, but each year it is barren.  Finally, he tells the one who tends his vineyard, "Cut it down!"  That seems a logical course of action.  But the gardener begs for more time, promising to give it tender care, hoping to coax it into blooming and producing fruit.

A lot of people look at parables and try to figure out who is who in them.  Is the landowner God and the gardener Jesus?  I suppose a certain amount of that is unavoidable, but I much prefer to simply look at the bigger picture the parable paints without turning it into an allegory. 

The elements of this painting are simple.  There is a tree that is supposed to bear fruit, but it does not.  Clearly fig trees without figs are faulty on a fundamental level, and cutting this one down and replacing it seems more than warranted.  But not in this garden.  Here every effort is made to allow the tree to become what it is meant to be.

This parable speaks of purpose, of judgment, and of grace.  And it ends with waiting.  Will grace and tender mercy help the tree become what it is created to be?  To frame the question larger, will God's creation be set right?  Sometimes religious folks want to hurry the parable along.  We want to end the waiting.  Some end it with judgment, others with grace, but either move seems to me to hurry the parable.  Thankfully the gardener in the parable is the patient sort.

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