Third Sunday Of Lent – March 23rd, 2025 – Fr Jeff Nicolas
Bad things are happening and the crowd in our Gospel wants to know why. “Wrong question”, Jesus answers. You see, God cannot be reduced to a Zeus-like character sitting in the clouds hurling lightning bolts on some people blessings on others. That would make God in our image. God is bigger than that. The correct question to ask is rather, “How can God be perfectly just and perfectly merciful at the same time?” It is in answering this question that Jesus tells the parable of the “Unproducing Fig Tree.”
Some in the crowd do not like the parable. They want Jesus to change it. Some of these people think God is all mercy and no judgement. It was to people like this that Saint Paul wrote his letter to the church at Corinth. There church members were suing other church members in civil courts. There was prostitution. There was a neglect of the poor, the hungry, and the homeless. There were immoral associations. And none of this worried any of them because they thought God was just a big warm fuzzy!
Didn’t matter what they did or didn’t do; God loved them so it would be all fine and dandy in the end. They said things like, “find your inner power. Salvation lies in self-fulfillment. What counts as how I stand before God, not how I stand in relation to the folks around me.”
This crowd traded in genuine Christian ethics (feeding the hungry, fighting for justice, contributing to the good of the whole Church community) for a flashy show. They traded discipleship for entertainment. They gave excuses to the Church instead of support. They figured someone else would take care of all that stuff.
It’s people like this in the crowd before Jesus that want him to change his parable. Don’t have the owner of the vineyard say “Cut down the unproducing tree.” Have him say instead, “So my tree doesn’t produce fruit, that’s OK. I love it anyway. Let it clutter up my yard.”
Jesus’s response? No! The parable stands as it is. “For three years the vineyard owner waited for figs; it has one more year to produce. If nothing happens, then cut it down.”
Somehow, we can start to think it’s all in the bag, no need to work at all. God won’t chop down the fig tree. But we are wrong. There is judgement. It does matter whether or not our fig tree produces fruit.
At the same time there’s another group in the crowd that has no problem believing our God is a God of justice. Their problem is believing that with God there is mercy. These people think God is all judgment and no mercy. These people likewise would have Jesus change his parable.
In the book of Exodus we overhear God giving his name to Moses as Moses is sent to rescue the enslaved Israelites from Pharaoh. Now this sounds all good and well, only there is a part missing from our text. The missing part is about 1/2 a chapter of Moses arguing with God. Moses was sure God had picked the wrong guy!
Remember, Moses was not Charleston Heston! Moses had a speech impediment. His brother Aaron would have to do all his talking for him. He probably had horrible self-esteem as well. After all, he was abandoned as a baby put in a basket and tossed into the river. He was raised in Pharaoh’s household, but he didn’t look like the other kids. Imagine the ribbing he had to endure. (Pharaoh’s pet! Pharaoh’s pet!)
Remember Moses wasn’t a saint either. In fact, he was in what we would call today a “state of mortal sin.” Some Egyptian taskmaster had hit a Jewish slave so Moses murdered him. Not exactly just punishment. Now Moses was on the run. He had gone from being one of the favorites of Pharaoh, basking in a palace, to being a fugitive, sleeping among sheep. God could not possibly want Moses to be his messenger. There had to be a mistake. “If God really knew me”, Moses thought to himself, “God wouldn’t reach out to me for help.”
People like Moses in the crowd before Jesus wanted him to change his parable. “Don’t have the owner of the vineyard give the fig tree another year to produce. It’s rotten to the core. Have the owner say instead, ‘Go ahead and cut it down. Don’t waste my time on something that is not worth it.’”
Jesus’s answer? “No! The parable stands as it is. Leave the fig tree for another year; hoe around it and manure it; then perhaps it will bear fruit.”
Sometimes we fail to see our worth in God’s eyes. We assume we (or those around us) are not worthy of mercy. We assume we are rotten to the core and are not worth the effort of converting. But we are wrong. There is mercy. God wants to give us every opportunity to bear fruit because God knows we can.
Like some of the crowd we too can say to Jesus, “There must be a mistake. You are telling the parable wrong.” But there is no mistake. Jesus knew exactly what he was saying. This life of ours is God’s gift of mercy to us. It is our chance to say “yes” to God’s invitation to bear fruit before the final accounting takes place. In God’s mercy we are given time to bear the fruits of generosity, kindness, forgiveness, justice, and self-sacrifice. But God gives us more than just time. God sends us his Son, Jesus Christ, who gets down into the dirt of our lives and spreads the fertilizer of his Word; nourishes us with his sacraments.
With God there is justice; we shall all stand before our Creator one day to give an accounting of the fruit we bore in this life. With God there is mercy; we are given the chance now to bear fruit. We are given the nourishment and direction we need to be like healthy fig trees.
Can we do it? Will the fig tree in Jesus’s parable finally produce fruit? Can we so live our lives that we bear witness to God through our actions? God thinks so. Indeed, Jesus bet his life on it.