THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT DEVOTIONAL
Photo from Unsplash.
A man said to his gardener, “Look, I’ve come looking for fruit on this fig tree for the past three years, and I’ve never found any. Cut it down! Why should it continue depleting the soil’s nutrients?” The gardener responded, “Lord, give it one more year, and I will dig around it and give it fertilizer. Maybe it will produce fruit next year; if not, then you can cut it down.” (Luke 13:7-9)
I grew up watching my parents garden over their shoulders. I watched them coax almost anything out of the sandy Florida soil. Our backyard was always full of fruit trees, vegetable beds, and flowers. An old loquat tree stands at the center, flanked by calamansi and starfruit trees. Beds of mustard greens lay beside hanging luffa vines. One year, I counted twenty papaya trees, later replaced by sugar apples. Whenever I stepped outside, it seemed like there was something new.
After college, I spent a year in the Appalachian Mountains as an intern at St. Mary’s Convent in Sewanee, Tennessee. There, my daily duties were split between the chapel and the garden. Slowly and all at once, I learned firsthand that growing things is a tricky business.
It starts out easy enough: You pick the things you want to grow. You put things into soil, nursed with compost, sun and rain. You watch, in hope, as things begin to sprout. But sometimes, the frost comes early. The kale and gourds we planted in the fall never made it through the winter.
But as a friend recently reminded me, gardening is one of those things you learn by doing. You don’t learn to garden by reading about it, or by watching your parents, or with wishful thinking. In today’s Gospel, Jesus reminds us to dig in deep and to use fertilizer.
When our winter crops didn’t make it through, we had to give our spring choices some extra thought and care. When we worry about pests, we plant companion plants together so they can protect each other. When we worry about bearing fruit, like the gardener in Jesus’ parable, we add fertilizer.
This time of year, I begin to yearn again for those spring days; for hands covered in Southern sunshine, searching for earthworms in rich compost; for lengthening days and Easter flowers. Year by year, my hunger for Jesus’ Resurrection grows. I think of the first Christians, who lived in expectation of Christ’s Second Coming, just around the corner, even unto their last breaths.
There are many things that the world tells us will not come in “one more year,” in “three years,” or even “this lifetime.” But the work of justice and peace, of forgiveness and reconciliation, these things are no less urgent for it. The immediacy of Christ’s Passion has not lessened these two thousand years.
Instead, Jesus enters again and again into our suffering, into our world. When the world demands to see the fruit from the least among us, Christ is walking with us in the garden of our circumstances. God—our gentle, patient and faithful gardener—waters us, clears our weeds, feeds our roots, and tends to our every need.
What does your fertilizer look like this Lent? What are your missing nutrients? Which fruits does your soul bear?
