For Sunday, February 28, 2016 – Luke 13:1-9
“Mind the gap,” the disembodied voice warns passengers stepping onto a London train. Notice what is not there in plain sight. Pay attention to the empty spaces, what you do not see. Jesus, too, urges us to be alert to the absent. Empty branches hang heavy with meaning. The fruit that has not come is ripe and juicy, full of wisdom yet to be discovered.
The story is of a fig tree that keeps on, year after year, not dying, but at the same time not bearing any fruit. The tree is caught in that limbo land called living-a-little, familiar to many of us whose lives have become something less than meets the eye. Oh, we might still be standing upright, filling a space in our orchard, but can we count on fruit? What has become of neighborliness and civility? Has compassion all but dried up? Where is our delight in diversity, our solidarity with suffering?
For three years the landowner comes looking. Surely a fig or two will have come, but again and yet again he finds none. “Cut it down,” he tells the gardener. “Why let it waste soil?” But the gardener takes pity on the tree, begs for one more year, promises to nurture it, dig around it, lay manure on it, love it into fuller life.
What would it mean to join the gardener’s team, to “dig around” what seems dead in us and among us? How might we purposefully poke and prod and get our hands dirty for the sake of love? The soil that seems least likely to yield fruit could be the very site of our next becoming. Maybe it is into those who seem to have given up that God is most likely to breathe new life. Look again at the dead places, the empty spaces, the embarrassingly shriveled parts of our common life that stink to high heaven. Surprising richness is likely to reside there. The “not yet” turns out to have been the “yet to be.” Meaning awaits us in what’s missing.
