Love=Oxygen
Andy Crouch
July 1, 1998
Jesus told this parable: Someone had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the vinedresser, "Look here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down! Why should it waste the soil?" But the vinedresser answered him, "Lord, let it alone for this year also, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, so much the better; but if not, you can cut it down." —Luke 13:6-9 NRSV As far as I know, the enigmatic little parable of the fig tree is not on anyone's list of Jesus' greatest hits. Its inconclusive ending is probably part of the problem, along with its uncomfortable place in that implicit "Harmony of the Parables" most of us carry around in our subconscious, where vines are good (after all, didn't Jesus say, "I am the vine"?) and fig trees are bad, or at least a sign of trouble (at least one fig tree outside Jerusalem becomes a living—er, actually, withering—parable of judgment in Mark 11). But here we have a vineyard full of vines and a vineyard owner who couldn't care less about them. He is looking for fruit on the fig tree—what is it doing in a vineyard anyway?—and presses the vinedresser (who, with a M.S. in viticulture, is probably feeling a bit outside his specialty) for action. Fortunately for the fig tree, the vinedresser pleads for one more chance, proposing an extensive agricultural rescue project, as if for an endangered species. The fig tree in the vineyard is an apt metaphor for what it means to be Christians in the world. Frankly, we don't quite fit. It's not that we're wildly different from our surroundings—as if the owner had, say, a cow in his vineyard and came looking for ...
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