March 23, Lent 3C (Luke 13:1-9)

Like any good preacher eager to move his audience into action, Jesus draws on a variety of homiletic approaches in Luke 13. On the one hand, he recalls the scary news of the day, local disasters guaranteed to put the fear of the Lord in anyone within earshot of Jerusalem. He speaks of events now lost to history but presumably vivid in the moment—cultic sacrifices mingled by Pontius Pilate with Galilean blood, a Siloam tower that crushed 18 people in its sudden fall. He grabs their attention and delivers an ultimatum aimed squarely at the complacent: “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

But then, leaving aside the shock of this beginning, he asks his hearers to consider something as ordinary as a fig tree, a plant familiar not only in the landscape of ancient Israel but also in its traditions. In the opening of Genesis the fig grows in Eden’s lush garden along with “every tree that is good to the sight and good for food.” It famously keeps company there with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is set apart uniquely and off-limits. When after eating that forbidden fruit Adam and Eve experience shame in their nakedness, it is the nearby fig that provides them with a covering (3:7).

Although connected in this way to the primal human disaster, recollection of the fig tree’s bountiful presence in an unfallen Eden nonetheless carries over into the larger world of the Hebrew Bible. In the Song of Songs, its luscious fruit is the harbinger of spring and of unabashed love (2:13). It also suggests the fertility of a promised land characterized by natural abundance, “a land of vines and fig trees and pomegranates” (Deut. 8:7–10). To describe the security of Solomon’s united reign, we are told that the 12 tribes once lived peacefully in shaded safety, “all of them under their vines and fig trees” (1 Kings 4:25).