(Audio)
Sir, leave it for this year also,
and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it;
it may bear fruit in the future.
The gardener is rich in mercy. He wants to see the fig tree bear fruit and will take extra steps of cultivating around it and fertilizing it to ensure insofar as it is up to him that this takes place. He is himself the new Adam, tending the new Eden of his Church. He himself bears fruit from the tree of life in her center and waters her with the water from his side. Is it any wonder Mary mistook him for a gardener at the resurrection?
Jesus is the culmination of God's self-revelation. What began in the burning bush with a God who could not be seen be only shown in sign by an angel of the LORD climaxes in the face of Christ.
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (see Second Corinthians 4:6).
God revealed his name to Moses. The philosophical import of "I am who am" was inexhausitbly vast. God was not merely one being among others. He was not simply the first in a chain of cause and effect. It would seem that this might have made him almost unknowable. Most attempts to go beyond this self-revelation wound up in pagan forms of anthropomorphism. Hence the prohibitions against graven images were given. And yet, God did have more beyond this name that he would eventually reveal in Jesus. The name revealed to Moses was joined with another word in the name Jesus, to mean God saves. Jesus revealed the Father's heart of love for his people. He was still beyond all knowledge. But he was no longer beyond the bonds of love.
She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins (see Matthew 1:21).
We are fig trees struggling to bear fruit. God is offering to fertilize and cultivate us with the revelation of the love that never ceases to flow from his heart. Just as his revelation to Moses gave Moses the courage to go to the Israelites to lead them out of Egypt so too does the revelation of Jesus Christ empower us to bear fruit in the new Israel, the Church of God (see Galatians 6:16).
More than an invitation to understand something merely abstract, we are invited to let the gardener do his work in our hearts this Lent. We are invited to see that he is not merely one thing among others by allowing him to prune away things which compete with him for our attention. We are invited to receive the true nourishment that only he can give.
Bless the LORD, O my soul;
and all my being, bless his holy name.
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