Fruitless Fig Trees and Empty Due Dates
Last week was my daughter’s due date. One of my daughters’ due dates. She was the second daughter I had hoped to name after Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles who was the first to share the good news of the resurrection. The first daughter announced herself with a positive pregnancy test during Holy Week and the second was due during Holy Week. But both of them are dead, and I feel their losses so profoundly I could not name them after the one who brought good news. These daughters of mine were not witnesses to resurrection; they merely seeded in me doubt that new life will ever be possible. They are not children through whom I praised seeing God; instead, their deaths sent me to my knees screaming into the void. And their deaths, even the one that happened four years ago, have me analyzing every moment from my memories asking what I have done to deserve this.
Holy Week does feel true to my experience in that it teaches we are not alone in suffering. Others suffer not only from senseless natural death but from actual systemic violence that could have been prevented. There is a story in the Gospel of Luke 13:1-9 where those who have seen great suffering ask Jesus about who is at fault. They point to two events: one is a violent bloodbath at the hands of an imperial overlord named Pilate, and the other is a tower falling and crushing those within and around it. One is caused by a person, the other by bad luck. Surely- the people bringing these two events to Jesus say- surely the victims of Pilate and the tower are actually the ones at fault. They must have sinned somehow to bring such violence upon themselves. After all, we can’t control evil men in power, and we can’t control rock crumbling, but we can control ourselves, right? So if bad things happen to us, there must be a reason. Right?
Wrong, Jesus says. He unequivocally says that those who suffer are not more sinful than those who don’t suffer, or who don’t suffer as much. And then he tells a story, one that seems to have nothing to do with the original question. A man has a garden with a fig tree, but that fig tree has no fruit. It hasn’t had fruit in three years, apparently, so he’s fed up. He goes to his gardener and tells him to get rid of it. It is wasting the soil. Wasting. But the gardener suggests that he dig around it and put more manure on it and wait another year before cutting it down.
What?
Here I am feeling trapped in and by suffering. I have no control over my body: there is no timed intercourse, no diet or exercise plan, nothing I can do to make my womb conceive and keep a baby. Nor do I have any control over the world: I can’t stop evil overlords like Putin from bombing Ukraine, or even my own president from committing war crimes in places like Syria and Afghanistan. And even if I could magically get rid of evil overlords in the world, even if I could magically become fertile, I would not get my daughters or any of my four lost children back. I would not be able to stop freak accidents from happening to my family or in my community. Suffering will always be a part of our lives.
But we can still nurture our own little plot of land here in the garden. We can still take our antidepressants and pray; we can still donate money to relief organizations and even get involved in those organization resettling refugees in our own communities. And if the things we have done in the past to help take care of ourselves or others aren’t working anymore, then we can dig a little deeper and advocate for better care for ourselves or find new ways to serve others.
It isn’t much, what Jesus gives us in this strange parable. It isn’t the abundance that my faith, and Jesus himself in the Gospel of John 10:10b promises, not yet anyway. But, while completely rejecting the blame we place on ourselves for our suffering, he still gives us work to do. He tells us to nurture ourselves, to tend to our piece of the garden and see what comes of it. It is not much, but it is enough
That’s all I can tell myself anyway, as we have passed yet another empty due date. I just gotta keep on digging away, trying to turn up new nutrients. And maybe in nurturing myself, that goodness might spread in the garden around me and around you. We won’t eradicate suffering, but maybe we can alleviate it a little together.
