I said, "FIGS!"

I’ve never been a particularly good activist. It doesn’t come naturally to me. The prophetic ministry of a priest is really important and it’s one that I’ve had to work at. It’s important to pay attention to issues that affect the poorest in our communities, to join in advocacy efforts on the ground. It’s important to recognize more broadly speaking in the life of the church that nonviolent resistance—protests, marches and public demonstrations—are where a lot of our young people are showing up. It’s where a lot of our young people express their Christian faith—a faith in solidarity with Jesus who sat with the outcast, ministered to the poor, lifted up the lowly. 

Though I am somewhat of a reluctant activist, I have to say, one of my favourite things about watching a march or going to a protest is looking at the signs that people make. I remember when Greta Thunberg came to Vancouver in 2019 for a climate rally. I think there were something like 10,000 people who marched that day, including a majority of middle school and high school students who had joined hundreds of thousands of teenagers around the globe in staging ‘walk outs’ from their classes in order to sound the alarm bells around the climate crisis. When Greta came to Vancouver, I remember seeing some of the signs that people had brought: “There’s no Planet B” was one. “Respect your Mother” with a picture of the earth inside the ‘O’ was another. My favourite: “I’m sure the dinosaurs thought they had more time, too.”

My all-time favourite protest sign, though, was one that I saw at a Vancouver march for LGBTQ communities. Someone had made a sign—and in signature queer fashion, it was really clever, it still makes me laugh—it had a drawing of Jesus with his face in his hands, and written overhead were the words, “Guys, I said ‘God hates figs!’” 

(There’s a similar meme online where Jesus is sitting at a computer, and autocorrect keeps underlining ‘figs’ and Jesus is just shaking his head—exasperated). 

God hates figs. Three times in the Bible we have a story where Jesus gets really angry with figs. There’s a story told both in the gospel of Matthew and of Mark, where Jesus is walking home after a long day. He’s hungry and he sees a fig tree. He goes up to it thinking there will be some fruit ready to eat. But, the tree is dry and any remaining fruit withered up. Jesus curses the fig tree, in the same way that we might get a little snappy when we’re hungry and we’ve been out in the hot sun and it’s been a long day. 

In Luke’s gospel, which we heard from today, Jesus tries a different approach. Instead of cursing the fig tree directly, Jesus talks about the fig situation through a parable. To paraphrase, he says something along the lines of: “there once was a man who had a vineyard with fig trees, and he was really hungry, and he was so excited to eat from one of his fig trees, but what do you know? The tree was dry and there were no figs and that man went away hangry!”

Jesus kinda hates figs, it would seem, so we ought to stop and ask, “why?” What deeper meaning is behind these trees?

Fig trees are common in the Holy Land—in the land where Jesus was born and grew up and held his ministry. They are common in what we know today as Israel and Palestine, namely in the Palestinian districts of Nablus and Ramallah. As a nutritious fruit, rich in antioxidants, figs are a staple of the Middle Eastern diet. Fig trees in the Bible go as far back as the Caananites. We know figs as the dried fruit you can buy preserved in packets. You can get them at most big chain grocery stores or more locally at Ayoub’s market on Lonsdale. Figs are dried in the sun, collected in large vessels from lands across the Middle East. In some places, children stamp on the fruits to compress them. 

I understand that there are a number of sayings—proverbs—in the Holy Land that have to do with figs. Among them: “I tasted the first fruit. I hope my life has a long route” and, “If we have dried figs, we are safe from hunger.” For Jesus and for the people who live today in the land where Jesus ministered, for them, the fig tree is a sign. When it is producing fruit and feeding the people, it is a sign of health, of abundance—of safety. When it is dried and withered up, it is a protest sign of sorts—a warning that famine is near. So, perhaps it’s no wonder that Jesus is as angry as he is about the fig trees that have no fruit. He’s scared. He’s concerned for the people who will have no food; he’s concerned for the land that is prophesying a grim and worrisome future—perhaps even a grim and worrisome present. He’s sounding the alarm bells so that people, like the gardener in the parable, will come and tend to the crisis—put some manure around the tree and watch it closely for a time—bring it back to life. 

There’s also a version of this parable where Jesus isn’t the angry land owner, but the gardener. Jesus is the gardener standing in solidarity with people around the world who are Indigenous to the land but find their lands now owned—whether through just or unjust means—by someone else. The land owner coming home to the vineyard and finding no fruit, is maybe an example we know all too well, of a greeder buyer trying to take over land that once housed a vibrant community for profit, profit that will never return to the people who actually live in the area. The gardener, then, who is left to till and manage the land cries one last desperate plea: leave it alone for one more year, and if I can’t do anything with it by then, ok, cut it down, but please give me one more year.

I’m part of a Facebook group called North Shore Home Rentals. It’s run by a local realtor who has made it his mission to connect good home owners with good tenants and good tenants with good homeowners. The realtor is kind of a fig tree gardener, in my mind. Whenever a homeowner posts a rental suite with a reasonable rent, the realtor comments thanking the homeowner for the rate, praising them for it. Likewise, when a tenant posts looking for their next place to hang their hat, the realtor comments with an affirming word, lifting up tenants who are looking to put down roots in local North Vancouver neighbourhoods. Reasonable rent and tenants who put down roots are things that lead to thriving communities in a transient and increasingly socially isolated world. These are efforts that help us stay with what’s good in the land we tread beneath our feet; these efforts are like trees we look to to feed people in our communities looking to stay local or become local here.  

I wonder, what are the trees that are Indigenous to the land in North Vancouver? What are they trying to tell us?