One More Year
"Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, ‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?’ “ ‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.’ ”"
— Luke 13:6-9
Just before this, people brought Jesus news of Galileans whom Pilate had killed while they were sacrificing. He raised a second disaster himself: a tower at Siloam had collapsed and killed eighteen people. Twice he told the crowd they would die the same way unless they turned back, and only then does this story arrive. The scene straight after it is a Sabbath, a woman bent double for eighteen years, and an argument about whether she could wait one more day. The Greek word for the man who answers the owner means the one who tends vines, and nothing tells us whether he was a slave, a hired worker or the manager. What he volunteers for is hard and filthy: breaking up packed ground by hand, carrying in animal dung. The verb he uses for letting the tree stand is the everyday word for cancelling a debt. Someone speaks up for what has already been condemned, and offers to pay for the delay with his own hands.