This essay first appeared in our weekly Scripture reflection newsletter on March 22, 2025.
If they are large enough, Jesuit communities will usually have “house jobs” for various Jesuits. To begin with, there is the superior, who oversees the whole community. That’s a formal assignment from the Provincial, or regional superior. Under the community’s superior is usually a “minister,” who is charged with maintaining the physical upkeep of the house. (In my first few days as a Jesuit novice, I was quite confused when a certain Jesuit brother was introduced as the minister. It sounded as if he were somehow the Protestant chaplain for the house.) Sometimes assisting the minister is a “sub-minister.” Recently someone told me he was the “interim sub-minister.”
Most Jesuit communities will have a “guestmaster” as well. Other jobs, especially in novitiates, still go by their Latin titles. In the novitiate, the “manuductor” was the novice who assigned the other novices tasks around the house. The man in charge of caring for the community cars is sometimes called the “Car Dux” (literally, the Leaders of the Cars) or, even more grandly, the “Car Rex” (King of the Cars).
These days, my job at America House Jesuit community is as the gardener, which means I care for our rooftop garden. (And yes, there is a “sub-gardener.”) That has necessitated coming to know something about flowering plants, bushes and trees. I’m always learning something new.
For the first year, my trees looked glorious. But after another year or two, the trees began to look wan, with curled and brown leaves.
A few years ago, I purchased some trees online (yes, you can do that) to plant in big planters on our roof. When they arrived (in several tall boxes) I had images of beautiful flowering cherry and dogwood trees providing shade during the torrid New York summers. For the first year, they looked glorious. But after another year or two, the trees began to look wan, with curled and brown leaves. A Jesuit in the community has a friend who is a horticulturist, so I asked her. She said, “The trees have exhausted the soil.”
I thought instantly of the Parable of the Fig Tree, which we read about in this Sunday’s Gospel. The fig tree has been in a man’s orchard for three years but has not produced any fruit. He tells the gardener that if he doesn’t cut down the tree, it will “exhaust the soil.” In response, the gardener reassures the man that he will fertilize it (we’ve tried that with our trees to limited success) and if it doesn’t bear fruit after a year, then he will cut it down.
As the New Testament scholar Gerhard Lohfink says in his book The Forty Parables of Jesus, the gardener becomes “a kind of advocate for the fig tree,” pleading for an extra year before it is cut down.
Jesus offers Israel, the People of God—and by extension, all of us—one more chance. He will nourish the tree with his words and deeds and try to help it to flourish—as he does for all of us.
What would the original hearers of this parable have thought? They might have remembered John the Baptist’s line in Matthew, “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the tree; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Mt 3:10). Into that rather bleak prediction comes Jesus, who offers Israel, the People of—and by extension, all of us—one more chance. He will nourish the tree with his words and deeds and try to help it to flourish—as he does for all of us.
But our time is limited. The parable, says Lohfink, is an “imploring appeal” to all of us that we will “not fail to make use of the reprieve that we have been granted.” Jesus’s parables always stress the urgency of the invitation to enter the reign of God.
Nothing is ever dead for Jesus.
In our own lives, we might ask: Where are we barren, fruitless and even “exhausting the soil”? How can we let Jesus help us to flourish and produce, as he says in another parable, “thirty, sixty, a hundredfold” (Mk 4:8)? (Yes, I know I’m mixing my agrarian metaphors, but you get the idea.)
Nothing is ever dead for Jesus. As we see most vividly in the story of the Raising of Lazarus, nothing—not a stone, not a stench, not the doubt of the crowd—can prevent Jesus from giving life (Jn 11). And nothing can prevent him from helping us to flourish, even if it seems that we are simply “exhausting the soil.” For with Jesus, for as long as we live, there is always another chance to bear fruit that will last.
