The Gardener Who Would Not Give Up

For seventeen years, Monica of Thagaste refused to stop digging around the roots of her wayward son. Augustine — brilliant, restless, entangled in hedonism and false philosophies — showed no fruit that matched his potential. His mother wept so persistently that a bishop once told her, "It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish."

Monica was doing the work of the gardener in Luke 13. When every reasonable observer would have declared Augustine a lost cause — a man who had fathered a child outside marriage, embraced Manichean heresy, and mocked the faith of his childhood — she kept loosening the soil. She prayed. She followed him from North Africa to Milan. She fertilized barren ground with her stubborn, aching love.

And in a garden in Milan, in the summer of 386 AD, Augustine heard a child's voice saying, "Take up and read." He opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and everything changed. The fruitless tree erupted into bloom.

Jesus tells this parable with holy urgency. The owner of the vineyard has every right to demand the axe. Three years without figs is three years too many. But the gardener kneels in the dirt and pleads: "Give it one more year. Let me work the soil."

That is the gospel in miniature — judgment is real, but so is the God who keeps digging, keeps fertilizing, keeps pleading for more time. The question Luke presses upon us is simple: Will we bear fruit while the Gardener still tends the soil?