Sharing the gospel is to garden modestly — with love, trust, and faithfulness
May 27, 2025
St. John Don Bosco Parish in Manila has converted its football field into a vegetable garden for the poor. (Photo supplied)
By Michel Chambon
Rooted in the teaching of Nicaea — both in its text and its context — we Christians are called to proclaim the Kingdom of God, or to put it differently, to evangelize. But what does it mean to evangelize in God’s way?
The Bible offers us a fairly simple model, a luminous image, though one that loses some of its force in our artificial cities. To evangelize is to cultivate the common garden, just as God the gardener does with us and for us.
I had the grace of growing up on a farm where much of our food came from the vegetable garden, the chicken coop, and the orchard. I’ve always loved gardening and tending flowers. Also, I was particularly responsible for raising the rabbits we ate (when disease didn’t come through).
In this world of the land, gardening wasn’t a pastime for idle minds seeking contact with reality. Gardening was our daily bread.
At my parents’ and grandparents’ home, we go to the garden every day, especially the women. There’s always something to do or to pick, no matter the season. Each month of the year brings its share of tasks and vegetables to harvest. There are always weeds to pull and something to nibble on. One could spend hours thinning out carrots and beets. In summer, long evenings are spent watering rows of lettuce, peas, and zucchini.
But the garden is not the kingdom of productivity and profit. In that world, material success cannot be an end in itself. Our investment of time and effort can be wiped out by a single hailstorm or frost. A beautiful patch of lettuce may slowly disappear over weeks of drought or under the teeth of a passing animal. The garden can never be entirely controlled.
The garden is first and foremost a place to cultivate the self, the human community, and the whole creation. You come to it to contemplate the growing potato plants, to dig up beans, or to pull weeds one by one among young lettuce shoots. Sometimes, you come in a group to chat while working. The garden is above all a peaceful place where you coexist with nature, work alongside it, and admire its birds, snails, and butterflies.
In the family, there were always those who didn’t like gardening. For my brothers and father, the garden was women’s work, not the place of noble labor. They only came three times a year: to use the rototiller in the spring, to harvest potatoes in the fall, and to spread manure in the winter. Three punctual and physical tasks that were the pride of men.
Yet when my mother made raspberry ice cream from fruit she picked alone, it never occurred to us to say to the men: no ice cream for you. The same when it was finally time to enjoy a rabbit that I killed the day before! Whether it was vegetables from the garden, animals from the barnyard, or fruits from the orchard, when the harvest came, it came for everyone, without distinction. Sometimes, when we had too many crates of cherries, beans, and zucchinis, we even gave to neighbors and friends. We shared without counting.
This needs to be said again to slightly romantic urbanites: cultivating a vegetable garden and fruit trees is not a short-term productivity exercise. Sometimes we sow, water, weed, and then hail ruins everything. Sometimes we plant a tree not knowing whether we’ll be around in 20 years to enjoy its fruit. My older brother never liked gardening, but I enjoy reminding him that the huge walnut tree in the yard, under which he likes to park his tractors on hot summer days — well, I planted it exactly 30 years ago. It was a beautiful walnut given to us by my mother’s cousin.
I won’t recount my thousand little memories of gardening, pruning, watering, and making jam with my parents and grandparents. What matters here is to say again that evangelizing is, first and foremost, gardening, pruning, and watering! Evangelization is not military service that everyone must undergo. Each person, according to their gifts, availability, and passions, devotes the energy they wish. For some, gardening is fulfilling; for others, it’s terribly boring. But it doesn’t matter — when the vegetables and fruits arrive, they are for everyone, in abundance.
In the same way, the Kingdom comes for all, quietly and equally. Evangelizing is like gardening: we don’t aim for short-term productivity, and we remain wary of a controlling mindset. Gardening means working with the nature of things, trusting in time.
I can’t help but smile when I see my aging father now spending a lot of time in the orchard and vegetable garden. I don’t always agree with how he prunes or treats the trees. But he, who long mocked us for the time we spent in that modest-yielding garden, now that he no longer runs the farm, is following in my grandfather’s footsteps and has found a new passion for green spaces. Gardening has a place at every stage of life, each at their own pace.
So it should be with evangelization. Let’s not recruit by force, threats, or false advertisement. Let things and people take their time. You don’t make carrots grow by pulling on them.
In the Bible, God is a gardener. That is how He reveals Himself, and it matters. He is the one who plants and contemplates His Garden of Eden, that masterpiece where He places man and woman. It is in the guise of a gardener that the risen Jesus appears to the women. Gardening the earth is not a trivial or secondary activity. It is a noble task that not only feeds the human family, beautifies our common home, and soothes the soul, but also makes us participants in the being of God.
When we ask ourselves how to proclaim the Good News of Jesus, when we want to defend the splendor of the truth, let us not forget that God-the-gardener is our model. It starts with committed care and time. It would be healthy to begin by cultivating a few plants — working with them, savoring their scent and beauty, and learning how to nourish ourselves from what they produce. Even as they wither, these plants will whisper to us the secrets of the coming Kingdom.
To evangelize is not to force others to conform to a set of truths, beliefs and rituals. It is not to act like an industrial farmer obsessed with output and straight rows. It is neither about living in a parallel and unreal world, but about being rooted in this earth and seeking real food. Sharing the gospel is to garden modestly — with love, trust, and faithfulness. To evangelize is to cultivate, never entirely alone, the life that is given and that surpasses us. We give it a hand, cling to it, co-create with it, depend on it, but we never dominate it. Some come to love it deeply, and the abundant fruits they bear overflow for everyone.
In a city proud of its green spaces, let us learn to garden as the Creator shows us how.–ucanews.com
This is the first part of a three-part series of articles.