Cursed Fig Trees and Fruitful Soil: God’s “Nature Logic” | S4 E3

Welcome back to The Extraordinary Story. In this episode, we return to Jerusalem on the morning after Jesus’ triumphal entry as he curses a fig tree. We’ll learn why he did such a strange thing and why he insisted to Greeks that he was a grain of wheat and what it tells us about the Garden of Eden and us. This episode is all about the nature, logic of the Gospel and the way the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is built into the very logic of the cosmos.

This is The Extraordinary Story, a podcast that tells the story of the life of Jesus Christ. God himself entered the confusing maze that is our world to transform it into a path that leads to him today and always. The Extraordinary Story is brought to you by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. I’m Tom Hoopes. I’m a writer in residence here at Benedictine College.

So today, we’re actually going to look at three times that Jesus compares himself to plants on the most important week of his life, but we’re going to start with the fig tree in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 18. “In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he was hungry, and seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it, and found nothing on it but leaves only. And he said to it, ‘May no fruit ever come from you again.’ And the fig tree withered at once.”

Well this is a very strange story, one of the strangest in the Gospels. In fact, there’s a comedian who does a routine about how strange it is that Jesus did this. It’s the day after the big entrance into Jerusalem, and Jesus is there, and we are told he is hungry. This is a significant statement, especially this week, the week that starts with the cleansing of the temple and ends with the passion. “I am hungry” is kind of a precursor to Jesus’ “I thirst” from the cross.

First of all, it means Jesus is a man like any other, he gets hungry. He has human physical weakness. His hunger pain is real, and the pain of the passion will be real. But it can also be taken as a meaningful statement in that when you and I say I’m hungry, we’re probably just complaining, but when Jesus says it, he’s trying to draw attention to something. Saint Bede points out that Jesus sometimes speaks in parables, and sometimes his actions are parables. This is a case where his action is certainly a parable.

We hear in the Gospel that he went to the fig tree and found nothing but leaves only, so he cursed it. What do fig leaves and cursed trees remind you of? It reminds me of the time that God went looking for Adam and Eve and found them ashamed and dressed in fig leaves. In fact, it’s often noted that that original tree from which they took the forbidden fruit was more likely a fig tree than an apple. Anyway, this makes the perfect symbol and a perfect object lesson. God gave Adam and Eve two commandments, be fruitful and multiply, and don’t eat from the tree. They broke both. Now we have Jesus at the beginning of the big week of redemption history coming to a fruitless fig tree, finding only fig leaves, and cursing that tree.

So it’s clear that we’re back to what we have been focusing on this season, God’s attempts to re-edenize the world. I’m really excited by this concept, which is fairly new to me. The father wanted us all to be happy together in paradise, but we blew it. Now, instead of letting us drift away, he decided to come and restore paradise. When one of my children disobeys, I punish them to bring them back into line, not because I hate them, but because I love them. I want to restore what we should have. This is what the father has done. He longs to be our friend and he plans to make it happen. We’ll see the many ways he wants to restore Eden as we go along through the week.

But think about it, what do we know about the paradise of Eden? Paradise was the place where Adam and Eve were made for each other. Jesus has said that he is the bridegroom for the church, his bride. We’ll see that in the weeks to come in a major way. Paradise is also a principality, a place with real rules about following God’s will. And Jesus has said we need to get back there to a place where we follow God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. And Jesus came to renew our ability to do just that. And we’ll be focusing a lot on that during Passion Week also. We’re going to look at all these things because we think of all these things when we think of the Garden of Eden.

But what first and foremost do we think of when we think of the Garden of Eden? We think of a garden. We think of trees and vines and bushes and grass and plants. And not just a garden of plenty, but a garden that Adam tills and keeps. So what about the garden-ness of the Garden of Eden? Well, what was true of Adam and Eve is true of us. We work in the garden, but God’s the one who makes it grow. Here is the fascinating way Genesis describes the Garden of Eden and Adam’s place in it. “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground. But a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till and keep it.”

Well, this is fascinating the way it describes how God created the garden for the man and the man for the garden, and the man came out of the earth in the garden. It’s this oneness between man and the garden. But then look how Jesus describes the Kingdom of God. Earlier in the Extraordinary Story, we heard him say, “This is how it is with the Kingdom of God. It is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land, and would sleep and rise night and day, and through it all the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how.” Jesus added, “Of its own accord, the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.”

So Jesus describes how painstakingly slow the growth of his kingdom, the church, is and how much the human being has to do with it and not to do with it both at the same time, much in the way that Genesis describes Adam in the Garden of Eden. St. Paul once explained how this works. Paul had started the church in Corinth, and it grew under the preaching of another Christian named Apollos. He described the principle that always applies in these cases. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”

As in the Garden of Eden, so in salvation history, God began it, he assigns us to tend it, and he will make it grow. How long does this take? Well, anyone who’s done a Jesse Tree project in Advent knows the answer. It takes a long time. Adam tended the Garden of Eden, Noah cared for a mini Eden on the Ark until the olive plant said it was safe, Abraham found a sacrifice tangled in thorns, then came Moses who spoke to God in a mysterious fiery bush and received manna from heaven, and it took a very long time for the shoot from the stump of Jesse to establish the Kingdom of David forever. You see this same nature logic throughout the Psalms. In Psalm 1, the just man is like a tree planted near streams of water that yields its fruit in season, its leaves never wither. In Psalm 92, they that are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.

So it’s a great metaphor. All the power is God’s, and if we take our plant away from him, it’s like shading a plant and denying it water. It will die, not because God is mean, but because God is the source of abundant life. If we cooperate with God’s law, his logos, the logic of the universe, things will go well for us. They will go very well for us, according to the prophet Ezekiel. He writes, “Thus says the Lord God, I too will take from the crest of the cedar, from its topmost branches, tear off a tender shoot and plant it on a high and lofty mountain.”

Then Ezekiel writes something that should remind us of Jesus on his last week of earth. “I the Lord bring low the high tree, lift high the lowly tree, wither up the green tree, and make the withered tree bloom.” Ezekiel is describing in advance exactly what we see in the fig tree, exactly the object lesson Jesus wants to make. That brings us to our story when the day after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus was hungry and punished a fig tree for having no figs. He made it wither and die.

Jesus doesn’t harm plants out of spite, and he didn’t wither up the fig tree as a lesson to other fig trees. The lesson of the fig tree is for us, and it’s that Jesus comes to our trees expecting them to have grown, expecting to see the fruits of our faith. St. Mark makes the lesson even clearer by pointing out that when Jesus punished the fig tree, it was not the season for figs. Fig trees can only produce figs in certain seasons, but people are different.

Jesus wants us to produce works of prayer and repentance at all times in season and out. The point of the whole thing is that fig trees exist to be fruitful, and we exist to be fruitful. We exist to love God and neighbor, and God expects our fruitfulness. He is patient, but as we saw last time, he grows tired of relenting eventually. But let’s look deeper into God’s Garden with another plant metaphor from the same week. This is from the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 12. “Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, Sir, we wish to see Jesus. Philip went and told Andrew. Andrew went with Philip and they told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me, and where I am, there shall my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.”

So, at the beginning of this Gospel, we hear that some Greeks had come to worship at the Passover feast. Jesus here is giving a very non-Jewish or non-Semitic interpretation of his redemption for them, and it’s fascinating to hear him explain the redemption in non-religious terms. He says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” He’s saying that death and resurrection is built into the very nature of the cosmos. We see the same thing in the Genesis account of creation, where the plants of the earth grew on the third day, which is seen as a prophecy of the resurrection precisely because of what Jesus says today.

As Benedictine College theologian, Dr. Matthew Ramage, points out, the cosmic repercussions of this gospel passage have been recognized throughout the history of the Church, from St. Cyril of Jerusalem to Pope Benedict XVI. St. Cyril said, “From the analogy of nature, consider these matters, and understand from them what is seen to this day. Wheat, it may be, or some other kind of grain, is sown, and when the seed has fallen, it dies and rots and is henceforth useless for food. But that which has rotted springs up in fresh green, and though small when sown springs up most beautiful. God, knowing your unbelief, works a resurrection year by year in these visible things.”

From the very beginning, St. Cyril saw that the very cosmos is set up to show death and resurrection, and he would say that the same god who created the cosmos in the same instance that he created all time, in the same instant eternally that he created the death and resurrection of Christ, that that same god is showing the death and resurrection of Christ in all of reality. With more understanding of science nearly two millennia later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said essentially the same thing. He was serving as the Vatican’s doctrinal leader in 1985 when he wrote, “The Paschal mystery, the mystery of the dying grain of wheat, appears before us among the ideas of creation. Man must become with Christ a grain of dead wheat, to truly rise again and truly be lifted up, to be truly himself. Only then does he attain his real goal.”

Ratzinger returned to the theme again and again. In 2002, as Pope Benedict XVI, he interpreted it this way, when he said that suffering is necessary to love. “When we know that the way of love, this exodus, this going out of oneself, is the way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people. He becomes hard and selfish.”

Ramage cites generations of theologians who have embraced this idea that as Fulton Sheen put it, “the law of immolation is a basic law running through all nature.” Larry Chapp says that Christ appearing as a slaughtered lamb in heaven marks the very identity of the form and life of the world. They all agree that we should relieve suffering, but they also all agree that nonetheless suffering is necessary for love and therefore suffering is necessary for redemption. Then the Gospel reading ends with an amazing glimpse at the inner dialogue of the Trinity, which shows the humility of God, the Son glorifying the Father and the Father honoring the Son. This is from John’s Gospel, Chapter 12:

“Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ Philip went and told Andrew. Andrew went with Philip and they told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it. And he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me. And where I am, there shall my servants be. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name.’ Then a voice came from heaven. ‘I have glorified it and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing by heard it and said that it had thundered. Others said an angel has spoken to him. Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ He said this to show by what death he would die.”

Jesus suggests that he might want out of this whole suffering thing, but for the sake of his Father’s glory, he will do it. In return, the Father will honor anyone who serves Jesus. And then Jesus adds, ‘when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.’ In other words, this law of suffering, which is in nature, actually appears in one way in the Trinity, where the father and the son are each bowing to each other and accepting the other for the sake of the other. So as Jesus, the man from heaven, the divine figure who enters our maze, enters into our life, he brings this principle of suffering with him.

As St. Paul says, Jesus, “offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death. He was heard because of his reverence, and son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” That’s an astounding sentence. Jesus pleads to be spared suffering and death. The father hears and respects his prayers, and then he suffers and dies anyway. The only way this can be a positive answer to a prayer, is if it meant that Jesus accomplished what he prayed for. And in the gospel, it seems he did. “Now the ruler of this world will be driven out,” says Jesus, and he himself will be lifted up, which is a reference not just to the crucifixion, but also to the resurrection and the ascension as well. The eternal son of God dying a torturous, humiliating death apparently is well worth what the crucifixion brought about, the defeat of death in the beginning of the re-edinization of the world. So fig trees wither at God’s command, but in another plant metaphor, he says that dead things bloom at his command. He says that unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. When we do God’s will but see no growth, we can remember that God can bring life from our sacrifice. He will make the withered tree bloom. But if we give forth no fruit, we can expect to be destroyed just like the fig tree.

In fact, later in the week, Jesus will double down on this idea that if we bear no fruit, we will be destroyed. The Fathers of the Church take the words almost literally when on the night of the Last Supper, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches, he who abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” So as we know, Jesus is very fond of these nature metaphors. And just as he compared himself to the wheat, which appears in the Eucharist in the form of bread, he also compares himself to the vine, which appears in the Eucharist in the form of wine. This constant unstoppable growth of plants tells us something about God’s power that comes to us through our union with him in the Eucharist.

St. Ambrose says you can almost imagine Jesus on the cross as a vine growing up a trellis. And St. Augustine wrote, Christ would not have been the vine had he not been man, yet he would not have supplied such grace to the branches had he not also been God. Christ is the man in the maze who helps us climb out because he’s God, but he couldn’t be among us to start with unless he was also man. The fathers parsed every part of the parable of the vine because they saw it as central to this nature metaphor that Jesus extends in the re-edinization of the world. St. Cyril of Alexandria said, “If we demonstrate what kind of union we have by only a mere barren confession of faith, without sealing the bond of our union by the good works that produce from love, we will be branches indeed, but still dead and without fruit.”

So he says we basically don’t have faith unless we’re also producing fruit. Jesus says that his father cares for the vine by removing useless branches, saying, “every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit.” Well, the fathers wanted to know exactly what this pruning was. And St. Clement of Alexandria said “This pruning knife that God uses to prune his vine is the word, because the Book of Hebrews says, ‘the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit.'” He says that this is the pairing instrument that the vine dresser uses. Specifically, he says, “The word, the knife, clears away the wanton shoots, compelling the impulses of the soul to become fruitful, not to indulge in lust.”

He also said vanity is what gets pruned away. “The word of God works by reaching into the depths of each person’s inmost soul and having each person’s hidden purpose revealed before it as God,” he said. “It brings its keen edge to bear on our vain pursuits by the workings of the Spirit.” St. John Chrysostom said Jesus spoke of pruning with relation also to the persecutions then coming upon them, and that the Vinedresser parable shows that persecutions make men stronger. So this law of nature that works through God himself and in nature from plants to our lives is very real to the fathers of the Church and to Christians ever since.

And I want to go back to a Gospel story I skipped over earlier in The Extraordinary Story because I think it’s key to this whole re-edenization of the world and how we can be trees that bear fruit. Luke says in chapter 13: “Jesus told this parable, ‘A man once had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground? And he answered him, Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then, if it should bear fruit next year, well and good. But if not, you can cut it down.'”

There is good news in this reading, but also important news about mercy. Here is a master, much like Jesus, who finds no more figs and wants to destroy a fig tree. The gardener begs for him to spare the tree for a year so that he can tend it and strengthen it. The master agrees. The message is about mercy.

First of all, God is merciful. God is willing to overlook our weaknesses and he takes the initiative to help us overcome our weaknesses. In other words, he isn’t a merciful judge. He’s a savior. But he doesn’t just demand that we become holy and then judge us kindly when we fail to. He forgives us precisely in order to give us more time not to fail. He wants us to do all the things necessary so that the grace can grow in our lives. In the parable, that means dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good. But if not, you can cut it down. So he wants us to do real work to dig into our problems, do real work to nurture grace in our lives, confess, pray, be nourished with the Eucharist and serve. And then you will find that that barren fig tree in your life will be revivified by God Himself and at last become part of His Extraordinary Story.

The Extraordinary Story is written by Tom Hoopes and produced by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Benedictine College is transforming culture in America through our mission of community, faith and scholarship. If you enjoy this podcast, please follow us on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Leave a review and share with a friend. Help us tell others about The Extraordinary Story.