Disclaimer: I use humor and sarcasm when I speak. It’s a built in function, I don’t know how to turn it off. My interest and curiosity is very much genuine, however.
… He yelled at a tree? It’s early spring… and the tree is described as doing what trees do… You know, like, photosynthesizing and stuff… To prepare itself for bearing fruit not too far down the road… But the poor thing got cursed all the same?
That seems a trifle unfair to the tree, right?
L&R,
F
Standard answer as found in commentaries, bible encyclopedias is that at that time of the year there would normally by edible shoots on the tree and the fact that there weren’t, it is a visible warning to the consequence of not producing the fruits expected by God.
Thank you for taking the time to answer.
Can you tell me more about these commentaries? I would LOVE to dig into that.
See I was under the impression that it was plausible or even likely that it was too early in the season for fruit to have been an absolute. A possiblity, sure. But not a cut and dry “must”.
However, I’ve never been to the middle east in ANY growing season, let alone the proper one to have made this distinction myself. I also understand that the calendar observed was obviously not Gregorian and that fact alone likely skews rather greatly my understanding of the concept. Annnd, I assume that the earth as a whole has DRAMATICALLY changed since then, in terms of climate, atmosphere, temperature, etc. and those things could be an ace hidden up the sleeve in regards to what was going on then that isn’t going on now.
I’m also still trying to locate reliable sources and gather opinion and perspective from many. (Hence the reason I am here.)
Thanks again,
L&R,
F
If you go to https://www.biblestudytools.com you’ll find the Bible in a variety of translations and lots of commentaries.
It was symbolic.
There is a lot of symbolism in the Bible, hidden meanings. You have to mine the Bible for gold. On one hand, there is the stuff that is just good advice. Teachings for a better life. But when you start looking at subtext…
Could it relate to the parable about the men who were given talents? The one who buried his talents instead of investing found his talents taken away because he bore no fruit. He was so afraid of the King that he did nothing wirh what he had.
Does it allude to Isaiah 11:1, which says, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit."
Or the Genesis commandment to go and be fruitful?
What does being fruitful mean to God? What exactly is God looking for?
Maybe its’s about authority over nature, or the world?
Or is there an even deeper meaning? Were the early Christians speaking in code? Hiding pearls from swine?
Maybe it points to Gods Will for institutions that do not do what they are created for. If they bare no fruit, God will make them ineffective and whither.
Thank you for your thoughtful and well-worded reply. It means a lot to me.
Your first sentence has me holding up the checkered flag though. I hope you don’t mind if I elaborate:
I seem to have to opposing (or at the least, not fully aligned) opinions on this here. “It’s symbolic.” Of course it’s symbolic. Right? There is no other rational explanation. Not to my understanding. Even in the various translations and versions I’ve read of the same thing, over and over and over. The takeaway is always the same for me.
BUT …
I have people, people who’s opinion I find valuable, who are learned and well-read and well-spoken and most certainly well-meant that tell me if I don’t take the Bible and all of it’s contents literally or “as true” then I’m just some dirty foot Pagan and that alone, that fact excludes me from the party.
Now I’ll level with you. I don’t believe that. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t. I can’t. But I do believe that symbols, parables, and the beautiful power of myth were used along with other truths and other means to boil an idea that is much too complex for my pea brain to comprehend down into a soup that my unsophisticated and uncultured palate can taste without my head exploding. That I can get behind.
And if that is the case, and I can still go to my church and hang out with the good weirdos, like me, in second service (because you know those first service folks are just up too damn early and happy about it, and that’s not right) and bring my son to the nursery to get oogled on by the young ladies that line up to love on our kids, I’ll continue to go to my pastor’s house for dinner with his family once in a while and draw pictures of him with sock puppets on his hands because I know they creep him out. I’ll continue to write my ‘mock’ or pretend studies for the youth ministry I’ll probably never get the courage to ask about actually doing. I’ll continue to give more of my income to the church than to my shoe collection (just kidding, I don’t have a shoe collection.) And yes, you better believe I am going to the Women’s Tea Social next weekend, at the Alice in Wonderland themed table and I’m almost done sewing my Alice Dress. I’ll continue to get teary eyed every time I see pastor Mike because he dedicated my son in that church… In front of all three of my post pregnancy double chins (the rest of the congregation was there too, I guess.) and where Pastor Andrew and I nerd out together like a couple of high school kids about Christian metal bands.
But if it’s not the case… Things feel a lot darker. I don’t get to go to my church, a place I finally feel like might be home. I don’t get to share with my partner, his family, nurture the relationships it’s brought to me. And worst of all, it isolates me from God. (And that, I think, is actually what Hell is.)
Sorry, I zigged where I should have zagged here. The TL;dr is: If it’s okay to accept the symbolism, the idea or the myth I believe the Bible is coded with, if that’s cool, then I actually have no more tough questions. I can stop right here. Because all of the questions I can’t answer are rooted in the ‘understanding’ that I have to take the Bible literally. And that’s something I can’t do. Not without a lot of tough questions.
Love and Respect,
F
Give me time to digest the entirety of your response before I fully respond to it. Until then, allow me to clarify what I said previously.
First and foremost, these are just my thoughts on this. I do not mean I know any of this.
By “Symbolic” I did not mean that the event did not literally happen. I do not know if it did or did not happen.
I meant the gesture itself is a message, meant to convey truth or understanding through the action taken. An example of this is when Ezekiel is told to bake bread over dung to symbolize something. And how Hosea’s marriage to an adulterer also symbolized something. And the story of David and Absolom potentially symbolized something- the whole story is a message. As well as Joseph decieving his brothers to decipher the state of their hearts, as did Solomon when he offered to split a child in half to discover the true mother.
God/ and or the Scribes/ and or the Prophets used physical actions and actual relationships to symbolize greater truths. As above, so below. The Patterns between the greater and the lesser are connected.
One way to understand the Bible is to study the creative ways in which the scribes communicated their message. Just as we have styles for writing, so did they. This is a part of context. You may ask a modern Rabbi the various ways in which they interpret their Scriptures, but you would still need to pay attention to understandings from a past perspective. How did ancient Rabbis read the text?
Through out history, as time passes, ideas and understandings change. The mind of man has been evolving since conception. It’s capacity, capability, philosophies, mythologies have all been in flux. For instance, the concept of Satan/Lucifer/the devil etc. This idea has changed over time.. As have the idea of “good” and “evil”
Zoroastrianism introduced the concept of children of light/ children of darkness. Before this religion, good and evil referred to the nature of a given action, not the inherent essense of a given person as Zoroastrianism teaches.
(while a study of psychology would suggest we have the capacity of both good and evil, light and darkness though most people follow authority regardless of its nature while a few can become self actualized and think for themselves, as discovered through years of testing, trials…perveying for themselves what is good and what is not.
And a study of biology and brain scans coupled with psychological testing has shown that the few people who behave with no capacity of empathy, ethics, and morality tend to have different brain structures/ activity/ capacity etc. There is a diagnosiible difference…though the nature or nurture of such things I do not know. They do not care what good or evil are… only self preservation.).
But if you never knew any of this, your interpretation of the past would lack understanding. Depth. The story of the devil/Satan/and Lucifer has alao been in flux. For example, the shepherd god of the greeks is the physical form identtified as the devil. But that did not occur for several hundred years after the first pope. The idea evolved. All ideas have evolved. All in flux, morphing intoo something else over time.
I have been adding to this post over time. If you first read it an hour ago, you would have missed what I have added. An example of what time does to what we think we know. And if you are just now reading this, then you don’t know exactly what I wrote before. And what I didn’t. Except for this passage which implies the reality of it.
Many of the old gods look like other gods.
Roman Gods for instance are a spin on Greek gods- similar, but not exact. And if you study a given list of old saints, angels, and demons you may find they were actually old gods from old cultures, rewritten, covered in plaster and white washed. This was done for a reason.
Because of this, the scribes themselves had to walk a fine line. They had to please the one in power just enough that they could convey the truth but hide its significance. Retain history by sticking it in the cracks.
The truth is there, because the scribes cared enough about the message. But it could not be obvious. They had to use Subterfuge.
Look to Jeremiah 8
8“ ‘How can you say, “We are wise,
for we have the law of the Lord,”
when actually the lying pen of the scribes
has handled it falsely?
9The wise will be put to shame;
they will be dismayed and trapped.
Since they have rejected the word of the Lord
We read this passage looking backward. Something happened, something took place, something that called the Law of God into question. Jeremiah is speaking to an ignorant people who think they are correct in their standing with God but don’t know any better. They have something that is being called, the Law of God. But it is somehow false.
God sends prophet after prophet to lead the people back to truth, but they will not listen.
Why did the scribes lie?
Can we trust the history that we think we know?
How did the Prophets know better?
When did this happen?
Was the truth ever clarified?
Do we still have the false text?
Did this happen again? Did the pattern repeat?
And this is why it is so important to not follow blindly. Because it was the deception surrounding the Law that caused Israel to fall. Those who thought they were wise were not listening to God’s correction because they thought they had the Word at their grasp. But they didn’t.
An enemy went into a field and sowed lies when the farmer was sleeping. The farmer knew what the enemy had done. The fruit of lies and the fruit of truth sprouted together, because the farmer allowed this. And together, all things will be sorted during harvest.
Another question is- what is the Harvest? What does this event look like? How does God sort out the truths from the lies that are so enmeshed together? Or, how does God sort out the children of lies (those whose lives bare the fruit of following the lies that have been sown) and the children of God (whose lives bare the fruit of listening to God and following His instruction)?
Along with the commentaries these 2 articles give a good explanation to your question.
It really depends what passages one is referring to.
The bible contains many different forms of literature some is allegorical, some is poetry but much is historical prose.
How one understands the bible boils down to where one believes the final authority lies.
Is it as timothy says, " ALL scripture is God breathed?" or is the truth in it determined by our intellect and current whims.
If God spoke and creation happened, then where is the objection to speaking donkeys, floating axe heads and suns standing still?
Worse if God cannot do these can he forgive sin, does he have authority to declare what sin is? Is he God?
I think one can believe what one likes, so long as one has a rational reason for that belief.
I’m biased as I firmly believe only a conservative Christian view of the bible is rational.
Hi,
It’s a great way to demonstrate how to have dominion over the earth.
Blessings
If you had looked it up, you would know fig trees bare two crops, so around 50% of the time you can expect to find something edible available.
Of greater concern is your questioning of the Lords sovereignty over all things. Your idea of “fair” has nothing to do with how God works.
You have to read and try to understand the meaning of the text. The whole text. The fig tree is a prop Jesus used to convey His message.
They had the form of religion but not the reality. They knew the right words to say, but their hearts were far from God.
This is offered as one take, but I feel some interpretations are subjective and personal, zigs are cool. My lesson gleaned was, “when Jesus comes to harvest, will you be bearing fruit or only have the appearance? There are consequences…”
I’ll try to answer this tough question , pardon me if im wrong.
Let’s look in Matthew 21:18-19 (ESV)
“In the morning, as He was returning to the city, He became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, He went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And He said to it, ‘May no fruit ever come from you again!’ And the fig tree withered at once.”
Concluding ans:
In sum, the cursing of fig tree in Matthew 21:18 must be apprehended not as an arbitrary act of divine caprice but an eschatological parable in action, a prophetic sign act acc to Ezekiel 4-5, operating within a theodramatic framework wherein Jesus, the Incarnate Logos, executes a symbolic judgement upon covenantal sterility. The fig tree, bearing only ostensible vitality through foliage, yet devoid of the proleptic fruits of repentance (cf Matthew 3:8) typologically represents apostate Israel under the Old Covenant, whose temple systems and religious leaderships had become spiritually anemic and ethically barren.
Patristic consensus- from Origen’s allegorical nuance to Chrysostom’s mora; clarity- situates this act within the dialectic of judgement and mercy, affirming that the fig tree is a synecdoche for any ecclesial or individual reality which maintains external religiosity without pneumatic fruitfulness. Christ, as the eschatological High Priest and telos of Torah, thereby enacts a sacramental indictment upon unfruitful religiosity, foreshadowing the temple destruction (70.AD) and the inbreaking of the New Covenant community - the ecclesia, defined not by cultic formality but by the Spirit-wrought fecundity (refer Galatians 5:22-23). Thus, the pericope transcends its horticultural literalism, functioning as a theophanic pronouncement of divine verdict embedded within the broader Christus Victor narrative arc, simultaneously affirming divine justice, covenantal transition, and the ontological imperative of bearing fruit worthy of the kingdom.