October 19 2022
THE DEATH OF A SINGLE TREE.
Nobody can escape death, yet we all try;
Trees are life: we kill them and we die.
Death is part of life: just look at ‘fall’, when trees, in multi-colored shades, say so long to summer and embrace the winter death, awaiting re-birth in spring, followed by the soaring of summer and the glory of fall.
Trees signal life, evident how the Tree of Life occupies a prominent place in the Garden of Eden. That singular tree makes me believe that every tree is the Tree of Life, and that by cutting them down indiscriminatory, we abet death. So, why did Jesus kill a tree? Why?
Jesus was hungry. He looked around for a snack, and saw a fig tree. Mark 11: 12-14 relates the story.
“He went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs.” Then, quite unreasonably, he cursed the tree, and it died almost instantly.
I wonder, was there a special reason why Jesus did this unusual act?
I believe, Jesus had an ambiguous relationship with trees. He knew that his death would happen while hanging on a tree. He also knew that on the “Tree”, eternal life depended: “do not eat from this tree, because if you do, you certainly will die”, says Genesis. We did eat from the tree, but when Jesus tried to still his hunger, there was no fruit, ‘because it was not the season.’ How strange a happening: it looks totally bizarre.
Consider: Jesus healed the sick, made the lame walk, resurrected the dead, fed thousands from scratch, but when he himself was hungry, he barked upon the wrong tree.
What happens here?
A couple of things come to my mind: first, Jesus, with his divine hindsight and foresight, perhaps visualized both the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1-2, and again in Revelation 22, telling us that “on each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.” Perhaps Jesus, hungry and overtired, imagined himself already in the new Eden, where trees continuously bear fruit.
Trees and us.
We dwell in world where trees are seen as a highway to halt hunger, rudely aborted to grow soybeans to fatten pigs. Also, trees are wantonly slaughtered to provide building material, so they vanish everywhere, causing earth’s wildlife populations to plunge by an average of 69% in just under 50 years, as we continue to clear forests, consume beyond the limits of the planet and pollute on an industrial scale.
Deuteronomy 20: 19 warns us that even in times of war trees must be spared. However, we now have come to the point where they, rather than absorbing our poison, now breathe out CO2 through fires. No longer is the Amazon a carbon sink: the opposite.
So why did Jesus deliberately destroy one tree for no obvious reason?
The Tree as an example.
All trees are symbols of God’s grace. It could be that this fig tree represented humanity in general. It stood for us, for you and me. Jesus, as the ultimate teacher, uses graphic examples to make a point, the point being that we must bear fruit, serving God in and out of season, live to improve and heal God’s creation, bear fruit for eternity, failure to do so means death.
Unreasonable?
When Paul spoke at the world’s most famous debating place, the Areopagus, where the ‘wise philosophers’ debated the issues of the day, (See Acts 17: 28) he postulated that, ”For in him we live and move and have our being,” a well-known thesis for these Athenians. We tend to spiritualize these words, pointing to God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit in all sorts of pious ways, but I believe that these words apply directly to creation, where Paul sees creation as an expression of God, making Bonhoeffer state that: it is specific to the Christian faith to equate God with creation, that life has its wellspring in this world in God and so bounces back from this world to God.”
The tree is a symbol of life.
The Bible starts with a Tree, has a Tree pounded into the Golgotha Hill, and has the Tree at the end. The Bible ends with these beautiful and reassuring words: “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
“When Jesus reached the tree, he found nothing but leaves.”
And then, is there a connection between the leaves of the Trees in the New Creation, and the leaves on that Fig Tree Jesus cursed? Are both healing agents? Did the death of that single tree become his cross, and healed us all?