Unless we understand this, Jesus’ cursing of the fig tree seems entirely out of character at best and petulant or mean at its worst. We must not think that Jesus was simply angry at the tree and struck out against it like a child might throw down a toy and break it just because he can’t make it work. Jesus was not being petulant. He was teaching an important lesson with two points. First, the religion of Israel, focused in her leaders, was not producing fruit. It was a case of blatant hypocrisy. Second, that or any other religion will wither up at last, becoming as dry as a tree that is no longer nourished by its roots.
We are in a section of Matthew’s Gospel that I have titled “The King’s Final Break with Judaism,” and we should be aware of how this is unfolding by now. We have had two symbolic actions: 1) the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in which the Lord presented himself as Israel’s true King, knowing that he would be rejected by both the leaders and the masses of the people; and 2) the cleansing of the temple, which would be no more permanent now than it had proved to be the first time. In the verses we come to now we have a third symbolic action: the cursing and withering of the fig tree.
Nothing in the Gospel of Matthew is put down randomly. We have noticed that many times already. Now we have two further examples. If religion is not buying and selling—if it is not the thriving religious establishments of the Jewish past or the evangelical present—then, what is it? We can hardly miss the answer Matthew gives. He says here that it is two things.
Yesterday I mentioned John White’s book, The Golden Cow: Materialism in the Twentieth—Century Church. We looked at the first of three areas White cited as abuses of the church related to commercialism. We will continue that discussion today by looking at the second and third areas of abuse he noted. Here they are:
When Jesus drove the money changers and those who were selling animals for sacrifice from the Court of the Gentiles, he justified his action by a comparison of two Old Testament phrases. In the first, Isaiah referred to the temple as a “house of prayer” (Isaiah 56:7). In the second, Jeremiah says that the hypocritical worshipers of his day had caused the temple to become “a den of robbers” (Jeremiah 7:11). Jeremiah was writing about hypocrisy. Jesus used the word “robbers” to describe the unjust extortion that was going on. But hypocrisy must also have been in his mind, as the story about the barren fig tree which follows shows.
