Passion: The Last Moments of Jesus' Lifeናሙና

It’s Monday.

Yesterday was exciting. Can we say it that way?

Beautiful and inspiring, filled with a lot of cheering, fist bumps, and palm-waving.

But that was Sunday. Today is Monday. We all know how Mondays can be. And this Monday, Jesus’ feet hit the ground running, on mission and ready for a challenge.

It’s early spring right now, of course, and hot months in Israel don’t start until May. Still, they’re surely up and at ‘em before dawn, looking to avoid the mid-day heat. Besides, the all-important and crowd-drawing Passover Festival is looming closer and closer, and there’s work to do. So, they travel from Bethany to Jerusalem. Two miles. Forty-minute walk, tops.

Due to the short distance, it’s still early when they arrive. Jesus gets hungry. NoWaffle Housein sight, they look around to see what nature has on the menu. Something catches the corner of Jesus’ eye. His mouth waters.

A fig tree.

So, Jesus has an early-in-the-morning sweet tooth. But then a scrapped-from-the-menuletdown. Licking His lips, He pulls the leaves back to pluck His fig newton snack. To His disappointment, nothing’s behind it. It’s a fig tree without figs.

And He’s not happy about it.

In fact, instead of moving on and searching for berries or grain, He stands back and curses the tree, demanding nothing ever grow from it again.

Dang.

Here’s the thing. Jesus, after all, lived in skin and bone like you and me. Yet even in the moments of His rawest humanity, He was always painting a bigger picture, always pointing to a deeper narrative. And if there’s one thing we see recurrent in the heart of Jesus, it’s this -

He is always talking aboutthe fruit of our lives.

Over and over, we see Jesus has zero interest in pretension. Little tolerance for falsehood.

Jesus isn’t after religion; He’s after reality.

So many of His teachings go back to this – an ardent desire that His followers avoid trite and surface-level religion, and instead live the kind of gritty, authentic, God-central lives that actually bear fruit.

True fruit. As in true change, true character, true devotion, true worship, true power. He implores people to abide – or dwell – richly with Him through His Presence and words. And He promises when we do, we will bear a whole lot of fruit.

What kind of fruit? Well, for starters, in a little over seven weeks from today, Jesus is going to pour out His Spirit into those who follow Him and Paul will tell us the result of walking in that Spirit will be the production of Spirit-fruit(love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, longsuffering, self-control) instead of our old fruit (sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, drunkenness, disunity, selfish ambition, etc.).

It seems Jesus is angry with this faux fig tree because, not unlike His encounters with the Pharisees, He has come across something great on the outside but profoundly lacking where it counts. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, and perhaps like many of us, this tree wasn’t just lacking; it was false about it instead of honest, simply covering its emptiness and shame with a lot of leaves.

Point is, seeing the metaphor clearly in His own mind, Jesus was grieved that the tree He inspected was leafy but not fruitful.

He was hungry for something real and came up short-handed.

Jesus isn’t interested in leaves; He’s after fruit.

He isn’t interested in religious form; He’s after spiritual substance.

Perhaps the question begins to press into our souls – if Jesus were to draw near to our lives, would He find fruit or just leaves?

REFLECTION QUESTION

Why does Jesus seem so upset about this barren fig tree? Are there places in my life that look “leafy” but don’t have much “fruit” or influence of God’s life in me?