Are You a Fig Tree?

My wife asked me a question last week. Did I think it was weird, Jesus cursing a fig tree because it had no fruit?

Yes, I said. I think it’s weird.

She asked why. I started to answer and ran out of answer halfway through. I could give her the plot. A fig tree, no fruit, Jesus cursed it, the tree died. What I could not give her was the context around it. It had been over a year since I had last read the account, and somewhere in the middle of my answer I realized I was holding an opinion about a passage I could no longer recall in its proper setting.

That should have stopped me sooner than it did. It is worth noticing when it happens to you, because it happens to nearly everyone who has spent years around a Bible. A passage gets reduced to its headline, the gist survives, the context it stood in is gone. What is left is a strong opinion resting on nothing.

Two Gospel writers record this account, Matthew and Mark. Neither is in any doubt that it happened. How they tell it is another matter, shaped by two different writers with two different styles, organizing two different books. Matthew was there. He saw it himself, and in his account the whole thing collapses into a single moment on the way to a lesson about the power of faith. Mark was not there. He was recording what he heard from Peter, who, like Matthew, was an eyewitness. The way Mark arranges what he learned from Peter gives the event more context. It is the same event told from two points of view. Two book structures. Two different things to learn.

Mark’s structure is the one built to answer the question my wife asked, what does it mean for us. From Matthew we learn that faith has power. From Mark we learn that faith without works is dead. From both of them we learn that reading a verse without considering its context can get weird.

A verse without its context is not the truth, only shorter. It is a pretext. And a pretext is a lie standing on Scripture’s own authority. Bible study runs on one rule before any other: know the context, or you will miss the truth the passage is teaching.

So I went back and read Mark’s account. Not the verse. The whole chapter.

What the Verse Alone Gives You

Before the rest of the chapter, here is what memory alone had been running on. Pull Mark 11:12-14 out by itself and this is what you get.

On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.

Mark 11:12-14 (ESV)

Read on its own, that is a strange scene. Jesus is hungry. He walks up to a tree. He finds no fruit. Mark even tells you why, “it was not the season for figs,” which sounds like Mark himself is flagging the unfairness. And Jesus curses it anyway. Taken in isolation, the passage hands a skeptic an easy shot: an irritable miracle worker punishing a plant for doing exactly what plants do.

That was as far as my memory had gotten me. It was also exactly wrong, and the reason it was wrong is not some hidden detail buried in the Greek. It is right there on the same page, in verses I had not read in over a year and could no longer call to mind.

The Rest of the Page

Read past verse fourteen and the same chapter answers its own hard question.

And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. And when evening came they went out of the city.

Mark 11:15-19 (ESV)

Then, the next morning:

As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.”

Mark 11:20-21 (ESV)

Curse. Temple. Withered tree. Mark wrote it in that order on purpose. He opens the fig tree account, breaks away into the temple, then comes back and closes the fig tree account. That is not how you arrange events if you are simply recording what happened in the order it happened. It is how you arrange them if you want those two scenes read against each other.

This is not the only place Mark does this. He splits the account of Jairus’s dying daughter the same way, opening it, breaking away into the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years, then closing it once her account lands (Mark 5:21-43). Mark is not a careless narrator. He is a precise one, using placement to say something he does not say outright.¹

Here, the placement says: what Jesus just did to the tree, He is about to do to the temple. Read the two scenes side by side and the pattern is not subtle. A tree in full leaf, promising fruit, delivering none. A temple in full operation, promising the presence of God, delivering a marketplace. Leaves without figs. Activity without the purpose that gives the activity meaning.

Mark also tells you when this happened. It was the week of Passover, the one week of the year a fig tree’s early crop should already be showing alongside its leaves.² That early crop ripens on the previous year’s wood, in spring, often right alongside the tree leafing out. A tree this far along in leaf that early should have already been carrying something. “It was not the season for figs” (11:13) is true, and it is not the excuse it sounds like. The season for the main crop had not come. The season for this tree to be showing something had already arrived, and it showed nothing. It had leafed out ahead of what it could deliver. That is not bad luck. That is false advertising with roots.

Which is why the ending lands where it does. Mark does not say the leaves turned brown. He says the tree withered “away to its roots” (11:20). Fig trees are hard to kill, deep roots, minimal water needs, the kind of tree that survives poor soil for generations,³ which is exactly why sitting under your own vine and fig tree became Israel’s picture of settled peace (1 Kings 4:25; Micah 4:4). For a tree built to survive almost anything, root-level death is not a bad season. It is finished.

An Old Image

None of this was a new insult when Jesus used it. The prophets had already spent centuries reaching for the fig tree to describe Israel’s condition.

When I would gather them, declares the Lord, there are no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered, and what I gave them has passed away from them.

Jeremiah 8:13 (ESV)

Jeremiah is not describing agriculture. He is describing a nation that has stopped producing what it was planted to produce, and the withered leaves in his verse are the same withered leaves Peter finds six centuries later. Hosea reaches for the same tree to describe what Israel used to be, “the first fruit on the fig tree in its first season” (Hosea 9:10), before it went after other gods and became what it once was not. By the time Jesus stands in front of an actual fig tree with actual empty branches, He is not improvising an image. He is stepping into one that had been waiting for Him for centuries.

One More Year

Luke records a different fig tree, a parable this time, not an event, told earlier in Jesus’s ministry.

He told this parable: A man 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.”

Luke 13:6-9 (ESV)

Three years of nothing, and the owner is talked into one more. That parable is patience with a deadline attached, mercy that has not yet run out. Set it beside the tree Jesus curses on the road into Jerusalem, and the fig tree in Mark reads like the parable’s ending, spoken instead of merely told. The extra year is over. The vinedresser came back one last time and found the same thing he found the first three years.

Leaf Without Fruit

Once you know the symbolism and the context, the account is not weird at all.

Mark set the fig tree beside the temple on purpose. A tree in full leaf promising fruit and delivering none was already a stock image, generations old, for a people going through the motions of faith with nothing behind it. Jesus walked from that tree straight into a building doing the exact same thing: a great show of activity, delivering none of the fruit. Justice, mercy, and faithfulness, “the weightier matters of the law” (Matthew 23:23), were nowhere to be found. The curse was never really aimed at a plant. It was aimed at everything the plant had just finished pretending to be.

Which means the real question the account is asking was never “was Jesus fair to a fig tree.” It is closer to “does your leaf match your fruit.”

That is the relationship Jesus does not want from the people who follow Him. All show and no go. Everything that looks like the real thing, standing in for nothing that is.

Faith With Nothing Under It

James asks of people the question Jesus asked of a tree.

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

James 2:14-17 (ESV)

James’s complaint is not the words. “Go in peace, be warmed and filled” is close to a blessing. His complaint is that the words were the whole transaction. Nothing given, the person leaves as cold and as hungry as he came. That is a fig tree in full leaf. James names the failure in a single word, the one word Mark never needed because he had already shown you a tree withered to its roots. Dead. Faith with nothing under it is not weak faith. It is a dead thing wearing leaves.

What a Fig Tree Is For

Dead is the diagnosis. It only lands because the tree was alive for a reason.

Mark gave the reason in the account’s first sentence. Jesus was hungry (Mark 11:12). A fig tree is not planted to be admired from the road; it is planted to feed the one who comes to it hungry. That is the point the temple had forgotten. Jesus walked off the road and into it and named the exact hunger the leaves had failed to meet: the place was built to be “a house of prayer for all the nations” (Mark 11:17), where a watching world could come and find the living God. It had become a marketplace instead. Leaves without figs, this time in stone.

Feeding the nations was the whole assignment. Israel was planted to be “a light for the nations,” so God’s salvation would “reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6), and a tree in full leaf carrying nothing is a people keeping that light to themselves. That is the tree Jesus cursed and the temple He cleared, the same barren thing twice.

The assignment did not die with the temple. Days later the risen Jesus handed it to everyone who would carry His name.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Matthew 28:18-20 (ESV)

Every word points outward. All authority is His, so go. Make disciples, not admirers, of all the nations, the same nations the temple was built to gather and never did. The fruit a Christian is planted to bear is other people. Someone who did not know God brought to know Him. More believers, more worship, more of Him made known to a world that has not seen Him yet. That is the harvest. That is what the tree is for.

It sounds like more than one life could carry, until you see how the work divides.

“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”

1 Corinthians 3:6-7 (ESV)

No one grows the whole crop alone. One person plants a word that seems to land nowhere. Another waters it years later, never knowing who planted it. Someone else is there the day it breaks the surface. Each is paid for his own labor, and not one of them made it grow (1 Corinthians 3:8). God did. Your part is real and your part is partial. You plant. You water. He gives the growth.

What You’re Leafing Out With

A tree. A temple. A whole nation. Every example so far has belonged to someone else. The question does not stay there. It comes for your own leaves. Not whether you believe the right things. Whether that belief has grown any fruit, in you and through you both. Start with the fruit that grows in you.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

Galatians 5:22-23 (ESV)

Read the list again and notice whose portrait it is. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. That is Jesus. The Spirit grows this fruit to form Christ in you (Galatians 4:19), until you become a little Christ, which is all a Christian was ever meant to be. And a little Christ is the one thing a watching world cannot look away from. No one is argued into the kingdom by a bitter, impatient witness. People are drawn by someone who has started to look like the Lord they have never met.

Because the world is hungry. Under all the noise it is hungry for God, for a meaning it cannot manufacture and a salvation it cannot buy. We know what relieves that hunger. It is not us, and it is not our character. It is Jesus, and the God who so loved the world He gave His only Son (John 3:16). The fruit of the Spirit is what makes them willing to listen. Telling them is the harvest.

So the question Jesus put to a barren tree on His way into Jerusalem, the same one Israel was handed and failed, is hanging over your own leaves right now. If God put someone in your path hungry for meaning in their life, would you be able to feed them, to point them to the answers they seek, to point them to Jesus? As Christians, that is why we were planted, nourished, and fed, so that we could go and do likewise (Luke 10:37).

Answering Her Now

If my wife asked me that question again today, I would still say yes. It is weird.

I would mean something different by it now. Not confusing. Not unfair. Weird the way a mirror is weird when you were not expecting to see your own reflection in it. I went looking for what the account meant and found, on the same page I had not opened in over a year, something that was never really about a tree. It was about whether the leaves and the fruit match, and about who goes hungry when they do not, in Jerusalem in the first century and in whatever city you are reading this in now.

Reading it whole instead of in pieces was not incidental to finding that out. It was the only way to find it out. Context is not a scholarly nicety you can skip when you are in a hurry. It is the difference between a Jesus who curses a tree for no reason and a Jesus who has been naming this same rot in His people since long before there was a tree to curse. Read the whole page. Then ask what kind of tree you are, and whether anyone has ever gone away from you fed.

References

• The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV). Crossway, 2001.
• FigBoss, “Breba Figs: A Fig Tree’s First of Two Crops and the Varieties That Produce Them,” https://www.figboss.com/post/breba-figs.
• Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History, Book III, Chapter 39 (quoting Papias on Mark as Peter’s interpreter). Translated in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. I. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm.

Footnotes