This morning we consider one of the strangest actions of Jesus in his entire ministry. Every one of Jesus’ miracles recorded in the Bible focuses on serving others – except one: Let’s read it now:

Jesus curses and destroys the fig tree because it had no figs -- even though it was not the season for figs. It almost looks as if Jesus is peeved; hungry and hopeful that this green tree will provide nourishment, upon finding the tree empty of fruit, he curses it in a fit of pique. We might act that way if we had the power; but Jesus? This story seems completely out of character.

Recall that Jesus has just entered Jerusalem, acting out the role of the returning Davidic king. We saw last week that Jesus is our perfect king, performing all the roles of government:

• He unites us from all different nations and ethnic groups
• He punishes all wrong
• He works all things together for good
• He is sovereign, in control of all that happens, even of evil

Why would such a king act in this way? Jesus is the King who is in control of everything that happens; he always works all things together for His glory and our good. How could this event fulfill those requirements?

The answer to this question provides a key for understanding the next two chapters of Mark. In cursing the fig tree, Jesus provides a visual parable of the necessity of bearing fruit for all who claim to follow Him. He then provides us both positive and negative lessons concerning how to bear fruit, lessons we must take to heart if we are going to glorify God, if we are going to show the world what God is like. In relating the continued conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, Mark teaches us vital lessons about how to become a dry, withered vine – and, in contrast, how to become a healthy vine, full of heavy, juicy fruit. This topic extends through the end of chapter 12; we’ll look at the first four lessons today, and consider the remainder next week.

Let’s begin by looking more at the story of the cursing of the fig tree.

Jesus is hungry; he sees in the distance a tree full of leaves. Many trees produce leaves and flowers simultaneously, but the fruit always follows the leaves. The nourishment provided by the sun via the leaves is necessary for the production of fruit.

Figs appear to be an exception, though in reality they are not. Fig trees produce flowers simultaneously with their leaves. But the flowers are encased in a fleshy, protective coverings which have the same shape as ripe figs, giving the false appearance of fruit. The fruit doesn't develop, however, until later. When pollination occurs inside these coverings (which requires the assistance of a special type of wasp), fruit develops. But the fruit, too, remains inside the fleshy covering. So the skin of a fig is actually the exterior, protective covering of the flower.

The tree that Jesus saw was unusual in two ways. First, it leafed out early. It looked to be especially well-watered by an underground spring or stream, and thus likely to produce abundant fruit. But when Jesus approached the tree, he found that it had neither ripe figs nor the precursors of figs, the fig-shaped flower modules. The tree appeared to be flourishing, but in reality it was producing nothing of value -- and never would.

So Jesus curses the tree. He curses the appearance of fruitfulness without the reality.

He’ll elaborate on this later this same week, as recorded in John 15:

So God wants much more than the appearance of fruitfulness: He wants us to become like Christ; for that’s what it means to be fruitful. To display the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, -- to be like Him as we depend upon him. That’s what this passage is about.

We’ll see how Jesus applies this concept to our own fruitfulness as we go through the other stories.

Recall that the temple had an outer court, the court of the Gentiles. No Gentiles were allowed to go any further into the temple. While God intended this area to be a place of prayer for the nations, the religious leaders had allowed it to become a strip mall. Merchants sold animals for sacrifices; moneychangers converted foreign currency into the coinage required to pay the temple tax. Others, not wanting to carry their merchandise around the large temple area, used the Court of the Gentiles as a shortcut between the city and the Mount of Olives. So this area had become like Main Street instead of a place to praise and glorify God.

Note that this was a deliberate action by Jesus; he had surveyed the scene the previous day, and decided what he would do on Monday (Mark 11:11). He throws out the merchants and turns over the tables of the moneychangers, scattering their nicely-piled coins all over the ground. Undoubtedly this caused a great commotion: "What do you think you’re doing?" "Hey, where are the authorities when we need them? There’s a crazy man in here!"

But then Jesus does something interesting: In the midst of all the commotion, he teaches (v. 17)! Jesus had to make clear that his were not the actions of a vandal, but those of the nation’s true King and High Priest.

In this teaching, he quotes Isaiah 56:

Do you see what Jesus is doing here? Temple-worship was ordained by God to picture the intimate relationship between the Lord and His people. It was to be a picture not only to the Jews but also to foreigners – and this particular part of the temple was designated for the worship of those foreigners. They were to be joyful in their prayers, as God reached out to all peoples.

But this Court had become a convenient place for doing business – a business that had lost all connection with the worship of the one true God. The entire system of temple worship had become only a set of rituals, requirements necessary to appease God rather than expressions of an intimate relationship. They would approach the temple with the attitude, "Oh, I have to do this, so that God won’t punish me. I’ll meet my needs here – get this over with, change my money, and I’ll be fixed until next time." You see the focus? "I, I, I; the temple worship exists for me." They did not focus on God. As we saw in our series on Leviticus, God instituted the sacrificial system to provide a series of pictures of His love and mercy – temple worship was never intended as a way to gain brownie points with God.

This leads us to our first principle for fruitbearing: The fruitbearer is God-focused in worship.

We worship to glorify God, to show through our teaching and our praise and our prayer what a mighty, loving, just, holy, and perfect God we have. Worship that loses this focus on God, services that become people-oriented rather than God-oriented, are in great danger of becoming like 1^st century temple worship.

How do we stay God-focused in our worship? These matters deserve a full sermon to cover; let me just briefly note three points here:

• First, our worship must focus on God’s word to us, in reading, teaching, and preaching.
• Second, our music should serve to sharpen this focus with lyrics that are soundly biblical, that we can hear and understand. The music itself should enhance our ability to understand and take to heart the message of the lyrics.
• Third, in our worship we should enjoy corporate prayer, God’s people speaking directly to Him, in praise, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication.

Jesus tells the woman at the well that those who would worship God must worship in Spirit and in Truth. That is what we want to do: To focus on the truth as proclaimed in God’s word; to exalt His name in God-honoring music, and to pray together fervently and deeply from the heart.

In sum, the central goal of our worship is to glorify God; A fruitbearer focuses on God in his worship.

Remember the context: Jesus has just judged the fig tree for giving the appearance of fruitfulness when it was really barren, and has rendered a judgment on the Jews for approaching temple worship like pagans, relying on a ritual to avert God’s wrath. So when Peter exclaims that the cursed tree is dead, Jesus summarizes the lessons about fruitfulness: "Have faith in God." He then shows that our faith extends to believing that our good God will fulfill His promises, so we can pray confidently in accordance with His word and know that He will answer. This statement is a further parallel between this account and Jesus' conversation with the disciples the night He is betrayed, as recorded in John 15:

Furthermore, as is brought out in verse 25, our faith must extend to our confidence in God's justice. As we saw last week, God will wreak vengeance when vengeance is due; He will right all wrongs, so we are free to love and forgive everyone who annoys us, everyone who does evil against us.

The principle here:

A fruitbearer has faith in God, as shown in his prayers and his forgiving spirit. If we really believe God works together all things for our good and His glory, we will pray with power according to His promises, and can forgive whatever slights or evils done to us.

Ray Stedman puts it this way:

Do you want to bear fruit? Trust God to right wrongs. Have faith in His promises. And pray for those promises in the lives of yourself and others.

The scribes, elders, and chief priests cannot believe Jesus' audacity. They think, "Who is this itinerant preacher who thinks he can come in here and cause a scene in the temple?" So that's what they ask Him: "Who do you think you are? We are the authorities here; if anything is wrong in the temple, we'll take care of it. Who gave you the right to come in here and do this?" Understand that they've already answered the question in their own minds: No one gave Jesus this right; in their minds, He's a nobody, stepping on their turf.

Think about this: do the chief priests and elders have a right to ask Jesus this question? Perhaps not in these demeaning words, and probably not in the tone of voice they used, but surely the religious authorities do have a right to ask about Jesus' authority. They can't let every Tom, Dick, and Harry (or every Nathaniel, Joshua, and Zechariah) enter the temple and turn over tables.

So why does Jesus avoid answering their question? Why doesn't he simply say, "My authority is from God"?

The reason Jesus doesn't answer is that these men are not interested in the truth. And Jesus exposes their lack of interest through the question He asks. In effect, He asks, "You ask me about my authority; let me ask you about John. Was his authority from God or from man?"

Look again at verses 31 and 32. Are they concerned at all with the truth? In their discussions, does the true source of John's baptism arise at all? No. Their entire discussion is framed in terms of the response of the crowds. They care not one whit for the truth, only for the political ramifications of their reply.

So Jesus' answer to them is this: "You don't care for the truth, so why should I answer you? But if you do care, remember: The source of my authority is the same as the source of John's -- as he himself indicated."

The positive lesson for us from this interchange is this principle:

The fruitbearer speaks the truth, regardless of expected response. We must not be like the politicians of ancient times (the chief priest, scribes, and Pharisees), nor the politicians of modern times, scripting our remarks to play to whatever audience is in front of us. If we are to bear fruit that lasts, if we are to take on the character of Jesus, we must be willing to speak the truth of the gospel, whether it is popular or not, whether we are in the midst of great revival or bitter persecution, whether it will lead to our being honored or our being put to death. We must be men and women of our word, as James reminds us:

This thought leads directly into the last section of today's text, where Jesus tells the parable of the tenants of God's vineyard.

Let's get a little background from the Old Testament prior to looking at the story itself. In 12:1 Jesus quotes from Isaiah chapter 5, where Israel is compared to God's vineyard. Let's read the first seven verses of that chapter:

God does everything one can expect of the owner of a vineyard to produce fruit, but in the end the vines produce only worthless grapes. Isaiah explains the parable: God looked for justice and righteousness among his people, but found instead bloodshed and distress. He looked for the qualities that would show that the people were being conformed to His image, but instead finds them acting completely contrary to His character.

In Mark 12, Jesus makes a clear reference to this passage of Isaiah, but adds new characters, the tenants of the vineyard, those in charge of keeping, nourishing, and helping the vines to bear fruit. To whom do the tenants correspond? Who is supposed to make the nation fruitful for God? The religious leaders: the scribes, teachers of the law, and Pharisees.

With that understanding, let's read the passage:

Why had the owner put the tenants in the vineyard? Both for the good of the vineyard -- as they care for it and make it fruitful -- and for their own good. They were expected to share in the productivity of the vineyard.

Just so, God put the religious leaders in charge of Israel for their good and His glory. Yet they rejected Him, and act as if their own selfish interests are all that matter. Ironically, by selfishly guarding "their own interests," they themselves miss out on the greatest joy of all: a loving relationship with King of Universe.

So God will do away with the existing tenants – the Jewish religious leaders – and will give to others the task of leading His people. Matthew's account makes this explicit; these words follow after the quotation from Psalm 118 concerning the chief cornerstone:

What is the lesson of this parable for us? How can we ensure that we bear fruit instead of being dried and worthless branches, like the scribes and Pharisees?

Consider the error of the tenants. They received numerous messages from the owner, but rejected the messages and harmed the messengers. Indeed, they rejected the owner’s son, thinking that they then would have vineyard to themselves.

Do you see what this means? They rejected the Word of God: the Word in both its written form and personal form. So God rejects them, creating His church, and destroying both the temple and Jerusalem by the hands of the Romans 40 years later.

Yet the stone they reject becomes the chief cornerstone. Jesus himself is the cornerstone of the new building, the church, which brings glory to God.

This then is our final principle from today's text for fruitbearing: The fruitbearer loves the Word of God, the Bible, and the Word made flesh, Jesus. The fruitbearer loves the truths proclaimed through the written word, and Truth as manifested in Jesus ("I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life").

We are completely dependent upon the Word of God if we are to produce any fruit. Remember again Jesus' warning in John 15:5: "Apart from me you can do nothing."

So we must love His word, devour it, asking God to open it up to us, asking God to make His word dwell in us richly,

Jesus curses the fig tree as a severe rebuke to the religious people of His day. Is there a parallel for the religious people of our day? Are we in danger of emulating the fig tree: having the appearance of fruitfulness without real fruit?

Undoubtedly the answer is "Yes." If we are to avoid becoming cursed fig trees, we must avoid at least four pitfalls:

• Relying on ritual: So often we think that because we perform a certain ceremony once in our life, or regularly every week, we are right before God. These Jewish religious leaders were perfect in their observance of rituals that God had specifically ordained. But they had no fruit; they did not take on the character of God. God rejected them, despite their outward obedience to religious rituals.

• Relying on numbers: Sometimes we're tempted to think, "We’re fine! Our church is growing by leaps and bounds! God is blessing us!" But remember, in terms of growth, few churches can match the cults. Churches can grow simply by appealing to people’s natural desires – by telling people what they want to hear, by avoiding the hard parts of Scripture. No. Numbers do not provide evidence of fruitfulness.

• Relying on doctrinal purity: Others are tempted to think, "We’re fine because we hold to the ancient truths. That’s what it means to be fruitful." Well, no. That’s not what it means to be fruitful. James tells us even demons are doctrinally pure in many ways. God chose His people to be His own precious possession, a people who will value Him above all else, a people who will be in living relationship to Him, as a vine is to its branches. Doctrinal purity is an absolute must for fruitfulness, but alone it is not sufficient.

• Relying on great emotion: Another group might say, "We’re so fruitful – just looked how everyone is moved in our services." But great emotion is no sure sign of fruitfulness. We can arouse strong emotions in many ways unrelated to God; go to any rock concert for evidence.

Now, doctrinal purity, emotion, and God-ordained rituals are all vital parts of the Christian life; if these are absent, there will be no fruitfulness. And in many cases growth in numbers accompanies fruitfulness. But the passage today gives us these keys to true fruitfulness:

• Love the Word: both Christ himself and His spoken word, the Bible. This is the foundation for the true fruitfulness that comes from knowing Him.

• Have faith in God, that He will fulfill His promises, and therefore pray with power and free yourself to forgive.

• Focus on God in your worship, thereby worshiping in Spirit and in truth.

• Speak the truth in love, without political calculations; proclaim God's truths whether they are popular or not, whether your listeners think this is what they need to hear nor not.

May we be a church overflowing with fruit -- and may each of us here this morning bear fruit, to the glory of God.

This data file may not be copied in part, edited, revised, copied for resale or incorporated in any commercial publications or other products offered for sale, without the written permission of Thomas C. Pinckney, tpinckney@williams.edu, c/o Community Bible Church, Harrison Ave, Williamstown, MA 01267.

(return to main sermon page)

(return to home page)