By the Rev’d Jacky Sewell
Season: Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Luke 6:39-49 | Sirach 27:4-7 | I Cor 15:51-58
It’s fig season again. Ripe and juicy, falling apart in the mouth, scented with honey and sunshine.
Some of my most powerful childhood memories are connected with figs. My mother was Palestinian and grew up with figs in their garden to be eaten straight off the tree, pick them before the birds and the wasps started stealing them.
By the time I was born, she was living in post-war England. It’s difficult to grow figs in that part of the world but that didn’t stop her trying, without the benefit of a glass house. They never quite lived up to her expectations. They didn’t ripen properly. Pale and dry! They should be deep purple, dripping their juices over her fingers. Some fig trees do indeed bear bad fruit.
A deep red, highly scented fig was like a pearl of great price to my mother. Except she could never bring herself to pay the price in the supermarkets. She would be scandalised to know how much I paid for these in New World yesterday!
Jesus and Wisdom Literature
It is not surprising that the fig features so prominently in our scriptures as a symbol of abundance and fullness. Let’s set to one side their dodgy start as aprons for Adam and Eve.
In Jeremiah, the fig is a symbol of the children of Israel, blessed by God.
In the Song of Solomon, the fig is a symbol of the flourishing of love.
In the Gospels, the fig becomes a parable for the sign of the season of the kingdom of God, and a life lived well. I can see Jesus, under that fig tree on the road from Bethany to Jerusalem, eagerly looking for ripe fruit to refresh him, and his grumpiness when he found none ripe on that poor unfortunate tree, about to incur the blast of his disappointed hunger. That’s in Mark’s Gospel.
In Luke’s gospel, the fig tree gets better press. Figs and grapes are the epitome of a life lived well, bearing fruit that is a testimony to a person who walks in the ways of God.
Jesus was an expert at reading the signs of God in the world around him and turning them into parables of the realm of God. He heard God’s voice speak through creation. The fig tree. The grape vine. The mustard seed. The rising of yeast in the dough. The irritation of a speck of dust in the eye. The rock that is able to withstand a flood. The sand which is washed away by the flood.
He follows in the great tradition of Jewish wisdom sayings found in abundance in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs and the Song of Solomon and the Psalms. The largest and longest of these ancient wisdom texts is Sirach which you might also know as Ecclesiasticus – that’s where our first reading came from today. Ecclesiasticus – and Ecclesiastes – both roughly mean ‘the preacher to the assembly’. They were written about 200 years apart, by different wise preachers, but it is easy to get them confused. Today’s book – Sirach the wise preacher – didn’t make it into the Protestant Bible, but it is in the Catholic and Orthodox versions of the Bible. Ask me why another time!
Sirach Ch 27
When a sieve is shaken, the refuse appears;
so do a person’s faults when he speaks.
5 The kiln tests the potter’s vessels;
so the test of a person is in his conversation.
6 Its fruit discloses the cultivation of a tree;
so a person’s speech discloses the cultivation of his mind.
7 Do not praise anyone before he speaks,
for this is the way people are tested.
These words feel familiar to us. Partly because of the lilt and the cadence of great poetry. But also because we hear the echo of so many other scriptural texts which pick up the same metaphors.
Amos declares the nation of Israel shall be shaken through a sieve in order to shake out the sinful.
Isaiah and Jeremiah speak of the fragility and flaws in the clay pot akin to the flaws in Israel.
Proverbs bursts at the seams with sayings on foolish words and wise words.
And Jesus, as we have seen, peppers his parables with fruit and seeds and the fertile earth.
Discerning the Wisdom of God in Creation
It shouldn’t be a surprise to us that the word of God is so heavily laced with metaphors of creation. Of course creation reveals something of the mind and the imagination of its Creator. A person’s speech, said Sirach, discloses the cultivation of the mind. As with us, the creation, so it is with its Creator.
However when it comes to discerning what it is that the creation reveals, we can find ourselves in miry waters. We see through a glass, darkly, or in a mirror, dimly. And we can sometimes be mistaken. What I think might be God’s voice or the wisdom or truth of God, being revealed through creation, may not be precisely what God had in mind.
Let me tell you another story.
Many years ago, I was wrestling with what was to prove a life-changing decision. As I mulled over the opportunity before me and prayed about it, I went on a long walk up a valley behind Dunedin. It was winter, and there was a rare thing – a deep hoar frost – and the trees were heavy with ice crystals, and the morning sun was dancing among them. Suddenly, a tui started singing its bright, piercing song from the top of one of the trees, and what I heard wasn’t the tui but God’s voice, loud and clear, saying to me directly, “If you don’t do it now, you will regret it for the rest of your life.” Instantly, I knew what I had to do, and it turned into one of the richest and most fruitful times of ministry. Happy ending!
But it might not have been. I might have been mistaken, and based on the call of the tui, I might have made a really bad decision and missed what God was really calling me to do.
So how do we know? How do we know that what I discern to be God’s voice or a truth from God, revealed through creation, is not simply my own vain imaginings? The longings and yearnings of my own ego? How could I be sure that the decision I made that day would bear good fruit, and not sour grapes?
One of the wise early founders of the church was St Augustine of Hippo. His personal story is one of the great testimonies of the church, akin to the conversion of St Paul. I’m not a fan of all his theological writings – he cemented the deep misogynism that was floating around the early church, and his views on women were hair-raising – but even fig trees can produce the odd rotten or diseased fruit! One of his great insights into how we discern what God is saying through scripture was the test of Love. Is this revelation, or interpretation, of what we think God is saying consistent with the Law of Love, AND is it consistent with the Christian teachings about the nature of God?
Taking his insight into how we read scripture and applying it as a measure of whether I am hearing God correctly, we might say:
Does this revelation or sign in creation bear enough truth, consistent with the law of the Love of God, that I can trust it?
There are many truths which are NOT consistent with the law of Love. And those truths are aften the ones that play into my own ego or my own imaginings. Was the voice of the tui luring me into the path of ego and self-aggrandisement? Or did it hold out the promise and invitation of love and flourishing.
Figs in Season
I have no doubt that these fine specimens of the fruit of the fig tree, purchased at the beginning of the fig season, were cared for, pruned, composted, and fertilised by growers of integrity, keen to get a good price for their produce.
What care do I – do you – give to our life and faith as Christians so that our words and actions are like good fruit, sweet and juicy, eagerly awaited by friends and strangers and passers-by on the road?
How are we pruning and composting our lives so that what comes forth is good, our words like honey, sweet to the tongue, our actions like strong branches, giving shade to those in need?
Maybe you are in a season of growth and new shoots; maybe in a fallow season of rest and recovery. Either way, in due season, may love, consistent with the love of God, flourish as a sign of the realm of God, bearing good fruit in your life.