The Fig Tree
Matthew 21:12-22
Reader one:
Today's Gospel reading includes two stories – one of them quite puzzling.

In telling these stories about Jesus, the writer of Matthew's Gospel attacks the temple and its leadership. He portrays these people as a corrupt elite who are stupid and ignorant, unable to see who Jesus really was. Even the children understood who Jesus was. How come the temple officials were so blind?

In the first part of this story, Jesus goes into the temple and in a fit of anger, chases out the money changers and the people selling sacrificial animals. The money which people donated to the temple had to be as special kind – not Roman money which they felt was foreign and therefore unclean.

But the money changers often charged exorbitant exchange rates. And the people selling the sacrificial animals charged way more than the animals were worth.

That really made Jesus angry.

Reader two:
Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves.

He said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer'; but you are making it a den of thieves."

The blind and the lame came to Jesus in the temple, and he cured them.

The chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that Jesus did. They heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David!"

They became angry and said to Jesus, "Do you hear what these children are saying?"

Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read, 'Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself'?"

He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

Reader one:
We can understand Jesus' anger at the money-changers in the temple. But the second part of the story is puzzling because it shows Jesus as using his powers in a rather petty way to destroy a fig tree.

This part of the story is an allegory. It's not about figs at all.

The writer of Matthew's gospel wants us to understand that the fig tree represents the temple. You see, this gospel was written half a century after the death of Jesus. In that time, the Romans had totally destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. This story about the figs is the gospel writer's way of telling us that the destruction of the temple was caused by the stupidity and stubbornness of the temple leadership. It was God's punishment.

The temple produced no good fruit. Therefore God destroyed it.

Reader two:
In the morning, when Jesus returned to the city, he was hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the side of the road, he went to it and found nothing at all on it but leaves. Then he said to the tree, "May no fruit ever come from you again!" And the fig tree withered at once.

When the disciples saw it, they were amazed, saying, "How did the fig tree wither at once?"

Jesus answered them, "Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, 'Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,' it will be done.

“Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive."

Ralph's list of readings and stories

See also:
The Moneychangers
Lectionary Story Bible, Year A,
page 238.