Rooted in Reality

By Allison van Tilborgh

Is your church producing fruit in your community in the here and now?

The foundations of church are still shifting after a decade of political turmoil, natural disasters and pandemic. We try all sorts of things to stay on the cutting edge: developing culturally relevant sermon series, hiring better graphic designers and purchasing state-of-the-art soundboards. Yet it doesn’t always seem to move the needle. We keep throwing time and money into a process that doesn’t seem to be working as well as it should.

The questions then become: How do we get people to come back to church? What would Jesus do?

Scripture shows that Jesus had a pretty radical approach to dealing with these situations.

In a shocking passage found in Mark 11, we are told:

Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, [Jesus] went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it (Mark 11:13-14).

This is pretty raw. Jesus cursed a tree for having no fruit, even though it was not in season. It wasn’t the tree’s fault! Did Jesus really have to kill it?

I’ve come to understand the fig tree passage as an important (albeit confrontational) metaphor for something we all have experienced at one point or another: fruitless religious systems.

Under particular conditions, our religious efforts have led to great past successes. Lives had been changed, and hearts had been turned toward God.

We find ourselves in a different world today. Those same patterns that have worked in the past might not be working as well today. We promise our congregations, “The season isn’t here yet,” and, “Revival is just around the corner,” while encouraging folks to keep giving and to remain faithful. Instead of tuning ourselves to the hunger of our communities today, we too often rely on fantasies of a future that is not yet here in an effort to pay the mortgage and make payroll. Many churches are hanging on by a thread.

Likewise, in its glory days, the temple indeed bore great fruit. For hundreds of years, it was the epicenter of Jewish life and a place Jesus cared about deeply: a place of childhood memories and personal growth. And yet it was this very same temple’s system that Jesus was sent to replace.

The religious leaders of the temple promised a day of freedom, a day when the Messiah would come. But now Jesus was here. God was among us. And yet the leaders were still professing the same stories of old: One day, sometime in the future, this suffering will end.

During the week of His death, the fig tree (a.k.a. the temple) was not producing fruit when Jesus was hungry and needed it most. Perhaps, in Jesus’ last week, the reality that the “season for fruit was not yet here” rang truer than ever. If the fruit of our institutions is not present now, they may as well never be. Who knows if Jesus ever got to enjoy a fig again.

Scripture tells us Jesus was not satisfied with mere visions of tomorrow. He attuned himself to the needs of people in the present (see Luke 17:11-19, Mark 7:31-37, Matthew 15:32-39) without much concern for the future (see Matthew 6:34).

Jesus healed and fed His people in the here and now, not just in the life after this one. Jesus funneled His precious and limited time into caring for the children, the “unclean,” the outcast, the poor and the hurting. Jesus didn’t love His followers because of what they could become but because of exactly who they were in that moment.

We must seriously consider if Jesus would curse our “fig trees,” if He were here now. Are we producing fruit for our communities? Are we aware of our congregation’s material and spiritual hunger? Do we rely on vague ideas of a better time “after this” where their lives will be better, or do we work to satisfy their needs now? The story of the fig tree tells us that the consequence of delay is to deny ever being able to produce fruit again.