Friday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time
I'd hate to be the fig tree in today's gospel (Mark 11:11-26). Through no fault of its own, entirely because it is the wrong season, it has no figs to offer when a hungry Jesus walks by. And for that crime, it is cursed and withers away in one day. You could say it went through a pretty extraordinary dry spell, in fact.
I can't help but compare myself to the fig tree: what if Jesus should walk by and I have no fruit in me? After all, Jesus often compares his disciples to fruit - "by their fruit shall you know them" he says in the Gospel of Matthew (v. 16). In relatively peaceful, normal times, I feel like I can be generally hospitable, generous and caring. But what if through no fault of my own - because of external stressors, illness, loss of a job, natural disaster, and the like, I just get to a point where I can't go on, and I feel that there is nothing left in me? No generosity, no ability to care about what happens to my neighbor? I know it has happened some times in my life, and I've seen it happen in others'. When I see it happen in friends' lives, however, I feel sympathetic and cut some slack. So how is it that Jesus, Lord of Creation, cuts this fig tree no slack?
Of course the point of both today's gospel and epistle reading (1 Peter 4:7-13) is to remind us that usually when times are good, when we feel more or less normal, that is when we are likely to be in a most dangerous spot for we are relying on ourselves rather than on God alone. The moneychangers in the temple were surely mystified by Jesus' anger toward them; after all, aren't they simply providing a needed service to people and helping provide for their families? But it was not God who had put them there in the temple and it turns out they were relying on an easy, but not Godly, path for making money.
And Peter mentions to his audience that if they are following God's will in their lives, it is no surprise they feel like they're going through a "trial by fire". Even when doing everything right, when serving each other and preaching with the words of God, these disciples will still feel their lives unsettled. Based on today's scriptures, in fact, normalcy is not what God calls his disciples to do and be.
This is where the rest of Jesus' message comes in: when his disciples remark about the fig tree that withers in one day, Jesus' response to them is that they should have faith. They need to trust that God will be there to move mountains even when they do not feel that presence. The thing that makes us, as fruit, different from the fig tree and its fruit, is that when Jesus walks by and demands something of us, we simply need to turn back and rely on Jesus again. Peter reiterates this when he emphasizes that when we do things it should be with the strength that God supplies, rather than the strength we think we need to find within ourselves.
When we go through dry spells of faith, moments when we cannot feel God's presence, then, today's scriptures can be both an exhortation and a source of hope. We may well go through trials by fire and not be sure that God is there, but if in spite of all, we put faith in God, fruit will come from that some day and the dry spell will end.
- Jana M. Bennett