Teaching | How Did the Fig Tree Wither So Quickly? | For the Sake of Others E06

Hello and welcome to the John Mark Homer Teachings Podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or others talking about spiritual formation in the body of Christ. Today, we get to hear from Gavin Bennett, a dear friend and pastor of spiritual formation at Bridgetown Church, where he also leads their covenant community. Gavin explores the themes of fruitfulness in Jesus' life.

and teachings focusing on the parable of the talents and the story of the barren fig tree. Here's the teaching. Again, it will be like a man going on a journey who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability.

Then he went on his journey. The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. So also the one with two bags of gold gained two more. But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master's money. After a long time, the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them.

The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. Master, he said, you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more. His master replied, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness. The man with two bags of gold also came. Master, he said, you entrusted me with two bags of gold. See I have gained two more.

His master replied, Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness. Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. Master, he said, I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here's what belongs to you.

His master replied, you wicked, lazy servant. So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed. Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned, I would have received it back with interest. So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has 10 bags. For whoever has will be given more and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have even what they have will be taken from them.

and throw that worthless servant outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks, Joseph. Throw that worthless servant outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. This is the word of the Lord.

It's a lot of uncomfortable laughter. Thanks be to God. Stories like this really freaked me out growing up. The stakes seemed so high. Jesus was either going to double my bags of gold. Or throw me out into the darkness where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. What in the world?

Jesus seemed so nice all the time. He was always feeding people and healing people and loving people. And then there's the story like this that makes God out to be unpredictable and capricious and impulsive and kind of temperamental. And maybe it's a weird thing to say as a pastor, but sometimes I still feel that way when I read the Bible. I'll be reading and seemingly out of nowhere, bam, throw that worthless servant outside.

into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And I'll kind of look over my shoulder and think, what just happened? Are you reading what I'm reading too? And I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that there are parts of the Bible that still give me pause.

But something has changed in me over the years, and while they still unsettle me, passages like this don't trip me up as much as they used to. So what's changed? For starters, As I learn more about Jewish meditation literature, the meta-genre into which the Bible fits, I'm understanding that sometimes the parts of the Bible that feel intense or confusing are that way on purpose.

It can be the author's intention to make us pause and say, wait, what? It gets us to slow down and pay attention and really sit with something again and again and again. Did you ever get a paper cut as a kid and it hurt so bad that you wanted to leave that bandaid on it forever? Maybe as an adult, you've had this experience as well. My dad used to stay. You got to air those things out so they don't get infected.

And it might be weird, but I think that reading the Bible is kind of like this. Parts of it feel uncomfortable and maybe even hurt as we read them. So we want to lock them away and never go back to them when they really need to be aired out. Because airing them out is how we learn to trust God.

In the biblical library, trust is something more potent than intellectual assent. It wasn't about what one believed, or it was, but it was as much about how that impacted what one did. Trust in the Bible is an action word. And so when I come to weird stories like this, I've started practicing something new that I'd love to invite you into.

And instead of just assuming a surface level meaning, I think I got it and I feel like I don't like that. I read it. I feel the discomfort. I assume that there's something happening that I don't understand. And then I go looking. in other scriptures, to people I trust, and to God, meditating and praying and asking the Spirit to help me understand. We're in a series called For the Sake of Others. in which we are exploring the reality that our spiritual formation has a purpose.

The phrase, for the sake of others, is borrowed from Dr. Bob Mulholland, who defines spiritual formation as the process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others. In the first half of this series, we explored what it means that our formation is for the sake of the world, for the sake of our church family, our city, and those in need. And then last week, we pivoted into the second half of our series, in which we will ask the question,

how by looking each week at a parable that Jesus taught and a story from the life that Jesus lived. So up for today, we'll dig into themes of fruitfulness. through Jesus's parable of the bags of gold that we just read, and that weird time that Jesus cursed a fig tree because he was hungry and it did not have a fig, and all of my childhood fears about God being capricious just rise right back up to the surface.

Let's air out those paper cuts, yeah? One of the most helpful ways that we can understand the things that Jesus taught is to look at the life that Jesus lived. Jesus is the only human whose actions and words were perfectly in sync. So when we experience confusion about what he's saying, we can look at what he's doing. And vice versa, when we feel confused about what he's doing, we can go back and look at what he's saying. Now, unfortunately, in this case, you might experience confusion with...

Both. But fortunately for you, after a whole lot of very nervous study and research, I'm finding that paired together, these two passages give us a beautiful image of God's kingdom. So if you feel up for it, hopefully you're still in Matthew 25, would you flip back a few chapters to Matthew 21? We're picking up in Matthew's biography right after Jesus rides into Jerusalem to declare to everyone that he is indeed the long-awaited king. Look down at verse 18.

Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it and found nothing on it except leaves. And then he said to it, may you never bear fruit again. And immediately that tree withered. When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. How did that fig tree wither so quickly? They asked.

And Jesus replied, Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but you can also say to this mountain, Go, throw yourself into the sea, and it will be done. if you believe you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. Now, part of me feels super weird about this story because it's Jesus's only punitive miracle. It is punishment.

And it's not healing. What I mean is it's the only time that Jesus miraculously left something worse than he found it. We'll get to that.

But for now, part of me also really loves it. Jesus just entered Jerusalem proclaiming himself to be the Messiah. People threw their coats and palm branches onto the roads of the colt that Jesus was riding on. The hoof wouldn't even touch the dirt. they were worshiping. And then Jesus gets down, he goes into the temple and the part set aside for the Gentiles to worship God, the non-Jewish people, but it had been turned into a high profit gift shop and he will have none of it.

And so he flips over tables and offers a scathing rebuke for the injustice that he finds. And after all of this rising drama, people watching, we're reading, edge of our seats, what's going on? We find Jesus in this story headed back into Jerusalem the next morning going, what's going to happen? And we read that this time he's hungry. I think it's a great reminder that while Jesus is 100% God, he is also 100% human.

So as he looks, he sees this fig tree. He tries to find a fig, but there isn't one. And so he curses it. It dies. Super weird. Jesus, chill out a bit. And it gets even more confusing when you read Mark's account of the same story because he tells us that it wasn't even fig season. So Jesus punishes a plant for not having the fruit that he knew it wouldn't have.

What is going on? Well, when we take a step back and we look at the context, it becomes crystal clear what Jesus, the master teacher, was doing. Matthew places this event right after the time that we just talked about. Jesus goes into the temple. He flips all the tables. Think about that deeper. Jesus went into a place that should have been an image of God's kingdom, God's fruitfulness, and he found what he knew he would find, injustice or fruitlessness.

Scholars believe that the cursing of this fig tree is a symbolic, punitive gesture performed in front of the disciples to demonstrate that Jesus was frustrated with the fruitlessness of Israel. But why do it like that? Well, Jesus was embodying the symbolic performance art of an ancient Hebrew prophet.

In the Hebrew scriptures, God orders a few people, we call them prophets, to act in some way that makes people look at something that they were willfully ignoring. But there was often something intentionally unsettling about it. They did it in a way that was so strange that you couldn't look away. So Isaiah was to warn about the coming Assyrian occupation of Egypt by walking around naked and barefoot for three years.

And then Ezekiel was to warn Israel about their own sin by binding himself with his belt and laying on his left side for 390 days and on his right side for 40 days. And Jeremiah was to condemn Judah of their guilt and warn them of their coming exile, how? By burying his dirty underwear and digging them up a few days later. Jesus was pointing out something real, the fruitlessness of Israel, that everyone had become accustomed to by doing something perplexing, withering a fig tree.

And if the disciples were really paying attention, they'd have recalled that the imagery of a fig tree without figs was a commentary throughout the Hebrew scriptures about Israel's fidelity. And they'd start to see what Jesus is saying. He's saying it's a problem that no one is expecting fruit from God's people. That's a problem. As if it's normal to find a fruit tree without fruit, or God's temple participating in injustice.

His actions in the temple mirror his actions with the fig tree. He approached something that could and should have had fruit, but didn't. And so he brought about judgment. But like they normally do, these disciples, who to be fair, were probably mostly teenagers, totally missed the point. It was not Jesus. What was that? It makes me think about the passage. It was, what the heck? How in the world did you do that? That was crazy.

And Jesus responds to their amazement by telling them that if they had enough faith, they could tell this mountain, which wasn't a parable, they were on a mountain in the city of Jerusalem, this mountain they were on to throw itself into the sea. Jesus was not saying you too can curse plants if you believe enough. Jesus is using an image to illustrate how we, you and I, partner with God towards the demise of evil.

What do I mean? Back in Genesis, at creation, the mountains come up out of the oceans, out of the seas. Order is brought to chaos. And then fast forward to this moment, we read that the mountains can be told to go back into the sea. Decreation. Jesus is promising that if we persevere enough in prayer, if we believe for and trust in God's kingdom, we will watch evil undo itself. We've been saying it every week, but our spiritual formation, mine and yours, is for the sake of others.

And now we see that this doesn't just mean helping someone move or politely interacting with your coworker or tipping someone really well. It also means that through our formation, we will see systems of injustice. flipped on their head. We will see ultimately the evil of our world and its effects undone as we pray down systems of injustice.

And it's not just the evil around us. When Jesus makes a whip and he flips over tables, most of us read that and we think, get them, Jesus, get those bad guys. They're being so mean right now. But Jesus' biographers were offering something more than an entertaining series of events, weren't they? They were mirroring Jesus who always knew that he had multiple audiences.

Jesus didn't critique the religious leaders in public because it was fun. Jesus critiqued the religious leaders in public because he was also warning his disciples. He was saying, watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees. What he's saying is they're not crazy. They're human. And here's a surprise. So are you. So am I. The very thing in them is in you as well. Jesus wanted his disciples to see what God was like and what sin was like. He wants us to watch for the presence of...

Both in our lives. Where is God active and where is sin active? Why? Because we have authority over and responsibility for evil. Evil in us and evil in the world. Jesus is warning us.

about being fruitless and inviting us to be fruitful. So what does it mean to be fruitful and how do we actually do that? Well, let's flip back over to today's text to find out. Look back over at Matthew 25. One of the last parables that Matthew records Jesus telling is this one about all these bags of gold and this seemingly fly-off-the-handle master.

This master is about to go on a big trip. And in Luke's account of this same story, the master's headed out to a distant country to be made king. So he calls in three of his servants and he entrusts them with money, quote, according to his ability. The first one gets five bags of gold. the second two, and the third one. The master goes and comes back to find that the first two have doubled his money, but the third one literally buried it and just gave it back to him.

The master, pleased with the first two, rewards them, and frustrated by the third, punishes him. At first read, and perhaps even fourth, this is a very weird story. But like the fig tree event, Jesus was up to something, the master teacher that he was, more clever than we assume at first read.

He's not talking about wise financial investing any more than the parable of the sower was about farming or the parable of the lost sheep was about shepherding. The imagery that Jesus used is symbolic and intentionally hyperbolic in order to understand score the point he was making. Jesus is saying that our whole lives are to be stewarded as gifts from God.

And while that can feel really inspiring to read or to hear, it's not how most of us live. Most of us think if I had a bag of gold, I'd definitely steward that. but I've got student loans and I've got a full-time dead-end job that I kind of hate. And that's hard to steward. See, there's this easy to miss phrase that helps us understand what he's after. Look down at verse 21. His master replied, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things.

Wait a minute, the guy who was entrusted with five literal bags of gold, more than any of the other people in the story, is said to have been faithful with very little. Jesus is calling out our tendency to compare what we have and therefore slide into apathy because honestly, I don't have much to steward anyway, Jesus. Look at what I got. Look at what that guy got though. He's got a lot to steward. But me?

I don't know, man. He is looking at each of us in the eyes and asking the question, what have you been trusted with right now? And will you be faithful to steward it? He's saying that stewardship is not something to do one day when our lives are more put together or we finally got that job we're hoping for. It's not about perfecting or idealizing our lives. Stewardship, according to Jesus, is about using what... we have right now to represent God's kingdom to the world.

This means that we should view our jobs, our relationships, our children, our grocery shopping, yes, even our money with the kingdom of God in mind. Reflecting on this passage, philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard says it this way. One of the main ideas Jesus was addressing in this parable is how people are misled, people, me and you, are misled because they believe they have very little. They don't understand that their body and their place in life is where they are meant.

to reign. It's that simple. If we are to grow spiritually, we have to understand that we already are in charge of some things.

So find what you have say over and use it to become the kind of person who can manage 10 cities. Jesus continues to underline this exhortation of stewardship by how he hyperbolizes the master's response to the third servant. This servant says to his master in verse 24, I knew you so.

But the master points out, no, you didn't. You did not know me. Because if you did know me, if that's what you really thought of me, you should have at least put my money in the bank to get interest, but you buried it? The master is not being petty when he calls the servant wicked and lazy. He is accurately assessing the situation. The servant failed the test. He was entrusted with something and he failed the test. The wickedness inside of him, the sin was revealed.

The servant was trying to get away with doing the least, living into the lie that he really didn't need to steward anything because he hadn't really been given that much. They had this much, and I only was given one, nothing really worth stewarding. Rather than going to the bank, he literally threw an entire bag of gold into a hole in the ground and covered it in dirt. He dishonored his master who had honored him by trusting him with this bag of gold.

And then he made excuses for it. Jesus, through this parable, is saying that poor stewardship is sin. And that sin is something that impacts us here and now. Our friend at VanCity, Josh Porter, talks about this text this way. In the mind of Jesus, obedience is the true measure of discipleship, not right thinking only. Intellectual belief to Jesus is empty when it does not propel lifestyle.

It would be easy or at least efficient to come at this from the kind of fire and brimstone angle and remind all of us, myself at the top of the list, to get our acts together lest we fall helpless before the horrible judgment of God. But this story exists in a larger canvas of a bigger story. And when you take a step back and then another, something strange and haunting comes into focus. Sin has consequences in the here and now.

But on that note, as we read Jesus's biographies, we see that making pronouncements of judgment didn't satisfy him. He didn't go into them or leave them saying, man, that felt good. Glad I got that off my chest. In fact, commenting on this passage, N.T. Wright says this, when Jesus speaks of someone being thrown into the darkness outside, where people will weep and grind their teeth, we must never forget that he himself

was on the way into that darkness, his crucifixion. But not only that, in between the fig tree event and the bag of gold's parable, as Jesus enters Jerusalem, Luke records that he weeps. Sin and fruitlessness grieve the heart of God. When the very same people, the religious leaders that Jesus is critiquing, follow through on their plot to kill him, he does not respond from the cross with a fiery, I will be avenged.

Instead, we read that he prays for their forgiveness. The Bible's consistent warning from Genesis to Revelation is that sin leads to death and destruction. And that fact breaks the heart of God. God is not standing by, idling in a baseline rage, waiting to strike out at you for your wrongdoing or laziness. God is pleading for you to turn away from the road that leads to death so that you and I can experience life.

And in this story, Jesus is revealing to us that the road that leads to death is not just a life of blatant evil. He is saying it is also the life of a withered tree. A tree that should have fruit, but does not. Wait a minute. Jesus pronounces a judgment on God's people based on their actions? On their fruitlessness, we're saved by grace, right? Why is Jesus judging actions? Scott McKnight says it like this.

Sensitive theologians are sometimes nervous about the way Jesus talks, and sometimes we need to exercise a special caution. But we need to trust that Jesus said what he wanted. No one is saved by works, of course, but everyone is judged by works because works are the inevitable life of the one who surrenders to, trusts in, and follows Jesus. We may be saved by faith, but we are judged by works. Perhaps it's obvious what all this has to do with you and me here now.

And maybe the Spirit's already pointing to a specific thing that he wants to talk to you about. But before we end, I want to say one final thing about what I think these two passages are getting at that actually help us to live spiritual formation for the sake. of others.

As these passages show us how much God cares about stewardship and faithfulness, they reveal that it's not just about being faithful. In fact, it's not even about being faithful with what I wish I had or what I will one day have. It's about being faithful with what I ask. actually have with my boring job or my course load of gen eds or my frustrating roommate or my broken down old car. Why? Because the gospel invites us to live our actual lives.

The gospel, this good news, means that Jesus meets me in the life I already have with all of its mundanity and pain and anxiety and joy and disappointment and hope. and he loves me right in the midst of it all. Jesus has not come to rescue us from the life that we have, but to empower us to live it more fully. and to do so for the sake of others, aware of how our lives and the responsibility that we take for it impacts the world around us.

At the beginning of our time, I reminded us that one of the best ways to understand what Jesus meant is to look at what Jesus said, to look at the life that he lived. And now, in an odd turn of events, that becomes the exact mirror that Jesus himself holds up to us. What story does my life tell? Can people know my life and what it means when they look at the way that I live? Jesus cares about our actual lives. So that's where I want us to end.

How do we live our actual life? Not the one we think we should have or the one we will have when our child is finally not a toddler and can use words or finally we're married or we're finally retired. How do we live our actual life? current life when we are frustrated in traffic or disappointed by our Bridgetown community or feel like we're always living paycheck to paycheck. Dallas Willard, one more time, what is in your kingdom?

What have you been given say over? You are in charge of your body and you are here to use that body as the place of God's glory.

of honoring God and blessing others. Think in terms of your work, your family, and your community as well. Now, your work is not just your job, but the total amount of good that you will accomplish in your lifetime. If you have children or grandchildren, you're in charge of your side of your relationship to them. You can determine what that will look like and your commitment can have incredible effects.

Some of us have a deep investment in our congregation and our fellowship with others. Don't minimize such simple things as helping out in the sound booth, serving coffee, or teaching children. All of this. Maybe you hear all of this and it feels like God is talking to you about your job. Does your job just pay the bills? Or do you believe that love it or not, it's something that God has entrusted you with? Do you honor and serve your coworkers and your boss as Jesus would?

Or do you waste company time? Do you do good work? I think of my mom here who doesn't know I'm about to talk about her.

Most of my life, she worked jobs that allowed her to be close to us, before and after school programs, nannying, school lunch programs, etc. But when I was in high school, she started working for the Department of Corrections. And to this day, she manages a large caseload of folks who are... incarcerated, working to help them become the very people that they were meant to be all along.

I remember talking to her one day, hearing about the work that she was doing and enlightened feminist that I was. I said to her, I am so glad that you finally found your vocation. You were a mom for so long and now you get to do the thing that you were really made to do. And without missing a beat, she said to me, oh, I've always known my vocation. My vocation has always been to be a mom. And it is who I will be no matter what I get paid to do.

I spent most of your life being a mom to you and your brothers, and now I also get to be a mom to these men and women who really need a mom right now. Is that how we see our work? Is that how we see our job? Maybe you serve with Bridgetown kids or youth and it's just another thing filling up your Sunday and Wednesday and you've been toying with stopping or maybe you already have stopped.

Perhaps God is inviting you to see these kids as God's church and to be for them an example of a healthy adult who loves them and loves Jesus. I think of people like Tracy Fox, who is constantly praying and pre-gathering prayer for the kids downstairs and hanging out with some of the girls that she teaches for mentorship. Or I think of people like Seth Jelen, who are so...

faithful to show up time and again for these boys and be with them. And so many others of you who have been faithful to show up for these kids, believing that they are a big part of what God is doing in our church right now. Maybe God's talking to you about your Bridgetown community or gathering here on Sundays. Has it become rote or automatic or boring? And do you sometimes just make up any excuse you can to skip sometimes? Or...

Are you taking spiritual responsibility for the people you're sitting next to? Do you love them where they're at, encourage them with all that they're holding and exhort them to keep going in the faith? I think of people like Kylie and Tony and Corey and Brian Haynes and Dustin and Chris Thulin and so many others who don't just show up in this building on a Sunday or their community on a Tuesday. They really show up.

But maybe it's your kids. Do your kids believe that they are worth your time, attention and affection? Do they know that you love them? And do your actions match your heart posture? I've sat with many men in my office over my 10 years of working at Bridgetown, and I want to say something that might surprise you. Almost none of them had dads who meant to leave a father wound. Most of them had dads who really loved their kids. They just didn't know how to show it.

So maybe you need to risk not just telling your kids, but showing them that you love them. There are so many good parents around here like David and Mika and Kyle and Allie and Josh and Megan and David and Joan and Miranda and Nick and so many more. What makes up your kingdom? Maybe it's the neighbors that you avoid because they always want to talk. Or your kids, friends who just need all that special attention.

Or maybe it's about taking responsibility for our city and finally signing up for night strike or to become a foster parent or to research what in the world halal food is so that you can invite that new Afghan family from your apartment complex over for dinner at last.

Or maybe it's time to start praying like you actually believe that your prayers can change reality and impact areas of injustice in our city. Now, it's easy to hear a teaching like this and think, shoot, I am really missing the mark. Or maybe you've even had moments where you started to feel ashamed or convicted as I've been talking. The enemy would love for you to hear the Spirit's voice and just be sad or upset about yourself. Why? Because it doesn't involve doing anything.

It doesn't move you to do anything. The Holy Spirit only speaks when he wants to act. And he is calling us back to life. And like the father in the story of the prodigal son, God runs to us. He doesn't require self-loathing or self-contempt. He wants to love us. Remember in the scriptures, repentance comes from the Greek word meaning to change your mind and to turn around. It's really simple. Jesus is calling you and me to life.

life that flows through us to others. So how will we respond? It matters that we take ourselves seriously as God's children. It matters that we believe that we are worth the investment that God has made into us. So what have you been given and entrusted with? And what will you do with them? I love that insight Gavin shared with the parable of the talents. The one talent man believed the lie that he didn't need to steward anything.

because he hadn't been given much that was worth stewarding. It's so easy for us to look at our lives in the same way, focusing on what we don't have, what's not working, and what we can't do. But God's invitation is to recognize that the life that he has entrusted to us is worth stewarding. So far reflection time, I want to take a moment to ask God to highlight something that he's given us to steward.

and then invite the Holy Spirit to give us ideas for how to steward it well in this season. So if you can, take a few deep breaths with me. Become aware of God's presence. and invite the Holy Spirit to bring an aspect of your life to mind where he's inviting you to recognize and step into your role as a steward. With that in mind, let's just ask God together. What would it look like for me to steward this well in this season? I'll leave 30 seconds here and we'll close with amen.

Thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. If you enjoy the show, consider leaving a rating or review. It helps others find us. We're a crowdfunded nonprofit, so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by The Circle, our community of monthly givers. Special thanks for this episode goes to Genevieve from Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.

Vanessa from Augusta, Maine, George from Loveland, Colorado, Brandon from Portales, New Mexico and Starla from Bradenton, Florida. Thank you all so much. To join these friends in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may you go in peace to love and serve the Lord.