As they went out from Beit Anya the next morning,
Jesus was hungry. Seeing a leafy fig tree in the distance, he went to it to see if there was anything on it. He found nothing other than leaves. It wasn’t the time for figs. In reply,Jesus told it,“May no one eat fruit from you! Never in this age.” His students were listening. […]Passing by in the morning, they saw the fig tree dried up at the root.
Simon Peter, remembering, toldJesus , “Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has dried up!”In reply, Jesus told them,
“By God, amen, I promise you all: Whoever tells this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and doesn’t criticize in their heart but trusts that what’s spoken does happen, it’ll happen to it. For this reason I tell you all, in everything, whatever you pray and ask for: Believe, because you’ve received. It’ll happen to you.
“But whenever you stand up in prayer: If you have anything against anyone, forgive. Thus your heavenly Father will forgive you for your own offenses.” —
There’s another story in between, in verses 15-19. I’ll get to it another time.
Damn that tree.
Nowadays, when you pick fruit off a nearby tree, the tree’s owner may prosecute you for trespassing and theft. But in Jesus’s day, the Law allowed anyone to pick crops from the edges of fields. It was a provision mainly for the poor, but anyone could do it, and usually did. So Jesus, sighting this tree, decided to collect breakfast from it.
But there weren’t any figs. Wasn’t fig season. Annoyed, Jesus cursed the tree.
Let’s be clear what cursing is. It’s not just the use of profanity. A curse is any wish, whether solemn or idle, for negative consequences. When we don’t get what we want, so we speak ill of whatever frustrated us, we’ve cursed it. This could range from a solemn, “In Jesus’s name, may the Enemy’s hold on this thing be broken, and the devil go to the pit,” to an idle, “The stupid vending machine took my dollar.” In wishing them ill, or calling them names, or posting poor reviews on the Internet, we’ve cursed them.
Even when it’s our fault. “That lousy cashier wouldn’t take my coupon. It only just expired.” Or, “Yeah, I made reservations for the wrong date, but I can’t see why you people can’t give me a refund.” Humans are full of idle curses.
If it seems petty of Jesus to curse the tree—as if it was the tree’s fault for figs being out of season—let me be clear: It was. Jesus doesn’t get a free pass just because he’s Jesus. He did something unkind and impatient here. But we know Jesus isn’t unkind or impatient: He’s infinitely kind, infinitely patient. Here, he was acting out of character. And whenever Jesus does so, pay attention—he’s trying to teach us a lesson. His students listened, and it paid off later.
For the next morning, in passing, the students noticed the cursed tree, and noticed the roots were dry. Some Christians tell the story as if the entire tree were dried up, dead, and wasting away. While that’s more dramatic, the fact is only the roots were dry. Still, dried-up roots mean it’s only a matter of time before the rest a tree is dried up and dead.
Simon Peter noticed, and found this a fascinating coincidence. Jesus replied by taking full credit for it—and saying this was nothing. Our words can move mountains.
“They’re just words.”
People forget that words can be powerful. Mostly because most of our words aren’t meant to be powerful. They’re meant to fill the silence with small talk. Or they’re meant to entertain and amuse. Or they’re meant to share mundane information, like “We’re out of ketchup” or “Don’t forget to take out the trash.”
Our idle curses can have far more of an impact than we realize. As can our idle blessings. You never know how our words might affect someone when they take those words to heart. A simple encouragement can make someone’s whole day. A simple rebuke can destroy it. True, some of us are jaded, and disregard any commendation or criticism—and often that’s because those idle comments made our lives miserable till we finally learned to treat all comments as idle.
On the other extreme, there are certain fools who teach every word is powerful, including the idle ones. They believe every time you speak into the air, even idly, you’re calling upon the spiritual forces in the heavenly realms, and invoking either a blessing or a curse upon the thing you’re speaking about. I call them fools—a term which they’ll immediately interpret as a curse, as if my calling them “fools” might bring devilish forces into their lives, and gradually transform them into fools. But I call them fools because they’re acting like superstitious dimwits: God’s children are curse-proof. What God has blessed, nothing else can successfully curse. (And we, of course, should curse no one.)
Still, you’re gonna run into certain Christians who believe “word curses,” as they call any negative statement, are legitimate curses, and they’ll rebuke you for them. I once told a student, “Unless you concentrate on your work, you’re not gonna get to do all the things you want to in life.” His parents considered this a “word curse,” and wrote me an irritated letter. Here’s the problem with their reasoning:
- It’s an if-then statement. If you don’t do P, you don’t get Q. The boy always had the option to do P and get Q. He wasn’t predestined to follow any destructive path, regardless of what I told him.
- Since time and chance happen to us all, the boy could always fall backwards into luck, and do just fine despite my warning… or conversely, do everything right, and suffer tragedy anyway.
- It’s from the frickin’ bible.
Yes, words can be powerful. But words are powerful only when we take them to heart. When we ignore them or dismiss them, they make no impact—true or not. When people ignore idle curses—as they should—they fall to the ground. It’s only when people take them up, and carry them around, that they have any impact.
Our words, plus God’s hand.
In this story, Jesus was trying to teach his kids how powerful words can be once God takes them to heart.
Y’see, we pray idle things all the time. We pray for things, but don’t always believe God will give them to us. And we don’t really expect him to. Like when we pray for God to speed up a traffic light: We really want him to speed it up, but we sorta expect the light will take just as long as always. Or when we pray for God to spare us from the common cold… but we know we’ve already caught it, and figure we’re gonna suffer through it just like we do every year. We pray without faith. So of course we see no results. It’s the prayer equivalent of small talk. God knows we don’t mean it, and most of the time he dismisses it as such.
But what if we do mean it?
Well, Jesus teaches, then stuff can happen. If God pays attention to our words—if we mean them, and don’t doubt them—he can put his power into them, and they’ll happen. As Jesus demonstrated with the fig tree. When he damned the tree, he wasn’t speaking idly, as so many people do when we casually curse things: He wanted the Holy Spirit to act upon his words. Nothing against the tree; it was to show his students that because we have access to the Most High God, we’re not just playing with squirt guns. We’re using live ammunition.
I know; naysayers are gonna insist, “Well, not in every instance.” Of course not in every instance. People ask for all kinds of stupid things, and pour all kinds of earnest faith into it, and God has to tell them no. After all, he has free will too. James and John asked Jesus if they could call down fire upon the Samaritans, and no doubt they were serious—and Jesus rightly told them off. God isn’t gonna disregard his own character, and give us destructive, evil things. Even if we believe really hard.
So this promise of Jesus is not license to ask for every dumb thing and expect God to grant our wishes like a genie. It’s a promise that our prayers aren’t for nothing. They’re not just wishes that God arbitrarily may or may not answer. When we’ve put our full trust in God—when we’re following him, pursuing his will, and there’s a better-than-average chance our prayer requests are the sort of things he wants us to pray for—stuff’s gonna happen. Fig tree-killing stuff. Mountain-moving stuff.
Hasn’t happened for you yet? Start following God. Obey his commands. Conform your life to his thinking, to his will. Stop asking for anything you crave, such as a full bank account, a new car, a big house, and material prosperity. That doesn’t reflect a life dependent on God; that reflects a life whose treasures are in this world instead of heaven. Learn to want the sort of stuff a serious, mature Christ-follower should, and then ask. Then you’ll see results.
As for forgiving others before you pray, I’ll discuss that tomorrow.