The Barren Fig Tree

Christian Science Monitor Articles

The Barren Fig Tree

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The True Vine

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, September 28, 1918

THE sayings of Jesus are capable of endless application, illustration, and interpretation; and this because these sayings are diamonds of many facets, catching the light of Truth whichever way they may be turned. Thus, the symbolism of the vine, the fig tree, and the mustard tree, reveal continually new light and new meaning, as the student grows, through demonstration, in some understanding of Truth, the knowledge of which Jesus himself said would make him free. This knowledge must come through demonstration, otherwise it does not come at all, and demonstration, Mrs. Eddy has pointed out, must result in healing the sick. The mere study of textual and doctrinal problems, of the fulfillment of prophecy or the more subtle meaning of texts is, by itself, however fascinating, just so much “Love’s Labour Lost,” the love being distinctly the love of intellectual gratification. Faith in the efficacy of this sort of mental pabulum never yet healed a case of sickness, and never will. And it is one reason why James declared, “Faith without works is dead.”

This intellectual study of the Bible nearly invariably concentrates on the Old Testament to the exclusion of the New, and any person who has ever seriously indulged in it, knows as the awakening comes, to the more spiritual demands of the New, and, above all, to its demand for demonstration, exactly why this is the case. It is, frankly, the old Adam in human nature, with its demand for “warmth and color.” The New Testament, with its “pure severity of perfect light,” chills intellectuality, in any and every form, to the bone. It demands a reason not for the value of this reading or the application of that prophecy, but for the faith that is in a man. And this reason must not take the form of some verbal argument, which is the foliage of the barren fig tree, but the fruit of the seed multiplying some thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, and some an hundredfold. That is, surely, what Mrs. Eddy was alluding to when she wrote, on page 92 of the Church Manual, “Healing the sick and the sinner with Truth demonstrates what we affirm of Christian Science, and nothing can substitute this demonstration.”

The study of the Bible must, then, have its roots, if it is to be profitable, in no mere intellectual enjoyment, but in the effort to gain more and more the Mind of Christ, in which sensual pleasure has no lodgment, but through which alone the demonstration, to which Mrs. Eddy alludes, can be accomplished. For Mrs. Eddy makes no secret at all of what the particular form of this demonstration must be, but continues straight on from the passage just quoted, “I recommend that each member of this Church shall strive to demonstrate by his or her practice, that Christian Science heals the sick quickly and wholly, thus proving this Science to be all that we claim for it.” Now it matters not one atom that a man should be able to forge a cable of prophetical theory or of the theory of salvation by grace or faith. Such cables will part the moment they are subjected to the strain of healing fevers or palsy. It matters not an iota that a man should fashion an Achilles’ shield of scholastic theology, he can be wounded to the death in the Achilles’ heel after all, his vital material weak point. But it is of supreme, of overwhelming importance that he should understand what Jesus the Christ meant, in his teaching, so that he too may gain the Mind of Christ, and he too demonstrate his knowledge of Truth, by healing the sick, raising the dead, and walking on the waters, since “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also.”

The deduction, indeed, is obvious, that if the avowed followers of Jesus the Christ, calling themselves Christians, have failed to do his works, it is not from any failing in that teaching, the scientific exactness of which he demonstrated, in every conceivable way, but because they have failed to understand his teaching, and so to walk in his steps. So complete, indeed, has been the failure that the misunderstanding must have been fundamental, and perhaps no single saying of his offers a better object lesson to mankind than that uttered after he had risen from the table of the last supper, and, accompanied by his disciples, was walking, through the night, towards Gethsemane,-“I am the true vine.” It is really of no consequence whether Jesus, as apparently was his wont, took his simile from some object under his eyes, or evolved it from his inner consciousness. He may have spoken, standing before the great golden vine hanging on the Temple gates, or amidst the vineyards on the hill-sides lit by the fires of the vine-pruners by Kidron. He may even have spoken before he left the upper chamber, with his eyes fastened on some vine climbing a neighboring wall, or drooping over a window. These are one and all speculations, matters that matter not, but which go toward the gathering of the warmth and color which feed the hungering and thirsting intellectual appetites. What does matter is exactly what Jesus meant by the words. And this means more than a mere superficial examination of them, it means, in order to understand them metaphysically, an examination of them in their relation to the whole body of his teaching, founded as that teaching was on the Old Testament.

It is, of course, perfectly easy to level the Old Testament entirely out of the question. Jesus’ teaching, though innately connected with that Testament, stands by itself as a firm and complete whole, because its keystone is Truth. This, of course, does not mean that the Old Testament should not be studied in conjunction with the New, but it does mean that the intellectual and literary stimulus provided by the one should not be allowed to outweigh the spiritual stimulus of the other. It is also easy and possible to ignore the far-reaching symbolism of the vine, and to confine the question to the simple and obvious intention of the simile, and it is practically necessary to do this unless a small volume is to be written on the subject. Jesus’ teaching was intended above all things, to be simple, so that wayfaring men though fools should not err therein. He chose his students from the fishermen and tax-gatherers of the countryside, not from the educated ranks of the scribes and the Pharisees, for he knew, as Paul was to declare after him, but as he was the first to insist, that the wisdom of God was wisdom only to the pure in heart, to those, that is to say, who had divorced some materiality from their thoughts and deeds.

Where, it need scarcely be said, the world has gone astray has been in confusing matter and Spirit, in making the human Jesus, instead of the spiritual Christ, the son of God, and so in drawing the conclusion that the true vine was something other than that Christ, Truth, the understanding of which makes every individual, as the carnal mind is blotted out, a twig destined to become a branch, in proportion as he lets that Mind be in him which was also in Christ Jesus.

Abide In Me

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, October 5, 1918

THE simile of the true vine is one of the simplest in the whole Bible, but its significance and its lesson have been largely lost because men have insisted in confusing Jesus with the Christ, and both with God. How this has continued, for centuries, with the Fourth Gospel staring men in the face, it is difficult to say. Indeed, the dilemma presented by the Fourth Gospel, has been rather cleverly seized upon by scholasticism to strengthen an untenable position, so that the Fourth Gospel has become a stumbling block, as it were, to, of all people, the rationalists. Scholasticism, with its insistence that the Christ is merely a synonym for the man, Jesus of Nazareth, has involved itself in the defense of a dogma, which it cannot, and knows it cannot, explain. Whereas, if it had frankly admitted that the Christ is simply a somewhat indifferent Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Messiah, it would have been saved all sorts of doctrinal tergiversations, such as that comprised in the Athanasian creed.

The Christ is, of course, simply the spiritual Truth. Jesus the Christ, consequently, to adopt the accurate phraseology of the Greek Testament, is the man who reflected Principle so clearly and fully, in his daily life, as to have gradually put off the human Jesus, and to have revealed the eternal Christ or the true man. It was thus that Jesus could claim to be the Son of God, the reflection of Principle. But he was careful to claim this also for the Christ, or true man, counterfeited in every other human being. It was thus that he could claim that the Christ, his and every other human being’s spiritual reality, existed before Abraham. It was thus that he could claim that he and his Father, God and the Christ, Mind and its idea, Principle and its reflection, were one and inseparable. For, as Mrs. Eddy perfectly expresses it, on page 334 of Science and Health, “This dual personality of the unseen and the seen, the spiritual and material, the eternal Christ and the corporeal Jesus manifest in flesh, continued until the Master’s ascension, when the human, material concept, or Jesus, disappeared, while the spiritual self, or Christ, continues to exist in the eternal order of divine Science, taking away the sins of the world, as the Christ has always done, even before the human Jesus was incarnate to mortal eyes.”

Understood in this way, and this way is the obvious meaning of the Greek text of the New Testament, the simile of the true vine becomes the simplest thing imaginable. God, Mind, Principle, the Father or First Cause of all things, is the husbandman. The infinite Christ, Truth, is the vine, and “Christ”, as Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 333 of Science and Health, “expresses God’s spiritual, eternal nature. The name is synonymous with Messiah, and alludes to the spirituality which is taught, illustrated, and demonstrated in the life of which Christ Jesus was the embodiment.” In proportion, then, as the individual puts off the old man with his lusts, he puts on the new. He finds, that is to say, his own spiritual selfhood, or the Christ, which, being eternal, existed before Abraham, and to the exact extent in which he lets the Mind of Christ be in him, finds his place as a branch of the vine. “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing.”

It is impossible to produce a perfect simile of a spiritual condition in material words. Jesus himself could not do that, for he could not make Spirit and matter one. His similes, parables, metaphors, represent the best that can be done with the medium, but the medium itself fights against a perfect spiritual presentation. Jesus, however, was probably not much troubled by this. But there was one thing he was always intent upon. It was showing his followers that Principle demanded fruit and not leaves, practice rather than precept. Therefore he pointed out that if the Mind of Christ did not abide in the individual that individual was not a branch of the true vine, and could not bring forth fruit and, what was more, that Principle, the husbandman, would lop off all such dead and useless wood. The dead wood is, of course, the mentality which imagines that it can live on professions unsupported by deeds, on a declaration of faith which is dead by reason of the very fact that it is divorced from works. What those works are Jesus made perfectly clear. They are the works which he did. Not the piling up of great buildings such as the temple, not the traffic in merchandise in the temple courts, carried on in the name of the temple service, those things need adequate provision, but that provision must come not by the sacrifice of bulls, and goats, and doves, but through the surrender of individual materiality.

It is that surrender which constitutes the daily battle of every true Christian, and on the success of which depends the salvation of the individual and the hope of the race. Only as a man sees the nothingness of matter can he possibly acquire the Mind of Christ which is the antithesis of the carnal mind. So long as matter remains real to him, it must be reason of that very delusion of reality ..(word blurred on original).. a temptation to him. He is literally compelled to divide his service between God and mammon, with the result that every hour given to matter is taken from Spirit. This hour devoted to mammon is an hour in which the branch does not abide in the vine, and as the hours grow together, and become days, the branch first puts out an abundance of leaves, but without fruit, and then finally withers. Then it is that the husbandman, Principle, comes with the pruning knife of Truth, and lops off the branch, or, if the process continues from branch to branch, lays the axe at the root of the tree. Not, of course, the root of the true vine, the Christ, that were impossible, but at that of the fruitless counterfeit. That is the meaning of the incident of the barren fig tree.

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, October 12, 1918

THE meaning of the parable of the barren fig tree is, up to a point, quite obvious; but, when that point has been reached, the meaning, so far from being obvious, has puzzled generations of commentators. Yet it is perfectly certain that Jesus, who taught in the most simple and direct manner, never intended to puzzle any person. The puzzles, indeed, of the Gospels are all man-made. They revolve round, and concentrate in, an unwillingness to admit the unreality of matter; in an insistence on such a contradiction in terms as the arguments that God, Spirit, created His entire antithesis in matter, and that God, good, who made nothing that was not good, none the less made evil; and in the declaration that the image and likeness of infinite, spiritual Being, eternal and sinless, is a finite human being, subject to sin, disease, and death. It was the persistent attempt to make good these amazing contentions, in all their endless ramifications, that caught ecclesiasticism, in the early centuries, in the toils of its many controversies. A fact which Mrs. Eddy has summed up, in less than two lines, on page 28 of Science and Health, in the words, “the determination to hold Spirit in the grasp of matter is the persecutor of Truth and Love.”

It is, then, this fact of the unreality of matter which has to be perpetually borne in mind by every one attempting to fathom the teaching of Jesus the Christ; and, indeed, the writer of the Fourth Gospel set up a mighty index finger for humanity, with eyes to see, when he recorded those words of the Christ, spoken to Nicodemus, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I say unto thee, Ye must be born again.” The barren fig tree had, then, in its way to be born again. The disciples, that is to say, had to gain a spiritual concept of the fig tree, just as Nicodemus, the Pharisee, had to gain a spiritual concept of man, not as a human biped, but as the image and likeness of Principle, as the Christ. For it has to be remembered that Jesus was not appealing to the dwellers in the cities, or the plowmen from the countryside, crowding to him for help and healing, when he cursed the fig tree, but to that little band of trained students who, for some three years, had walked with him in Galilee and Judæa, and which must have hundreds of times seen him demonstrate the unreality of matter.

The actual story is familiar to everybody. How Jesus, on his last visit to Jerusalem, lodged one night at Bethany, and coming in next morning to the great city, saw a fig tree covered with leaves, and approaching it, for its fruit, found that it had put forth nothing but leaves. And then come the two statements which have so given pause to the commentators, “For the time of figs was not yet,” and, “Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away.” Here, then, the problem arises, Why did Jesus expect fruit, if the time was not yet? and why, in any case, did he curse the apparently unoffending tree? Now in approaching the subject it has to be remembered that east is east; and west is west, and that that which is quite apparent to the one is an enigma to the other. The eastern mind pushes contentedly round the circumference of the circle, the western mind endeavors to cut impatiently across it. The two meet, however, in spite of anything Mr. Kipling may have to say to the contrary, just whenever they both touch Principle. The Pharisee, out of Tarsus, in Cilicia, the Greek of Corinth, in the Peloponnesus, reached a common understanding in their grasp of the Christ crucified, even though, to the east, the teaching was a stumbling block, and, to the west, foolishness.

The superficial meaning of the story is as simple as possible. The tree covered with nothing but leaves is the type of the man who is all profession and no practice, the man who, in the words of the ancient Hebrew saying, “Has dived deep, and brought up a potsherd.” Such are the people who have utterly failed to prove their faith by their works, and whose very faith, because of that, remains under suspicion. So far, all is plain sailing, but the question still arises, Why, if the time for figs was not yet, did Jesus condemn the fig tree? The answer to this seems comparatively simple. Simultaneously with the growth of the leaf, in the spring, the tree, if it is fruitful, produces a crop of green figs, known as untimely figs, and referred to in Revelation in the words, “The stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs.” Most of this crop is lost in windfalls, but a small proportion remains upon the tree, and constitutes the early figs, mentioned by the prophet Hosea, “I saw your fathers as the firstripe in the fig tree at her first time.”

When, therefore, Jesus found the fig tree, clothed in profession, but producing nothing, he realized that it was simply cumbering the ground, the fact that there were no untimely figs indicating that there would be no crop at all. It was like the teacher, who, if you ask him for a clue to the meaning of the Old Testament, presents you with a treatise on the metre of the Psalms, or, if you beg him for an explanation of the miracles, refers you to the textual arrangement of the Higher Criticism. And it was, surely, for such reasons that, Mrs. Eddy explains, on pages 43 and 44 of “Retrospection and Introspection,” that “At a meeting of the Christian Scientist Association, on April 12, 1879, it was voted to organize a church to commemorate the words and works of our Master, a Mind-healing church, without a creed, to be called the Church of Christ, Scientist, the first such church ever organized.” Such a church would, indeed, be a type of the true vine, having its members as its branches, whilst every branch which became dead wood, the husbandman, Principle, would inevitably lop away.

That loping away is the explanation of the withering of the fig tree, the only reality of which ever was in Spirit.