The Sermon on the Level Place (9); Good tree, Bad Tree

 We come now to Luke 6:43-45, often entitled "A Tree and Its Fruit."

For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.

First of all, we can see by the first word here that this passage is closely connected and follows from the previous passage, where Jesus suggests that we deal with the log in our own eye before we attempt to deal with the mere speck in our brother's eye.

Many of us suffer, apparently, from a kind of blindness. How would it be if the blind only had other blind men to lead them? Jesus seems to have thought that this world was full of the blind leading the blind. As a teacher, then, his goal was to equip his disciples with sight. That reality lies behind the "log in your own eye" story.

But just as a blind man can't lead a blind man, a bad tree can't produce good fruit. That seems obvious, right? But ask yourself what is the fruit that Jesus is talking about here? Seeking the answer to that question in the immediate context, we see that answer may well be vision. And broadening our context to include the whole sermon, the fruit he is speaking about may certainly be love.

Jesus spends a good deal of the sermon re-orienting his disciples toward a radical view of love. This is in fact such a radical view that it will in time cause some of his followers to balk. The log in their eye is their previous understanding of whom they should love, whom they should forgive, whom they should be generous toward. In fact, if they do not remove this log, they will be like blind men leading other blind me. They will not be equipped to lead at all.

So the point of this passage about the good tree and the bad tree is not to get the disciples to strive to be better trees. Not exactly. Jesus addresses this issue elsewhere when he talks about cleaning the inside of the cup, or about how we are not sullied by what goes into us but by what comes out of us. The issue is transformation on the inside, and that's all that Jesus is driving at here.

It is well to keep in mind that this sermon represents Jesus' first lesson to his disciples. It's his introductory lecture. In it he makes some startling assertions about love that will need to be "unpacked," as they say. His call to love enemies is so discomforting, in fact, that many followers of Jesus for centuries to come will lboriously ignore it. The disciples themselves, as we will learn, are not going to understand him fully, not at first. It will take the whole ministry of Jesus over the next two or three years, and then, as Luke will detail in his "Acts of the Apostles," the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, before they even begin to truly understand this teaching.

In the next segment, Jesus will finish his sermon with an answer to the question, how does one become a good tree, bearing good fruit? How does one become a seeing person with no log in his eye, able then to help others with specks in theirs? How does one love enemies? The answer Jesus gives will be brief, symbolic, and require (again) "unpacking."