About two or three weeks ago now I came across a clip of American stand-up comedian Louis CK performing a hilarious bit about Jesus and a fig tree (a link to the video is at the bottom of the article). I’ve had this earworm of the Nirvana cover of the Vaselines’ ‘Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam’ ever since (additional music nerd reference here too that for some reason, the Nirvana Unplugged album calls the song ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam’ nobody is really sure why). My version though has me singing ‘Jesus, don’t want me for a fig tree.’
OK, you might be thinking, what the devil is this lunatic of an Irishman talking about? So, look, the story here is that Jesus got into an argument with a fig tree, fell out with it, cursed it and killed it. Yes, a fig tree.
Gospels of Mark & Matthew
The story appears in the Gospels of both Mark and Matthew, there’s no need to give the full quotes here but the story goes like this:
Jesus and his disciples were leaving Bethaney and the bossman was feeling a tad hungry. He sees a fig tree along the side of the road and thinks “yum”. However, on reaching the tree, he finds that it has no fruit, it’s just covered in leaves. Jesus says “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”
Now, the poor lad must’ve been really starving because when he and his followers arrive in Jerusalem (just over two miles away), he’s obviously in foul humor and he makes a beeline for the temple court and overturns the tables of the money lenders and the dove sellers.
Moneylenders, boo, doves, yay
Money lenders, we can all understand, usury was illegal for a good reason back then (Jewish money lenders could only charge interest to non-Jews, and in previous civilizations, usury was just not allowed at all).
It was a commonly-held belief that charging interest on money would collapse economies (something we know today that it does, again and again) and I guess he didn’t like seeing birds of peace in cages. It does make me wonder though if he’d have cared as much if they were just standard pigeons rather than doves, since they’re pretty much the same thing, albeit one is lovely and white, the others are fugly.
Maybe though when they left Bethaney, he was already in bad form because he knew that he was going to have a confrontation at the temple courts and the fig tree was just collateral damage.
For anyone who knows the Jesus story, this is the beginning of the end for him. Taking on the money lenders was the first step towards his eventual arrest as those in power could see that he was amassing followers and they obviously didn’t like that.
At the end of the incident, it’s said:
“He said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it ‘a den of robbers’.”
The next day…
That evening (or the following day , depending on whether you prefer the Mark and Matthew version) Peter sees the fig tree on their short walk home. The tree is deader than the cheap prosecco at a dodo disco party. Right down to the roots. Peter informs Jesus about it.
He answers:
“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly, I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.
“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”
Kid Jesus
So, what’s really going on here? We could accept it as an event that actually happened but, I’m not so sure. Jesus doesn’t really sound like the type of dude to kill fig trees because he was hungry. Although, in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (short video below), an apocryphal gospel about the childhood of Jesus, there is a story of a child called Zenon who dies after falling from a roof and Jesus is accused of having pushed him.
Jesus raises Zenon from the dead and the kids says ‘naw, it wasn’t him, he’s cool bro’ but something strange happens, Jesus then lets him die again. Nobody can figure out why, since he brought him back to life, he didn’t just let him stay alive. Imagine being Zenon’s mother or father and seeing that. That’s some major PTSD right there.
What does it all actually mean?
Some religious scholars say that the fig tree is a symbol of Judaism, the tree, with its leaves but no fruit, represents a form of godliness that lacks substance. Others see the story as a warning to Jesus’ followers as the barren tree urges them to assess whether their lives bear fruit that reflects genuine faith or if they merely exhibit an outward show of religiosity.
Anyway, all this is to say that we don’t have a bloody clue as to the overall character of Jesus. It’s painted that he was some love-everyone-hippy type but it’s also right there in the gospels that he had quite the temper and if you go by the apocryphal texts there are even more incidents of him angry.
For me, I like angry Jesus to be honest. It shows he was human.
Some videos are below about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas & the Louis CK bit.
Hi, I’m Paddy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a counselor, coach, and meditation teacher. If you’d like to read my latest articles on Medium you can subscribe here. If you’d like to contact me regarding a counseling session or about writing, you can contact me here. My different social media channels are here.
Louis CK video: https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1978xcd/jesus_and_the_fig_tree/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3