FIGS AND WASPS AND FOOLISH GENIUS PART 2: FIGS AND WASPS

Figs and Wasps

Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever' . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects. -- Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"

See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone.

Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.

The fig tree forms its early fruit; the blossoming vines spread their fragrance. 
Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me."  Song of Solomon 2:11-13.

I am not sure I ever ate a fig. I know I have never seen an actual fig tree, but I'm still going to write about it. It is an interesting tree, very unique and very old. Fig trees seem to go back to the beginning as a food of men. The fig is not technically a fruit, but something called synconium.

This is a green round kind-of pod with a small opening. There are hundreds of tiny flowers inside the synconium. 

There are two kinds of fig trees, the hermaphrodite and the female. This female synconium has longer flowers inside. There is an important reason for this, which we will get to shortly. Now, the hermaphrodite has pollen, but no seeds to reproduce, while the female has a seed that can produce offspring, but hasn't any pollen. Sounds like a problem, except there is a symbiotic relationship between the fig tree and the fig wasp. They need each other to flourish and survive.

It is a very creative design. The female wasp enters through the little hole in the synconium and lays eggs in the flowers. The baby wasps hatch and eat the developing figs. Thus the fig tree provides the wasps with both shelter and nourishment. They grow to adulthood and have sex all inside this pod. Then the adult, fertilized female wasps chew out of the synconium to go find another fig tree. They then craw into the pod and lay their eggs and it begins all over again.

But how does that help the fig tree. Didn't all these growing wasps just eat the figs and destroy hope for new fig trees?

Recall the female trees had seeds, but no pollen and remember we mentioned the female fig trees had longer flowers than the hermaphrodite trees. We also noted the hermaphrodite trees did have pollen, but no regeneration seed. Here is what happens. The female wasps that enter a female fig tree can't situate their eggs on those long flowers, so no wasps develop in those trees to eat the fruit. But the female wasps that enter those female tree pods had grown up in the hermaphrodite tree pods and as they chewed their way out they collected pollen on their bodies. They deposit this pollen in the female fig trees and from that come crops of figs and new fig trees.

But what has this to do with Christ cursing a fig tree for not having figs "out of season".  Is Jesus being unfair to the tree? is he just taking out his pique on an innocent plant? And why did I put in a quote from the Song of Solomon?

The Beloved in Song is telling us it is spring and "the fig has formed its early fruit". Could that early fruit be what in Palestine was called taqsh? When the leaves appear on the fig tree they are accompanied by a forerunner of the future figs, little green nut-like things that are eaten by the natives when they are hungry. Although when Jesus comes to this tree it isn't fig season, there are leaves and should be taqsh if the tree is going to produce figs later. There wasn't any early fruit, the tree was useless and thus Jesus cursed it and it withered.

Is that all there is to it? The tree should have had something worth eating, it didn't and Jesus made it wither?
We have to consider there was a lesson here or a warning.  The Bible contains histories, science (yes science), geography, biographies, stories and tales, but that is not its main purpose. It is God's communication of his Word to us. Everything in Scripture is for instruction. The Barren Fig Tree is more than a curious event. 

We have to remember that the fig tree appears several times in the Bible. Oft times, the fig tree is a stand-in for Israel. Here are some suggestions for the meaning of this event from those who didn't just stop at saying the story is puzzling, but took the time to think about it.

Some say Jesus was illustrating the principle of faith to the disciples. If the disciples had such faith, they too could do such things as withering fig trees and moving mountains (Matthew 17:20). They would need such faith in the hard days to come.

Other scholars believe that since the fig tree had leaves on it (Matthew 21:19), from a distance it gave the appearance of being fruitful. But upon closer examination it became clear that there was no fruit on it at all. So perhaps Jesus' cursing of the fig tree was an acted-out parable that taught the disciples that God will judge those who give an outer appearance of fruitfulness but in fact are not fruitful at all (like the Pharisees).

Still other scholars suggest the fig tree is representative of faithless Israel. Israel professed to be faithful to God and fruitful as a nation, but in fact it was faithless and fruitless. Indeed, Israel had rejected Jesus the Messiah. Israel was thus ripe for judgment. Perhaps the withering of the fig tree foreshadowed the withering (or destruction) of Israel when Titus and his Roman warriors trampled on and destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70, ending Israel as a political entity (see Luke 21:20).

And still other scholars see significance in the fact that the account of Jesus' cleansing of the temple in Mark's Gospel (Mark 11:15-19) is sandwiched between the two sections of Scripture dealing with the fig tree (verses 12-14 and 20-25). It is suggested that perhaps Jesus was teaching that at a distance the Jewish temple and its sacrificial activities looked fine. But on closer inspection it was found to be mere religion without substance, full of hypocrisy, bearing  no spiritual fruit, ripe for judgment.  

I think all those reasons apply. I do think, though, that it also has much to do with judgment.

NEXT TIME: FIGS, REPENTANCE AND JUDGMENT