The Tree That Dried Up

The day before, Jesus had been hungry, had walked over to a fig tree in leaf, and had found only leaves. He spoke against the tree, then went into Jerusalem and cleared the traders out of the temple courts. The same road brings them back past that tree in the morning, and they see it withered down to the roots. Mark has wrapped one story around another here: the tree on the outside, the temple in the middle, meant to be read through each other.

On a fig tree the leaves and the fruit come along together, so a tree in full leaf is making an announcement, and this one had nothing behind it. The prophets had used that picture already: Jeremiah, where there are no figs on the tree and even the leaf withers; Micah, hunting for an early fig and finding none; Hosea, remembering Israel as the first fruit on a fig tree. A leafy tree with nothing on it, on the road into Jerusalem, is not a bad morning. It is a sermon.

The temple in the middle is saying the same thing. It was crowded and loud and busy and not doing the one thing it had been built for. Jesus quoted Isaiah as he cleared it, about a house of prayer for all the nations, and Jeremiah, who asked at the temple gate whether the house had become a den of robbers, in a sermon warning that the building would come down.

So Peter points at a dead tree and Jesus answers by talking about faith and prayer. That is not a change of subject. The house of prayer had stopped praying, and he is telling them where prayer will live now.

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

On its own that sounds like a lever: want it badly enough, keep the doubt out, and the thing arrives. The next sentence out of his mouth ties praying to forgiving somebody you hold something against, and nobody describes a technique that way.

And when you stand to pray, if you hold anything against another, forgive it, so that your Father in heaven will forgive your trespasses as well.

Later that week, in a garden, Jesus asks his Father to take a cup away from him. He says out loud that all things are possible for the Father, asks anyway, and does not get it. He calls the answer his Father's will. One book holds both scenes, so whatever verse 24 promises is larger and stranger than getting what we want.

Augustine, answering a woman who wrote asking how to pray, named the difficulty: "His gifts are very great, but we are small and straitened in our capacity of receiving." Straitened means narrow. God is not the bottleneck. We are.

*Augustine, Letter 130, to Proba.*