Fruit-bearing and Recognition

Luke 6:43-45

One issue with understanding Scriptures is determining whether or how a certain text is related to what comes immediately before or immediately after. These verses are a good case in point.

Here Jesus explains, first, that good trees bear good fruit and bad trees bear bad fruit and, second, that you can identify a tree by its fruit. For the agrarian-based society to which Jesus was talking, this made perfect sense. They all knew fruit trees and they all knew which trees were which. Nowadays, it is much harder to find people who can identify trees and even fruits can be hybrids, a mix, for example, of apple and pear.

By such analogy Jesus is teaching that what comes from inside a person is what identifies said person as good or evil. Thus, good trees do not produce bad fruit and bad trees do not produce good fruit.

As soon as I read that, I am struck by the realization that I have seen very bad people do very good things and very good people do very bad things. When I was a much younger man, I remember a New Jersey senator, Harrison Williams, a man I looked up to for how he showed much compassion for the poor. And yet he got caught up in a sting operation called Abscam. Disgraced, he resigned and did time.

I’ve learned over and over again that just about everyone is a mixed bag when it comes to producing good and evil. So how does this observation settle with what Jesus is saying in this passage?

Go back to what Jesus has just been saying about judging others. Jesus, who was perfect, was very slow to judge others and when he did, he preferred mercy over judgment – otherwise we’d all be crispy critters long before now. So he has been telling his audience, who are we to judge? We, who have planks in our own eyes, should be slow to clean out the eyes of those around us.

And yet, the very next thing Jesus is saying is that people’s goodness and badness will be self-evident. Before we rush off to study what Jesus has said elsewhere on the subject, it is good to meditate on why Jesus is saying such seemingly contradictory statements in nearly the same breath.

What follows? Jesus concludes this “Sermon on the Level Place” by talking about wise and foolish builders. I start to get a picture here. Jesus is placing the focus on judging ourselves, not on judging others. This is not about playing “Santa”, “gonna to find out who’s naughty and nice.” This is all about examining ourselves. He has just said, we can’t really properly judge others, not like God who is perfect.

But we can take a good hard look at ourselves. What do we see in ourselves? Good or evil? A good tree will not produce evil fruit and a bad tree will not produce good fruit. Whatever is in the heart of a person is going to flow out in what they say and do. Or as Jesus says, “out of the overflow of the heart.”

When my heart is full of goodness, that is what is going to gush out of me without even trying. It is not a forced goodness, but a goodness that flows naturally. Like an artesian well.

Here in the shadow of the Cascades, our creeks and rivers flow year round because they have a source that is not dependent on snow melt. Winter, summer, spring or fall, the underground water sources have an abundant supply.

So, too, it is with a person full of goodness. You don’t have to try and pump it out. It gushes forth on its own. A good person will bear good fruit without even trying. The character of a person will be self-evident. No mixed signals (or fruit). No hesitations or mixed messages or ineffective attempts at righteousness. Goodness is as natural to a good person as apples are to an apple tree.

So, Jesus says, in what follows next, don’t try to put yourself forth as something you are not. If you are good, it will come out as natural as fruit on a fruit-bearing tree.