One year an unfamiliar vine appeared in our garden. I had built a simple, lattice-like wooden structure for our snow peas to climb, but now a strange “volunteer” was there among the young pea plants. We hadn’t planted it and had no idea what it was, but it looked healthy and green. Week after week it stretched its tendrils from one slat to the next, and eventually it spread its broad leaves over the whole structure. What could it be? Evidently some seed had survived in the compost pile and been mixed into our garden soil. Finally, the plant’s flowers turned into small green bulbs, which grew and grew until they hung weightily from the vines: we had unwittingly grown cantaloupes.
In Matthew 7, Jesus uses an analogy that reminds me of this experience. Good trees, he explains, are recognized by the good fruit they produce; bad trees are recognized by their bad fruit. Just as I had to see the cantaloupe to know what kind of plant was taking over our garden, sometimes we must see the “fruit” of a teaching or experience to fully understand it. This passage comes toward the end of the famous Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus is warning his followers about false teachers or prophets. No good tree will produce bad fruit, while no bad tree can produce good fruit: “So you will recognize them by their fruit” (Matt. 7:20).
To connect this passage to Advent, it may help to imagine ourselves in Jesus’s original audience, gathered on the hillside, listening to a carpenter-turned-rabbi whose teachings sound, by turns, revolutionary or profoundly simple. Is this Jesus, an humble man from the outpost of Nazareth, to be trusted? What if he himself is a false prophet? Is he a good tree or a bad tree? A judicious listener would have to wait and see what fruit he bears. And so it is at Advent: we watch and listen, waiting for the appearance of the Messiah, waiting for the fruit to be borne.
Brent Newsom