Fruit

Read Matthew 7:13-29.

As Jesus comes near the end of this first block of teaching, he begins to focus on sorting the false from the true. After all this teaching about how to live, how to get our lives right, Jesus uses a metaphor on how we know what which persons to follow. The secret, he says, is in the fruit, what they produce.

At one church I served, there was some sort of cherry tree outside the front door. Why it was there is anyone's guess because it mostly just made a mess on the sidewalk when the fruit was falling from the trees. (I was told it was some sort of cherry that wasn't edible.) Every spring, I could count on cherries (of some sort, of a messy sort) growing on that tree...and making a mess on the sidewalk. But what if, one spring, I came out the door to find apples growing on that tree? While I might like the apples better, the tree would be considered a failure. Cherry trees are supposed to produce cherries, not apples. No matter what I might think about it, the tree is not doing what it was supposed to do.

That's what Jesus says here about those who claim to speak or act in his name. You'll know them by their fruit, by what they produce. There are all sorts of folks who will say what we like, who will even do what we like. They say calming things, nice things, non-controversial things. There's even one so-called preacher who said he doesn't talk about the cross because it makes people uncomfortable. Paul had a word about such folks: "For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear" (2 Timothy 4:3). In other words, they're going to a cherry tree looking for apples.

Jesus says such folks will not, ultimately, bring people to Jesus because they don't know him themselves. They only bring people to themselves. And in the end, Jesus will send them away. This is a theme he will, of course, return to later in the Gospel, when he talks about the last judgment (in almost these same words). For now, he wants us to think critically about the fruit a life produces. Weigh the fruit before you put your trust in someone. He even wants us think about the fruit our lives produce because others are looking to us. He's echoing his cousin John here: "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance" (Matthew 3:8).

What are you producing? How's your fruit quotient?