Matthew 12:33-37 Make Your Tree Good

Our passage this morning is part of a bigger story where Jesus heals a man possessed by a demon and then is accused by the Pharisees of being a servant of Beelzebub, the prince of demons. This is the kind of crazy thing that you couldn’t make up; you would think that the very people who spent so much of their time studying the Jewish Scriptures would recognize that Jesus’ power doesn’t come from the prince of demons, but from God. The regular people who followed Jesus got it, they asked good questions, “Could this be the Son of David?” another way of asking, “Is Jesus the promised Messiah that God is going to send us to save his people?”

So how did the Pharisees get it so wrong even though they knew so much about who God is and how God relates to his people and all his promises to us? Jesus points to their hearts, using the image of a tree that bears fruit. Likely Jesus is teaching outside the city and is using an orchard that is right there as his example, an orchard of olive trees full of healthy olives right for the picking. The people in the crowd know how much work it takes to grow healthy trees that bear good fruit, and how easy it is to let an orchard fall apart through neglect and a lack of farming skills. Good fruit doesn’t just happen, any farmer or gardener can tell you that. Lots of work and training goes into growing good fruit.

Good fruit in our own lives doesn’t just happen, it comes out of a healthy deliberate relationship with God through Jesus. Health doesn’t come through just knowing the stories of the Bible, being able to recite the attributes of God, or being able to pass a Bible knowledge test, it comes of being connected to Jesus and getting our life from him. In John 15, Jesus talks about this, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”

A fellow pastor told me he knew when he was heading to a breakdown because he stopped caring about other people. But he mentioned that it began long before that as over time he slowly became more cynical about people, looking at the negative in life rather than how God was blessing him. He began to fill his head and heart with things that focused on making him number one instead of Jesus and he stopped trusting that Jesus really cared about him or was working in him or through him. He could feel his heart and soul whither, but he didn’t pay any attention to the early signs of spiritual rot and disease slowly growing in him. The Pharisees revealed the spiritual rot in their souls by refusing to acknowledge that Jesus’ power came from God, not from demons. They rejected Jesus because his message and teaching threatened their place in the community. 

If the Pharisees couldn’t recognize that they were unhealthy and the fruit they were growing was bad, how can we know we are healthy and producing good fruit? It all begins with Jesus, with making Jesus the number one thing in our life. It’s easy to say, but much harder to live out because we are easily distracted and our hearts, as the catechism reminds us, that we have a natural tendency to hate God and my neighbour and that unless we are born again, we are inclined to all evil. This is why Jesus calls us to remain in him so we can bear good fruit. Jesus has made us clean and healthy by taking our sin that makes us unhealthy to the cross where he paid the price for our disobedience by dying for us. But he was also raised from the grave so that we can experience new life in him through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

If you’re wondering how your fruit is doing, start by taking a closer look at your day to day life. What kinds of things do you regularly talk about and how do you talk about these things? How do you talk about other people, with grace and understanding, looking to build them up, or are you more negative and critical? How do you treat others, the girl pumping your cash or the guy bagging your groceries, do you even acknowledge them and thank them? How do you react to the joys and challenges in life, do you give thanks regularly to God and do you really trust him or are you regularly filled with worry and stress because all you can see is what is going wrong instead of looking for the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life? This will give you a pretty good starting point for evaluating the kind of fruit you’re growing in your life. As Jesus tells the Pharisees, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. A good person brings good things out of the treasury stored up in him, and an evil person brings evil things out of the treasury stored up in him.”

I came across a meme that basically said: dancers dance, musicians make music, artists create art, administrators administer, salespeople sell, farmers farm, caregivers nurture, and I would add that followers of Jesus act more and more like Jesus. For a tree to be well nourished, it needs sun, water, pruning, and fertilizer at the right times. For us to be well nourished, we need to be filled with Jesus, our hearts, souls and minds with his teaching, his life, his Spirit, allowing the Spirit and Scripture to shape our lives, our thoughts, our words and deeds. This is why over the years the church has developed the spiritual disciplines: things we do in order to allow the Holy Spirit to make us more like Jesus. Some of them are prayer, meditating on the Bible, tithing, acts of mercy, simplicity in life, fasting, worship and others. As John Ortberg says, “Practices such as reading Scripture and praying are important—not because they prove how spiritual we are - but because God can use them to lead us into life.”

There are things we need to prune from our lives, ways of thinking and doing in order to be healthy spiritually so we can bear good fruit for Jesus. Sometimes it means changing what we listen to, watch or do because they lead us away from Jesus instead of closer. Over time I’ve had to give up certain friends because they influenced me in unhealthy ways, feeding my cynical or sarcastic side, feeding the anger that I’ve worked so hard over the years to control. I’ve learned there are certain kinds of shows or movies I shouldn’t watch, certain music or books that feed unhealthy parts of my soul. We need to cut away some of the unhealthier and wild branches off once in a while so the stronger healthier branches can produce more fruit.

Then there are the things I’ve added into my life, times of reflection and solitude, deeper study of the Scriptures and of the world around me in order to train myself to be able to see where Jesus is at work, even when it’s not always easy to recognize. These help us to remember that Jesus has a purpose for us, as the young man in the video mentioned, one of the reasons we are here is to love; to love God, each other and our neighbours. This creates healthy lives, healthy churches and healthy communities.

One of the key things I’ve learned about being healthy and bearing good fruit is that we don’t do this alone. We’re placed in a church community to help each other grow, to offer love and to receive love. Time and again we read about encouraging each other, about building each other up, about being a blessing. We follow Jesus and worship him together, we love each other and our community together, we serve each other and our community together, we share our faith in Jesus with others. Faith is not an individual activity; we’re created to follow Jesus together and together we help each other bear good fruit.