Why The Fig Tree?

I know very little about fig trees.  Until I began actually reading some of the Bible, I probably couldn’t even tell you that the “figs” I ate in Fig Newtons actually grew on trees (ah the splendors of a food industry that completely removes us from the legitimate food itself).  Fig trees in my life have now become an interesting symbol of the state of this world.

If any of you have spent some time in the book of Habakkuk towards the end of the Old Testament in the Bible, you may know why it’s currently a favorite of mine.  The first time I really dove into it and saw the radical way of life it proposes was in Rwanda.  I spent nearly a month in Rwanda during the summer of 2010 studying with a small group of students the politics in Rwanda; pre-genocide, during and post-genocide.  That brief season of my life was packed with life changing conversations, breath-taking experiences and essential frustrations.

Opening the book of Habakkuk in a country such as Rwanda, on the same day you, stunned, stand next to a brick wall of a church where children’s and baby’s heads were smashed against to kill them, or the same day you walk through tiny rooms with over eight-hundred hauntingly preserved bodies of those who died torturous deaths; the first few lines of Habakkuk come to life in a new way.

“² How long, LORD, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
³ Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds. “

These words seemed more applicable in my life than ever before.  I have been blessed by parents that are not afraid to show me what the world really looks like, in all of its flaws and all of its wonder, however this was a new reality to me.  No amount of protesting in the streets of Chicago or listening to speakers talk about countless world crisis could have prepared me to be hit by the truth of those words in the face of such darkness and death.

However, if you want to hear stories of God’s reconciling and redemptive qualities, Rwanda is a place to visit.  The same days we walked through those memorials, we would also meet the men who had killed…yet had been forgiven.  Not just forgiven by a far off government (which would still be unheard of in most justice systems), but forgiven by the families that had been directly wounded and crushed by the violence they committed.  And who was at the center of this forgiveness?  Christ.  When I asked Pastor Steven, a man who now lives next to the man who killed his family (whom he now refers to as a best friend) what to tell the people in the United States about the reconciliation process he answered that it is humanly impossible to forgive in this way, and Christ is the only way the country has moved forward.

Not only has the country moved forward, but it has prospered.  How much hope does that offer to a world that seems to be increasingly growing darker and darker?  It’s everything for me, a hope unparalleled.  Hence why the symbol of the fig tree is so astounding at the end of Habakkuk.

After crying out to the Lord about the destruction and injustice that seems to permeate all of this life, Habakkuk ends with words that seem hard to imagine if you don’t have hope in the reconciliation of Christ:

^“17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
¹⁸ yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.

¹⁹ The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.”

“Though the fig tree does not bud” we will find strength in the Lord to continue pursing his Kingdom here on earth.  The fig tree may be twisted and broken, dark and dying, but we have a living God who is a healer, light and brings life to even the deadest of things in this earth.