'And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came, if haply He
might find any thing thereon: and when He came to it, He found nothing
but leaves; ... 14. And Jesus ... said unto it, No man eat fruit of
thee hereafter for ever.'--Mark xi. 13, 14.
The date of this miracle has an important bearing on its meaning and
purpose. It occurred on the Monday morning of the last week of
Christ's ministry. That week saw His last coming to Israel, 'if haply
He might find any thing thereon.' And if you remember the foot-to-foot
duel with the rulers and representatives of the nation, and the words,
weighty with coming doom, which He spoke in the Temple on the
subsequent days, you will not doubt that the explanation of this
strange and anomalous miracle is that it is an acted parable, a symbol
of Israel in its fruitlessness and in its consequent barrenness to all
coming time.
This is the only point of view, as it seems to me, from which the
peculiarities of the miracle can either be warranted or explained. It
is our Lord's only destructive act. The fig-tree grew by the wayside;
probably, therefore, it belonged to nobody, and there was no right of
property affected by its loss. He saw it from afar, 'having leaves,'
and that was why, three months before the time, He went to look if
there were figs on it. For experts tell us that in the fig-tree the
leaves accompany, and do not precede, the fruit. And so this one tree,
brave in its show of foliage amidst leafless companions, was a
hypocrite unless there were figs below the leaves. Therefore Jesus
came, if haply He might find anything thereon, and finding nothing,
perpetuated the condition which He found, and made the sin its own
punishment.
Now all that is plain symbol, and so I ask you to look with me, for a
few moments, at these three things--(1) What Christ sought and seeks;
(2) What He found and often finds; (3) What He did when He found it.