The Fruit of the Vine

Jay: Fruit is mentioned often in the Book of Matthew, For example:

Therefore bear fruit in keeping with repentance; and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’; for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. The axe is already laid at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matthew 3:8-10)

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15-20)

“Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. The good man brings out of his good treasure what is good; and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil. But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:33-37)

And the one on whom seed was sown on the good soil, this is the man who hears the word and understands it; who indeed bears fruit and brings forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.” (Matthew 13:230)

Now in the morning, when He was returning to the city, He became hungry. Seeing a lone fig tree by the road, He came to it and found nothing on it except leaves only; and He said to it, “No longer shall there ever be any fruit from you.” And at once the fig tree withered.

Seeing this, the disciples were amazed and asked, “How did the fig tree wither all at once?” And Jesus answered and said to them, “Truly I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it will happen. And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” (Matthew 21:18-22)

Is there a common thread to these mentions of fruit? Is faith the common theme? Do they reflect some universal principle? How do they relate, if at all, to the “I am the vine” statement of Jesus?

Alice: The tree seems to be different from the vine. In Isaiah, a vine that was good when it was planted by God nevertheless turned out bad grapes. But Jesus said the root of the tree has to be good for it to produce good fruit.

Kiran: Jesus also said that a tree cannot become good or bad on its own. It has to become good. We think that an apple tree should always produce apples, but Jesus seems to say it can produce oranges.

Don: What is the reciprocity between fruit and vine, physically and metaphorically? Does good fruit benefit the vine in some way, while bad fruit harms it? A vine that produces good fruit presumably has been well pruned by the vinedresser. The vine in Isaiah 5 was abandoned by the vinedresser and left to its own devices, and as a result it fell into rot and ruin.

Charles: I think the metaphor is of the fruits as being of the spirit—love, joy, and so on (as mentioned in Galatians 5)  as opposed to of material origin. It is about manifestations of the vine and abiding in the vine. It challenges us to think about where our hearts and our will lie. If we abide in faith, in Christ, in the spirit, in God’s way, then those fruits of the spirit (love, joy, etc.) are produced. In contradistinction, if we abide in our own will, the fruits are hate, bitterness, etc. Abiding in faith, in the way of Jesus, requires full submission to God’s will and the abandonment of our own will. It is very difficult to achieve this, but it is what is required. The metaphor is ultimately about this, it seems to me.

Jay: This was set up by Paul:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law. Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.  Let us not become boastful, challenging one another, envying one another. (Galatians 5:16-26)

Charles: This lends itself to the new covenant, making it very clear that the way is faith in Jesus, not through law or religious ritual or “works”. Faith + Nothing = Salvation. The separation is ended through faith. The fruits of the spirit are a manifestation of that faith. Mortal “works” are not fruits of the spirit. The natural manifestation of a healthy vine is good fruit; the natural manifestation of a faithful spirit is love, joy, peace, etc.

Don: Most of the scriptures translate a certain Greek word as “taken away” (as in the branches are taken away and burned). But in slightly less than half the uses of that word in John it is translated as “lifted up”. The connotation is quite different. Some unproductive branches are discarded and left to rot on the ground, others are lifted up from the mud and helped to become productive. The theological distinction is between the fallen and the saved. David talks about lifting up the head in Psalms 3, and an old hymn has the line “Love lifted me”. The overall sense is that this lifting up is not of our own volition but is is an opportunity available to us when we are truly down and out.

Donna: I look at the mother and father as the roots of a family tree. How can some of their fruit turn out to be bad and others good? If our family member is in the mud, do we rally around and help him out, keep trying to save him, or do we prune and discard him?

Dave: I think that actions are important:

For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead. (James 2:26)

Are the fruits of the spirit manifested through good works? I think they can be, by putting ones love and faith into action, but they don’t always have to be. One can take the metaphor as applying at the individual level, the family level, the church level, and so on.

Don: When one sees good works, can one conclude that one is seeing the fruit of the spirit?

Donna: It may be so. The new age people are out there doing copycat fundraising but they don’t attend church. There is no God in their fundraising marathons, only self. Not all good works are of the spirit. Even in church, we must check our motives. As missionaries we must remember we are doing this for God, not for ourselves. Mother Theresa had to do this. We are called to confront people in our Christian circles who are messing up. In the mission field we constantly find people doing the work for themselves. I am called judgmental all the time by non-Christians because I don’t believe in some things—the rainbow is not being painted on my face. That doesn’t mean I hate, but I will not lower my standards publicly.

Dave: You can’t fool God. He sees the fruits of the spirit for what they really are. You can fool people with your outward appearance but you can’t fool God about what is in your heart. But I don’t think we can completely separate the spirit from works. Works without faith or faith without works is dead, James said.

Don: The discomforting thing, though, is that Jesus said that only a good tree bears good fruit—that a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Motive does not seem to enter into it.

Donna: But pruning clearly makes a difference. The branches of an apple tree can bear different-tasting apples, depending on if and when they were pruned. So motive becomes timing as well. I myself have gotten ahead of God on things I know I was supposed to do, but I did it before time. So every perfect fruit is totally God’s but that’s because his timing is perfect too.

Dave: Do we all start off as good trees? We seem to have established that God is in all of us; we start off as good trees and have the ability to grow into good trees. But because of our own will, we also have the ability to become bad trees. Good trees bear good fruit because they are doing God’s will. Bad trees bear bad fruit because they are doing their own will.

Charles: Playing devil’s advocate: One might also point to scripture that says we are all born in sin and to that extent, therefore, are separated from God. But God in his providence gave us free will. But issues related to good and evil are left to God’s will and our choice is whether to accept his will. “Faith without works” seems to me to imply the faith-in-name-only of someone who is spiritually dead and thus separated from God, as opposed to the true faith that follows from trusting and obeying God and his will. If that is so, then the natural manifestation of true faith, of abiding in God, would be works. So declarations of faith don’t matter; what matters are works that manifest true faith—total obedience to God’s will. Jesus manifested true faith to perfection, despite the temptations and sufferings he had to endure; but we can only do so imperfectly and to that extent remain more or less separated from God. I don’t think the works come from us: They are a manifestation of faith, of obedience to God’s will. Other fruits of the spirit are also a natural consequence of God’s will and need not be equivalent to one another. Revelation has a passage about the books being opened and the works being judged. It seems there were two sets of books: The book of life, used to judge those who were truly in the faith; and the book of works, used to judge humans. Can works that are the product of true faith and works that are the product of man be considered equivalent? I don’t think so. In scripture, “fruits” seem to refer more to works of the spirit than to works of man.

Robin: In the old Cherokee legend of “Two Wolves” an old man was teaching his grandson about life:

“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Chris: With regard to good and bad trees: What about transformation, the possibility of change? The fig tree that Jesus condemned must have had the potential to bear fruit at some point. Some trees will bear sour fruit but after care and attention from the farmer will produce sweet fruit. The gospels are all about people who bore bad fruit and were transformed into people who bore good fruit. Perhaps it’s a matter of having faith in the vinedresser, and perhaps the manifestation of that faith is in the form of love, joy, peace and the other “works” of the spirit.
Robin: Exactly. Farmers, vinedressers, and Jesus are all about managing trees that produce bad fruit but have the potential to be turned into trees that produce good fruit:

“A man had a fig tree which had been planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and did not find any. And he said to the vineyard-keeper, ‘Behold, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any. Cut it down! Why does it even use up the ground?’ And he answered and said to him, ‘Let it alone, sir, for this year too, until I dig around it and put in fertilizer; and if it bears fruit next year, fine; but if not, cut it down.’” (Luke 13:6-9)

We are born with both the light and with sin, so the struggle between good and bad fruit  is innate and takes a good pruner, not ourselves, if the good fruit is to prevail.

Donna: Let’s not forget who the creator is. Every good thing, every tree, God created.

Jay: We are still left with the stark statements of Jesus concerning good and bad trees in which he apparently makes no allowance for change. So why prune? Is the contradiction the result of personalizing the metaphor so that the vine or the branch or whatever becomes an individual? If, instead, we treat the trees metaphor as being about Good and Evil then the contradiction goes away. Goodness cannot produce Evil, and vice versa. The beauty, the assurance of goodness overcoming evil, is much more powerful. It lets us talk about God removing Evil without meaning God removing me. Unfortunately, every time we talk about this we personalize it rther than conceptualize it.

Charles: I see it as the vine being Christ and his church. As long as we abide in the vine by faith, the works of the spirit and the truth will prevail. Faith is the prerequisite for being in the vine.

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