At Times, Jesus Is Just Not Nice
I like nice... nice is...well... nice. To Quote Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H , "It's nice to be nice to the nice." But nice is really boring. Jesus wasn't boring. The crowds didn't follow him all over Judea and Galilee hanging on every word he spoke because we was just nice. Nice hardly attracts crowds. Nice doesn't radically transform lives. Nice doesn't get one strung up on a cross. The day after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus and his disciples are out and about. Jesus is hungry and seeing a fig tree he discovers that it has no fruit, which is not a surprise since Mark tells us it was "not the season for figs" (Mark 11:12-15). That doesn't matter to Jesus. He curses the fig tree. It will wither and die. As William Willimon notes, "No fig tree is planted for shade. 'You will know them by their fruits' (Matt. 7:16). Somewhere along the line the tree stopped being productive and Jesus, unmoved by naturalistic e...