By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. John 13:35 (NIV)
Good Fruit – The Fruit Series – Part 2
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6
Jesus told his friends that if you want to know if a person is good or not, have a look at the “fruit” their life produces. He often said that people would know they were his followers by how they loved one another and others. Matthew records Jesus as saying that all the commandments can be summed up in this:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’” (Matt 22:37-39 MSG).
Rather than coming down to dualistic notions of right and wrong, perhaps it all comes down to how we love: A trinity of relationship: God, myself, others.
I love how Richard Rohr put it:
“The Bible illustrates both healthy and unhealthy religion, right in the text itself, and Jesus offers us a rather simple criterion by which to judge one from the other. It is not a head category at all, but a visual and practical one — “does it bear good fruit or bad fruit?” (Matthew 7: 15– 20; Luke 6: 43– 45). Jesus is almost embarrassingly practical. When religion is not doing its job well, almost every other aspect of society also will be sick. When your God image is true, your self-image also will be true. If your operative God image is toxic, you probably will be toxic too, and it is that toxicity that Jesus is warning about. Religion is the best thing in the world, but it can also be the worst thing. If your way of relating to God is a life-giving style of relationship (the relationships of the persons of the Trinity being the first and richest pattern!), almost everything else in a society, even the broken parts, are subject to renewal, healing and enlightenment.” (from, “Things Hidden,” Pg 109).
I’m not so great at keeping plants alive. But lately, my indoor plants have been flourishing. I’m careful to water them, fertilize them, and position them properly in my house. I’m trying to replicate this health with some potted herbs on my front porch. So far, so good. As always, the indication of whether my plants are healthy or not is whether the “fruit” or produce of the plant is robust or struggling. Like Fr Richard Rohr says, Jesus is almost embarrassingly simple with his metaphor of plant and fruit about our lives and our health. Good tree, good fruit. Bad tree, bad fruit. Simple on paper, but my goodness, how we (I) mess this up in real life.
How do we tell what good fruit is when it comes to humanity? Or what a healthy tree (life) looks like? I know from experience (in both plants and life) that sometimes after a season of ‘unhealth,’ there is no outward appearance of fruit. But beneath the surface, in the dirt, in the hidden places, healing and renewal are at work, which will one day, at some point in time, have a physical manifestation, but until then, it seems things are dormant and lifeless. In our flesh and blood lives, it's not always the loud and demonstrative and clean and eloquently spoken and well known and wealthy that are full of health and vitality. In fact, when you peer behind the curtain of these things and into the actual lives people live, you can find a lot of rottenness. And vice versa, on all fronts. Never judge a book by its cover or a person by their image. You have to take a peek inside and see what fills their life.
And as Jesus said time and time again, it comes back to love.
Go to Part 3 – Basic Holiness »
Written by Lizzy Milani
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