If our Lord’s miracles epitomize his Father’s works, there must be room in them for what we call destruction.
In the grand process of existence, destruction is one phase of creation: the inferior must give way to the superior, as the husk must decay that the seed may germinate. As all creation moves toward the sonship, death does its sacred work in the lower regions, that life may rise triumphant toward the Father’s will.
So I see no good reason why the almost solitary act of destruction in the story should seem unlike the Master. True, he did not come to show such power, but why should it not have its place when occasion appeared? Why might he not do once, consistently with his helping and healing, what his Father does every day? I mean the withering of the fig-tree. In summer’s freshest greenery you may see the wan branches of a lightning-struck tree. The Maker’s destruction is like a poet drawing his pen through a word that mars his meaning: the indrawn sigh of the creating Breath.
Our Lord had already spoken the parable of the fruitless fig-tree; this miracle was the acted parable. All shapes of argument must be used to rouse the slumbering will of men. Even obedience from the lowest fear is a first step toward a condition infinitely higher than that of the most perfect nature created incapable of sin.
The right reading of the circumstances is necessary to the miracle’s truth. I give the following, not knowing to whom I owe it.
The time for gathering figs was near but had not come, so a fruitful tree might have a few ripe figs and more that were eatable. The Lord, hungry on the road from Bethany to Jerusalem, saw a tree with all the promise of perfect foliage and went to it “if haply he might find anything thereon.” There were leaves only, no fruit in any stage; the tree was a pretence. Here, in their path, was a chance to enforce by a visible sign one of the most important truths he had tried to teach. He condemned the tree to become in appearance what it was in fact, a useless thing; next morning it had withered from the roots. He did not press the lesson in words, but left it to work when the fate of fruitless Jerusalem should also have become fact.
For the moment the wonder of it filled them too much for them to read its lesson. Perhaps that is why our Lord makes little of the marvel and much of the power of faith: he assures them their prayers will be answered, but adds, as St Mark tells it, that forgiving others is the one condition of their own acceptance—a fitting lesson to hang on that withered tree.
After all, the thing destroyed was only a tree. Toward humanity there is only one distant approach to anything similar—and how distant! The pseudo-evangels have several tales of vengeance; these books have none. St John alone records it: when the “band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees” came to take him, and “Jesus went forth and said unto them, Whom seek ye?”, and he answered theirs with “I am he,” “they went backward and fell to the ground.”
I note a few facts about this incident, with the questions they suggest. The synoptic Gospels record the Judas-kiss; St John does not. St John alone records the going backward and falling to the ground, prefacing it with “And Judas also, which betrayed him, stood with them.”
Did not the presence of Judas, perhaps his kiss, have something to do with the men’s discomfiture? If so, as seems to me probable and, on mystical and artistic grounds, fitting, why does St John alone omit the kiss and alone record the recoil? I think because those who saw, saw each a part and record only what they saw or had testimony of. Had St John seen the kiss, he who so well saw its mystical fitness could hardly have omitted it, since he makes so much of Judas’s presence. Had he been an inventor he would have invented just this; yet his record is barest at the one incident that would best have helped his idea.
But why this repellent, half-destructive exercise of force, reminding us of Milton’s words—
But checked His thunder in mid volley?
It may have had to do with the repentance of Judas that followed, or with the future history of the Jewish men of that band. But I suspect its more immediate aim was the safety of his disciples. When the men had risen and advanced again, he repeated the question, “Whom seek ye?” “Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “I am he,” said the Lord, but added, now that they had felt his power, “If therefore ye seek me, let these go their way.” They did not even try to lay hands on the disciples. He had astonished and terrified his captors to gain his sole request: that his friends go unhurt. There was work for them in the world, and they were not yet able to endure for his sake. At all events this gentlest form of destruction was for neither vengeance nor self-preservation; I suspect it was another shape of the virtue that went forth to heal. A few men fell to the ground that his disciples might have time to grow apostles and redeem the world with the news of him and his Father. For humanity the fig-tree withered; for the world’s resurrection his captors fell: small hurt and mighty healing.
Daring to read the Father’s work from the Son’s, I would humbly believe that all destruction is for creation, and that even here only death is absolutely destroyed: that which blocks the outgoing of the Father’s will, which completes its creation only when men are made holy.
God does destroy, but not life. Its outer forms yield that it may grow and pass into higher embodiments where it can grow more. Only what has the law of death in itself will be destroyed: sin. Sin is death, and death must be swallowed up of hell. Life, that is God, is the heart of things, and destruction must be destroyed. For this victory endless forms of life must yield; even the form of the Son of God’s own life must yield upon the cross, that the life might rise a life-giving spirit and his words be fulfilled: “If I depart not, the Comforter will not come unto you.” Spirit must rise victorious over form, and the form must die lest it harden to stone around the growing life. No form can be great enough to contain the truth that is its soul, for all truth is infinite, being a thought of God. Only through the flowing away of form, which is death, and the gathering of new form behind, which is birth or embodiment, is any true revelation possible. Therefore destruction itself is holy. It is as if the Eternal said, “I will show myself; but think not to hold me in any form in which I come. The form is not I.” The still small voice says the Lord is not in the earthquake, wind or fire but in the lowly heart that finds him everywhere. The material can cope with the eternal only by everlasting evanescence.