No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit (Luke 6:43-44).

[Editor’s Note: CD on the Go begins this week!  Starting on Wednesday, and continuing through Easter, you’ll receive seven CDs each week instead of our usual five—AND each day’s CD will come to you in audio form as well as the familiar text format.  That way, you can listen “on the go” each day: over your morning coffee, walking the dog, jogging, running errands.  Stay tuned!]

We’re working together to better understand what it means to Disagree Deeply, Love Deeper Still. We are weary of our polarizations and echo chambers, burdened by disagreements that keep us fragmented and separated.  We know disagreements are real, and we know Jesus calls us into his love … how do we become the kind of people, and the kind of community, that is actually learning how to “walk the talk”?

One of the great mistakes we can make is to turn Jesus into a motivational speaker, exhorting us to try harder and do better.  And probably keeping himself at a safe distance from us until we have proven that we are trying harder and doing better!  So we hear Jesus say, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit” and immediately assume that Jesus is exhorting us to quit being bad trees and start behaving like good trees.

But when an audience steeped in Scripture hears about a “good tree” and a “bad tree,” where might they go?  Back to the Garden, with its “good tree,” the tree of life, and the “bad tree,” the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Adam and Eve were set free to enjoy everything in God’s good Garden, except the “bad tree” – “the day you eat of it, you will die,” God told them.

We are what we eat.  What does feasting on the fruit of the bad tree produce in us?  The insatiable desire to look good, feel good, be right, be in control … the deception that I am fully capable of always exactly discerning exactly where the line runs that separates truth from falsehood, good from evil, beauty from ugliness.  Feeding on the fruit from the bad tree makes me think that life is readily divisible into black-and-white; that because I know myself to be on the side of the angels, to differ with me puts you on the other side; that to disagree with me is to disagree with God.  We might never say it quite this baldly, but we sure can act it out!

You know what happened to Adam and Eve: exiled from the Garden (but not from God), with the way to the tree of life blocked by shining cherubim.

Until the Tree of Life shows up in person, as a person, in the person of Jesus.  His answer to all the death-dealing meals we cook up from all our bad-tree-fruit recipes is not advice or exhortation or rebuke or even his perfect example.  The Tree of Life willingly embraces the dead wood of a cross, not because he needs to die or deserves to die, but because we need to and we deserve to.  His death puts to death all the death flowing from the bad tree.

And that death, and the resurrection that follows on the third day, opens up a new way for all us bad trees, for all us thorn bushes and brier thickets.  A Seed is sown into the dead soil, and that Seed grows and produces its own kind of fruit, the fruit of the Tree of Life.

The answer for all us thorn bushes, brier thickets and bad trees is not to try harder.  The answer is to “die” and be replanted, to be “cut down” and sown anew with a different seed than the seed of death that hides in every piece of fruit produced by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

“Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.”  You can tell which tree I’m feeding from by simply listening to me.  And when you hear the evidence of a bad diet, don’t admonish me to do better; lead me to the Tree of Life.

The fruit of the “bad tree” sounds like look good, feel good, be right, be in control, know-it-all, critical spirit and having a long “enemies list.” Is there some repentance work that needs doing in your heart?

What is one way you could practice coming to the Tree of Life instead of beating up on yourself or on others?