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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost

October 26, 2022

Feast of Alfred the Great, King, 899 CE

Invitatory

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: Come let us adore him.

Reading: Luke 6:43-45

Jesus said, “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they pick grapes from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil, for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.”

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

Is this true - what Jesus said? It’s a serious question.

It seems simple enough. Good people do good things, and bad people do bad things. This could be taken as self-evident and certainly something that we don’t need the revelation of God to discover. 

But where do the good and the bad originate? Jesus seems to imply that the qualities of good and bad are resident in persons themselves; people are, fundamentally, of a certain type. And what they do merely confirms who they are – what kind of character they have. Bad trees can only produce bad fruit. So be it. One’s only option, then, is to cut down and eliminate bad trees and, as logically follows, to do the same for bad people too – which is not an uncommon response. 

The problem with bad people as we actually encounter them, however, is that in the overwhelming majority of cases they are able to do some good. Sometimes they do a lot of good. Sometimes we’re even inclined to dismiss the bad they do because the good they do – by some accounting – seems to balance out the bad. In this manner, they present us with a quandary. Mussolini got the trains to run on time. Stalin was a cultured man of letters.

The same problem holds for those who are good. Sometimes those who are most highly esteemed shock us by the bad they do, perhaps in some long-hidden corner of their lives. In this case, our sense of disappointment along with our disapproval can lead us to dismiss every good thing that they have, in fact, accomplished. We may not waver at all, pausing because of a sense of quandary. We lower the boom. And they are, then, judged to be bad people from whom no good can come. 

Our preference is for the boundaries of good and bad to be definite. This certainty makes us feel safer. We can dissociate ourselves from those we’ve villainized, and we can find security and pride among the righteous. And Jesus’ words seem to affirm this – after all, he is understood to be the exceptionally good person from whom only the greatest good can come.

This assumption, however, can cause us to misread Biblical texts because we approach them thinking that Jesus must have said what he meant and meant what he said. Our task is simply to listen and obey: for the Bible sets things straight. It is handy in this respect.

But, in truth, the Scriptures frequently serve to muddle the very distinctions that we had wrongfully thought to be clear; and sometimes what Jesus meant is exactly the opposite of what he said. 

Just before these verses, Jesus had warned that we tend to be deeply hypocritical in our judgments, telling others that we’ll remove the speck from their eyes when we ourselves are completely unaware of the log in our own. And, as a supreme example of this, Jesus then gave the example that we judge others to be either good or bad – even when we have no idea how to adequately make this judgment. However good and bad arise in us, their origins are far more mysterious than we can track. And thus, people, of themselves, cannot be judged to be good or bad because these forces are greater than we are. We do not merely do good or bad; we are caught up and tossed about by them. 

Jesus’ words warn us against the very thing he seemed to be teaching. It was his way of pointing out why and how we need God.

The Lord's Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven,

    hallowed be thy Name,

    thy kingdom come,

    thy will be done,

        on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

    as we forgive those

        who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

    but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,

    and the power, and the glory

   for ever and ever. Amen.