FRANKLY, I’VE ALWAYS found the story a bit odd. You probably know the story I’m talking about: it’s in Matthew 21, just after Jesus comes to Jerusalem on the day we now celebrate as Palm Sunday. Jesus rides into the city on the back of a donkey, fulfilling the messianic prophecy of Zechariah 9:9. The people praise God in response, cheering and acclaiming him to be the Son of David. He then marches into the temple and dramatically drives out the merchants. The blind and lame come to him for healing. And the children pick up the song the crowds had sung earlier, much to the annoyance of the religious leadership.

When he’s done for the day, he leaves the city to spend the night in nearby Bethany. But the next morning, he’s right back in the temple courts, engaged in vigorous public debates. His opponents are trying to embarrass him with what they think are hard or controversial questions. By the end of chapter 22, however, he’s bested them all, and as Matthew puts it, “from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions” (vs. 46, NIV).

But the story I’m referring to happens in between, on the morning Jesus returns to the temple after his night in Bethany. It’s found in Matthew 21:18-22, just five verses. If those verses were taken out of your Bible, you probably wouldn’t miss them; it wouldn’t leave a gap in the narrative. And the story itself may sound strange to our ears.

Jesus and the disciples are on their way back into the city. Matthew tells us that he’s hungry. He sees a fig tree by the side of the road. The tree is in leaf, but surprisingly, there’s no fruit on it. Jesus therefore curses the tree, and it immediately dies. The disciples seem focused on the miracle, asking Jesus how he did it, and Jesus answers with a short lesson on prayer and faith.

But the disciples don’t ask the question that would have been going through my mind, the one that confuses me when I read the story: why curse a tree for not having fruit? We talk about people being “hangry” — in a bad mood because they need to eat. Are we to think that Jesus was hangry when he zapped the poor tree?

Let’s ask Micah.

IN CHAPTER 6 of the book of Micah, as we’ve seen, the prophet acts like God’s prosecutor to bring a lawsuit against God’s people for failing to honor the covenant. The chapter ends with several verses that again bring accusations of injustice and predict the ruin that is coming to Jerusalem and Judah as a result.

If you think back to chapter 1, you’ll recall that when Micah prophesied the downfall of Samaria, he moaned that their spiritual and moral plague had spread southward to Jerusalem. The people of Judah are his people, and the prophet takes no pleasure in delivering such bad news:

Because of this I will weep and wail;
    I will go about barefoot and naked.
I will howl like a jackal
    and moan like an owl. (Mic 1:8)

Similarly, having delivered yet another message of condemnation and coming disaster, Micah now laments:

What misery is mine!
I am like one who gathers summer fruit
    at the gleaning of the vineyard;
there is no cluster of grapes to eat,
    none of the early figs that I crave. (Mic 7:1)

One could translate that first line as “Woe is me!” — in Yiddish, one might say “Oy vey!” But the latter has been used so often in more comic settings that it has lost much of its anguished tone. Micah is genuinely distraught over the fate of Judah.

What I want us to notice, however, is the metaphor he uses to describe how he feels. It’s not just that he feels badly that his people are about to suffer — it’s about why they will suffer.

Micah has already used agricultural imagery earlier in the book; such images would connect readily with the imaginations of his hearers. The city of Samaria, for example, will be laid waste and become a place for planting vineyards (1:6). Jerusalem, too, will be plowed flat like a field (3:12). And when Jerusalem is restored one day, the people will sit peacefully under their own fig trees (4:4).

So here again, at the opening of chapter 7, we have the metaphors of grapes and figs. In a way that should already be familiar to readers of the New Testament, these symbolize the “fruit” God wants to see in the lives of his covenant people. In his lament, Micah both embodies and gives voice to what God desires, a God who comes to his people expecting to find fruit — and is deeply disappointed at what he finds instead.

WHAT JESUS DOES in Matthew 21, then, is to enact a parable that draws upon the same stock of images and associations that Micah does. Don’t forget: Jesus isn’t out somewhere roaming the countryside, he’s heading into Jerusalem, and he already knows what he’s going to find. It’s no accident that this story about the fig tree is sandwiched between the two stories of the cleansing of the temple and his debates with religious leadership.

And shortly after, Matthew will also describe how Jesus, like a prophet of old, denounces the hypocrisy of Jerusalem’s leaders and predicts the coming destruction of the temple and city.

The disciples may have been so gobsmacked by the miracle of the withering tree that they missed the point of what Jesus did. But we don’t have to. And it should remind us that God is still looking for fruit in his people.