The Barren Fig Tree

Summary

Nikolaos Sotiropoulos opens at the threshold of Holy Week on Holy Monday, when the Church commemorates Joseph the All-Comely and Christ's cursing of the barren fig tree. He recounts Christ's return from Bethany to Jerusalem after Palm Sunday and His real human hunger, and explains that the tree's leaves promised fruit yet bore none, so Christ cursed it and it withered at once. He reads the act as a prophetic symbol, in the manner of the Old Testament prophets, and interprets the barren tree as an image of the Synagogue and of a nation whose leaders kept outward religion without inner obedience, joining it to the parable of the fig tree in Luke and to the destruction of Jerusalem. He then applies the warning to the Greek nation, praising its historic Christian fruits while denouncing present barrenness in worship, morality, and public life, and reads national calamities and prophetic signs as a summons to repentance.