From earliest days the story of Jesus cursing a fig tree has created problems. It was early April; fig trees didn't fruit until late May; it would be unreasonable to complain about there being no fruit when the fruit season was weeks away. Is this mere petulance? Some commentators even describe the fig tree as innocent. What are we to make of a miracle that is destructive, against created things, and seems to be the very showing-off of power that Jesus refused to perform when asked for a sign as proof of his divine status.
One answer is that the incident comes immediately before the cleansing of the Temple, and the withering of the tree is only evident after that cathartic exercise of religious outrage. The point, it's argued, is that the fig tree is God's people, from whom God expected the fruits of righteousness, justice and obedience to Torah. But the people did not deliver; the Temple had become a sham of performance without the fruit of a righteous people. Jesus words of condemnation to the fig tree are an enacted parable of the coming of God in judgement. Most exegetical efforts go in this direction.
Denise Levertov's father had converted from Judaism to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. After leaving home she spent much of her life agnostic to defined religious identity, and only in the last decade or so, slowly moved towards conversion, becoming Roman Catholic in 1989, eight years before her death.
Much of her searching included the Ignatian Exercises, and the discipline of imagining the scene and the characters in the stories and putting yourself into the situation. Something of that same technique is at work in Levertov's poem "What the Fig Tree Said." She personifies the fig tree, which explains to all those exegetical reductionists, empirical rationalists and wooden literalists, that they are missing the point.
Far from being cursed as a fruitless fig tree, the tree explains to the slow witted readers, that it has been co-opted into Jesus teaching ministry, a living metaphor, a visual aid to get it through the thick skulls of the disciples that they were the fruitless ones. The had walked in the sunlight of Jesus' example and teaching but showed no promise of the fruits of compassion, understanding and growth. Absent fruit is metaphor for barren hearts.
The curse is not directed at the tree, not even at the disciples, but at the state of mind that is deaf and blind to truth, possibility, newness and a different kind of kingdom. This poet has deep allegiance to metaphor as conduit of meaning. and as an instrument subversive of settled complacency, and disruptive of controlling intellect.
The story of a man cursing a tree for being fruitless out of season is shocking; which means it has done its job. Now it's up to those who were there, and those who are now present through reading the text, to use their imagination. This poem does exactly what Levertov attempts in so many of her poems. She compels the reader to think imaginatively and outside the familiar categories and limits of those who think they know more than they do.
For Leveretov, imagination is "to live with a door of one's life open to the transcendent, the numinous." She goes on, "The imagination, which synergises intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God." ('A Poet's View', New and Selected Essays, 241. 24)
And now to read the poem, with ears that hear, and eyes that see.
What the Fig Tree Said
Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! His friends
were blurting for Him
in secret: wouldn’t admit they were shocked.
They thought Him
petulant to curse me!—yet how could the Lord
be unfair?—so they looked away,
then and now.
But I, I knew that
helplessly barren though I was,
my day had come. I served
Christ the Poet,
who spoke in images: I was at hand,
a metaphor for their failure to bring forth
what is within them (as figs
were not within me). They who had walked
in His sunlight presence,
they could have ripened,
could have perceived His thirst and hunger,
His innocent appetite;
they could have offered
human fruits—compassion, comprehension—
without being asked,
without being told of need.
My absent fruit
stood for their barren hearts. He cursed
not me, not them, but
(ears that hear not, eyes that see not)
their dullness, that withholds
gifts unimagined.
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