Cursing the Fig Tree Spoken Word

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you.”
Such a strange thing for Jesus to say
On the day
After he entered
Jerusalem.

He clearly knew
What he would go through
Where this was all headed
Yet he remained wedded
To his mission.
Since his Transfiguration
Jesus had his eyes set
On the capital of the nation
But with a different goal
Then that of the collective whole
The masses believed
That were the Messiah to rule in Jerusalem
Then surely Israel would become like God
When you consider
What the Messiah was expected to deliver
And the calmness
That Jerusalem promised
This vision of victory and Power and might…
That somehow the Messiah in Jerusalem
Would magically make everything right.
When you see this frantic pursuit
Of establishing grand repute
You realize that it’s all just another forbidden fruit.
To Jerusalem
Prophets were sent
And they were stoned
And killed
Because their message
Didn’t match
The collective vision of sovereignty, valor, and victory
Truth is… this isn’t just an ancient Jerusalem issue
This is something we all commit to
It’s the story of a soul level malnutrition
The very plight of our human condition
This constant sense
That the answer
Is just within our reach

Once we have the money
Once we get the job
Once we are in the control
Then we will be whole.
Whether your Sacred Object
Is an Israelite empire
Or climbing corporately higher
Or just getting hired
The truth is
Your Sacred Object is a liar
Long before we were all caught up in the endless pursuit of happiness
Two humans were without pain
And Without shame
They were without separation or struggle or sin
Without need for pardon
At one with God in The Garden.

And somehow even there
Humanity was deceived into feeling incomplete.
These two humans saw a tree
And it became their Sacred Object
Because the fruit of this tree
Was the only crop they could not select
It was what they could not have
So, it became all that they wanted
In hopes of becoming like God
They took the fruit and ate
And were left forever haunted.
Thousands of years later
After entering Jerusalem
And lamenting Jerusalem
And critiquing Jerusalem
Jesus cursed a fig tree in Jerusalem

Was it the same fraudulent tree?
Jesus the man on a mission for months
wasn’t having a random outburst
No, he was cursing The Curse,
killing the Sacred Object
On his way towards become accursed
His mission
Wasn’t to rule in Jerusalem
It was to provide humanity
With a new way to be
To curse our Sacred Objects
To put to death the pursuit of the perfect
So that we might discover
That the Kingdom of God is near
In fact, it’s right here
And all along it was us
Convincing ourselves of something Superfluous
Telling our soul
That in order to be whole
We still needed to reach our goal.
This is the mindset that Jesus laments
These are beliefs that Jesus curses
This is why Jesus died.
To execute humanity’s old ways of living
So that we all might rise to something more life-giving.