The View from the West Mesa

Lauren McCain was a Virginia Tech student. She died on Monday, the 16th of April. The title is a snippet of what her father has said about her killer. Yes, it is only three days after his daughter’s death and he may well still be, and likely is, in the initial stages of his response to his daughter’s loss. He may well change his message, or at least his emotions surrounding it, in the coming days and weeks. Maybe when his daughter doesn’t come home for the summer and his house seems so empty, so quiet, so desolate, he will come to more fully grasp the violence that has been done to him and his world. And he will be entitled to changing his view. No one would blame him for changing his views, for being angry and demanding some sort of vengeance from someone . Anyone . While we deduce that he and his family have some pretty strong Christian convictions, he remains human. Feeble, imperfect, and subject to emotional and psychological conflicts and swings as are the rest of us. And so no on...

When Jesus is in the environs of Jerusalem prior to the Passover of His death, He spends time in the city, but apparently spends evenings outside the walls, in one or more of the small towns in the vicinity. It is coming into Jerusalem from one of these small towns that Jesus sees a fig tree and goes over to it. When Jesus gets to the fig tree, He searches through its leaves, looking for figs apparently. Finding no figs, He curses the tree saying that no one will ever eat figs from it again. We find out later that the tree withers and dies. None of this seems overly out of place. That is until we reach the phrase “It wasn’t the time for figs.” What? That simply doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t time for figs and yet Jesus curses the tree for not having any figs on it. Surely the creator of the universe knew that it wasn’t fig season. No, this story now takes on an almost laughable and confounding aspect. How are we to accept the text as written? How will we correlate Jesus looking for f...