24 June 2026 • Friday of Trinity 3 (observed) • Mark 11:11–23 · James 2:1–9
In the holy Name + of Jesus. AMEN.
A fig tree in full leaf is making a promise. On a fig tree, the leaves and the fruit come together, so a tree covered in green is a tree that says there’s fruit here. Jesus is hungry. He sees the green from a distance and comes for what it promises. He finds nothing. “He found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs” (Mark 11:13). And He curses it: “Let no one eat fruit from you ever again” (Mark 11:14).
It sounds petty. A hungry man blasts a tree, out of season, for not having what it wasn’t yet time to have. But it was never about the tree. The leaves are the indictment. This tree promised fruit and had none. All show, no figs.
Mark wraps the next scene inside this one: fig tree, then temple, then fig tree again. He means for you to read them together because they’re the same thing.
Jesus goes straight from the tree into the temple. And the temple is in full leaf. The sacrifices, the crowds, the money changers at their tables, the men selling doves, all of it moving. It looks alive. A packed house. Every pew is filled. It looks like the most lively place in Israel. And Jesus walks in and finds leaves. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17). The one court where the nations could come and pray, where an outsider could draw near to God, had been turned into a market. The house built to gather the world had no room left in it to pray. All leaves. No figs.
St. James wrote the same: A man comes into your assembly with a gold ring and fine clothes, and behind him a poor man in filthy clothes. You seat the rich man in the good place and tell the poor man, “You stand there,” or, “Sit here at my footstool” (James 2:3). “Have you not… become judges with evil thoughts?” (James 2:4). You’ve got the leaves: the assembly, the worship, the name of Christ, the faith of the Lord of glory on your lips. But the fruit isn’t there. A church that seats the poor man at the footstool is a fig tree in full leaf.
The fig tree, the temple, the footstool: all ways to confess the same sin. It’s religion that looks alive and is dead. Our Confessions describe a dead faith as the delusion that a man could keep true faith and salvation “even though he is and remains a corrupt and unfruitful tree, from which no good fruit comes at all” (FC Solid Declaration IV). The fig tree is in our Confessions. It’s there because it could be you. It could be me.
You can have the leaves. Baptized, in the pew, the name of Christ on you, the right answers in your head. The demons have that much. “You believe that God is one; you do well. The demons also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). Faith is not merely knowing the history, the knowledge the ungodly and the devil have. The leaves prove nothing. The fig tree asks one question. Are there figs?
And there’s the cutting of the knife’s edge. If the next word is “then bear fruit, or be cursed like the tree, grow your figs,” that isn’t the gospel. That’s just the curse again. And it isn’t what James says!
When James says “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26), he isn’t contradicting Paul’s “justified by faith alone.” He answers a different question. Not “how am I saved?” By faith alone, apart from works. His question is: how do you tell a living faith from a dead one? And the answer: “James calls that a dead faith where good works and fruit of the Spirit of every kind do not follow” (FC Solid Declaration IV). A dead faith has leaves and no figs. A living faith bears fruit. Not to be saved but because it’s alive.
So the question can never be “how do I make myself fruitful?” A cursed, barren tree cannot bear fruit. The fig tree couldn’t. You can’t. The question is where a living faith comes from. So let’s look at what Jesus does, standing between the leaves and the curse.
He doesn’t repair the old temple. He says, “Have faith in God” (Mark 11:22). Not faith in the temple. The temple is finished. That mountain, He says, will be taken up and thrown into the sea. There’s a new temple coming, not made with hands, His own body, torn down and raised on the third day. The fruit the old tree couldn’t bear, He bears. The prayer that the old house couldn’t offer, He becomes. In Him there’s a house of prayer for all nations at last, where the outsider and the poor man and the Gentile come in and are welcomed and are home.
The barren tree is cursed. And on Friday, the Lord of glory is hung on a tree and made a curse in its place. “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” (Galatians 3:13). He takes the curse the fig tree earned. And the Lord of glory, the title James gives Him, takes the footstool. He had nowhere to lay His head. He wore no fine clothes; they stripped Him of the ones He had. The Lord of glory became the poor man in the filthy clothes, so the poor man in the filthy clothes could be seated in glory. “Has God not chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith?” (James 2:5). He has. He did it by becoming poor.
That’s where a living faith comes from. From the Lord of glory who became poor and now hands Himself to you. Faith receives Him. And a faith that has received the Lord of glory doesn’t stay barren, any more than a branch grafted into a living vine stays dead. The figs come. Not as the price of your salvation; our Confessions condemn that, the notion that works are necessary to be saved. The figs come as a sign that the tree is alive.
And James tells us that they look like this: The poor man gets the good seat. The partiality dies in you. You can’t hold the faith of the Lord-of-glory-made-poor and look down on the poor man He became. The fruit of this faith is the welcome you were given: the man at the footstool, seated now in glory, making room for someone else.
So have faith in God. Not in your leaves. Not in the temple of your own religion, and its impressive green. Have faith in the One cursed on the tree so the barren tree could live, who became poor so the poor are rich, who is Himself the new house where you’re welcomed and fed and never sent to the footstool. Come and pray. Come and eat. He is the house of prayer for all nations, and there’s room for you. And in Him, the figs will follow.
The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School — Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin