Why Did Jesus Curse the Fig Tree? A Sign About the Temple

Jesus cursed a fig tree outside Jerusalem as an acted sign, the way the prophets acted out their messages. The tree was in leaf with no fruit. Mark sets the curse and the withered tree on either side of Jesus clearing the Temple, so the barren tree pictures a Temple busy with worship but without the fruit God looked for.

Leaves without fruit: that is the whole story in three words. A fig tree in leaf promises figs, and this one promised and gave nothing. The next morning the disciples found it “dried up from the roots” (Mark 11:20), and Jesus turned their surprise into a lesson on prayer: “Have faith in God” (Mark 11:22). Matthew tells the same event more briefly. Luke leaves it out and tells instead a parable about a barren fig tree that is given one more year.

Mark tells it over two mornings. On the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem he went into the Temple, “and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve” (Mark 11:11). Next morning, on the road back, “he was hungry: And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet” (Mark 11:12–13). Jesus said to the tree, “No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it” (Mark 11:14).

He went on into the city, drove out the buyers and sellers, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers (Mark 11:15). That evening he left the city again. “And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away” (Mark 11:20–21).

Matthew puts the Temple scene first, on the day of the entry (Matthew 21:12–13), and tells the whole fig tree story the following morning. Jesus “found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away” (Matthew 21:19). “Presently” here means at once, as the disciples’ own words show: “How soon is the fig tree withered away!” (Matthew 21:20). Matthew gathers it into one scene. Mark splits it in two and sets the Temple between the halves.

Detail	Mark 11:12–25	Matthew 21:18–22
When the tree withers	Found withered the next morning	“Presently”, while the disciples watch
The Temple cleansing	Between the curse and the withered tree	The day before the curse
The season	“the time of figs was not yet”	Not mentioned
The curse	“No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever”	“Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever”
What Jesus teaches next	Faith, prayer and forgiveness	Faith and prayer

Because its leaves promised fruit that was not there. Around Jerusalem, fig trees stand bare through the winter and begin to put out leaves at the end of March, and tiny green figs appear in the joints of the new leaves at the same time. The Song of Solomon counts them among the first signs of spring: “The fig tree putteth forth her green figs” (Song of Solomon 2:13).

E. W. G. Masterman, who watched the fig trees near Jerusalem himself, explained the story this way in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915). Most of those small early figs drop off as they grow, and the farmers of his day picked them up and ate them; they called them taksh. The few that stay on the tree ripen about June, and the main crop about August. At Passover, around April, no tree would carry ripe figs of either kind, and that is what Mark means by “the time of figs was not yet”. But “every fig-tree which is going to bear fruit at all will have some taksh” by the time its young leaves appear, Masterman wrote, and the little figs are “sure evidence, even when it falls, that the tree bearing it is not barren.”

So a tree in full leaf with no green figs at all would bear nothing that year. This one, the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges adds, stood alone by the road and “presented an unusual show of leaves for the season.” It made a promise it could not keep. An old commentary, the Pulpit Commentary, put it in one line: “the fig tree was cursed, not for being barren, but for being false.”

Other readers hear in Mark’s note about the season a hint that the story is about more than a meal. The Expositor’s Greek Testament suggests that Jesus’ hope of finding figs was “extremely faint,” and that he went up to the tree “with intent to utilise it for a parable.” John Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew in the fourth century, read the remark to mean that Jesus went to the tree “not for hunger, but for His disciples’ sake.” Yet Mark does say that Jesus “was hungry” (Mark 11:12), and both can be true. A real hunger brought him to the tree, and what he found there became a sign.

Because each story explains the other. On the evening he arrived, Jesus “looked round about upon all things” in the Temple (Mark 11:11). The next morning he looked over the fig tree and found it in leaf without fruit. Then he went back to the Temple, overturned the tables, and taught: “Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17). He was joining two prophets. The first half is Isaiah’s, “mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people” (Isaiah 56:7), and the second Jeremiah’s, “Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?” (Jeremiah 7:11).

Set side by side, the two halves show the same thing. The tree had its leaves. The Temple had its sacrifices and its busy trade. Neither gave what it was there to give. The New American Bible’s note on the passage calls the cursing “a parable in action,” and says Jesus’ search for fruit recalls the prophets’ use of the fig tree “to designate Israel”. The prophets had walked this road before him. Jeremiah wrote, “there shall be no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree, and the leaf shall fade” (Jeremiah 8:13). Through Hosea, God remembered the nation’s first days with tenderness: “I saw your fathers as the firstripe in the fig tree at her first time” (Hosea 9:10). And Micah grieved at finding nothing: “there is no cluster to eat: my soul desired the firstripe fruit” (Micah 7:1). God came looking for fruit because he longed for it.

The Temple’s leaders answered with a plot. “And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine” (Mark 11:18). The next day “the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders” came to him and asked, “By what authority doest thou these things?” (Mark 11:27–28). What the clearing of the Temple itself meant is taken up in what we can learn from Jesus cleansing the Temple.

Jesus also foretold the end of the building. As they left the Temple he said of its great stones, “there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). The Temple was destroyed in AD 70, when a Roman army under Titus took Jerusalem in the war that began with a revolt against Rome in AD 66.

Not at the Jewish people as a whole, though for centuries many Christians read it that way. The New American Bible’s note, quoted above, calls the cursing “Jesus’ judgment… on barren Israel”. The Pulpit Commentary says, “The Jews were this unprofitable fig tree.” Matthew Henry, the Protestant commentator, wrote: “He made this fig-tree an example, not to the trees, but to the men of that generation. It was a figure of the doom upon the Jewish church, to which he came seeking fruit, but found none.” Augustine, preaching on Matthew 21, applied the tree to the Jews who had not believed in Christ: “they who have remained in this bad and barren race, even unto this day, and shall remain unto the end, were figured in that tree.” For centuries this was a common Christian reading.

Mark’s own account points more narrowly. The fig-tree pictures behind the sign come from Jeremiah, Hosea and Micah, Israelites speaking to their own people. Jesus and the Twelve were Jews. In the Temple courts the crowd was “astonished at his doctrine”, and it was “the scribes and chief priests” who plotted against him (Mark 11:18). The men who challenged his authority the next day were “the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders” (Mark 11:27). In Mark the sign falls on the Temple and on its leaders that week.

At the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church rejected readings that blame the Jewish people as a whole. Its declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) says that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” and that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”

Bertrand Russell thought so. In his 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian, the philosopher quoted Mark’s account and said: “This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree.” He set it beside the drowning of the Gadarene swine as evidence that, in wisdom and virtue, Christ did not stand as high as Buddha or Socrates.

Russell was right that the tree was not to blame, and the Gospels never say it was. Neither account says Jesus was angry, and neither treats the tree as guilty of anything. The prophets’ signs worked the same way. Jeremiah was told to break a potter’s bottle before witnesses and say, “Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter’s vessel” (Jeremiah 19:11). Nobody blames the bottle. It carried the message, and so did the tree. And if Masterman is right about fig trees, a tree in leaf at Passover with no green figs was going to bear nothing that year anyway.

Chrysostom met a form of the same objection in the fourth century. Jesus, he said, had healed and helped people everywhere and punished no one, and when he first showed his power to judge, he chose a plant for it: “it was not His will to show forth this upon men; upon the plant did He furnish the proof of His might in taking vengeance.” A few days after the fig tree withered, Jesus let himself be arrested and crucified. The judgment he showed on a tree, he took on himself.

When Peter pointed out the tree, Jesus answered with a lesson on prayer. “Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith” (Mark 11:22–23). And he went on: “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses” (Mark 11:24–25).

Matthew gives the same promise: “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive” (Matthew 21:22). Mark ties it to forgiveness, and he places it straight after a Temple that had stopped being a house of prayer. The faith Jesus asks for is faith “in God”. The prayer he describes comes from someone who has first let go of a grudge. That is what a house of prayer looks like when it bears fruit.

The tree asks something of us too. Augustine opened his sermon on it by calling the passage “an alarming warning, lest we have leaves only, and have no fruit. That is, in few words, lest words be present and deeds be wanting.” Each of us can ask it quietly: does my faith have leaves without fruit?

Luke has no cursing of a fig tree. He has a parable instead, told just after Jesus has twice warned his hearers, “except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3, 13:5):

“A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none. Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground? And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.” (Luke 13:6–9)

The picture is the one from Mark and Matthew: an owner looking for fruit on a fig tree and finding none. But here the gardener pleads for one more year and promises to dig and feed the tree himself, and the parable ends before the year is out. In Mark the withered tree is a judgment already given. In Luke the barren tree is still standing, and someone is working hard to save it. That is the call to repent while there is time. Why Jesus so often taught in stories like this one is the subject of why Jesus spoke in parables.

The fig tree is one of the Bible’s ordinary pictures of home, peace and plenty, which is why a barren one says so much. It appears in the first chapters of Genesis, when Adam and Eve “sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:7). Deuteronomy describes the promised land as “A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey” (Deuteronomy 8:8). Figs were everyday food, often dried. Pressed into cakes, they were among the provisions Abigail brought to David (1 Samuel 25:18), and a lump of figs was laid on King Hezekiah’s boil (2 Kings 20:7). For the other fruit trees of Scripture, the olive, the vine and the pomegranate among them, see the fruit trees found in the Bible.

To sit under your own fig tree meant peace. In Solomon’s reign “Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree” (1 Kings 4:25), and Micah looks ahead to a day when “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). A failed fig harvest meant hard times, and that gives Habakkuk’s prayer its force: “Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines… Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:17–18). Jeremiah saw two baskets of figs set before the Temple, one of “very good figs, even like the figs that are first ripe”, the other so bad they “could not be eaten” (Jeremiah 24:2), and God used them as a picture of two groups of his people.

The Gospels mention the fig tree in two other well-known places. Jesus told Nathanael, “Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee” (John 1:48). And on the Mount of Olives, later that same week, Jesus used a fig tree in leaf once more, this time as a sign of what was coming: “Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh” (Matthew 24:32).

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• Why Did Jesus Speak in Parables?
• What Fruit Trees Are Found in the Bible?
• What Is the Meaning of Passion Week?