Archive for August 7th, 2006
Threats and warnings and fire
Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7: 18)
“Thrown into the fire…” This is a warning, a threat even, and no doubt about it. It’s the sort of thing we don’t want to hear, to say nothing of hearing come from Jesus himself, who loves us and whom we try to love and serve.
Parents are often counseled these days to allow the “natural consequences” of their children’s bad behavior to be the punishment for that behavior, rather than some external punishment or threat. You break your toy, and you end up with a broken toy; spank a child for breaking the toy, and they’ll remember the spanking (and who gave the spanking) rather than how their own behavior caused the breaking and how they might want to act differently in the future. This is, at least, the theory.
Farmers usually have to accept some amount of loss as the natural consequences of their labor. Treat field A with fertilizer X and field B with fertilizer Y; B does better, and so the difference between A and B is a loss; maybe some fertilizer X is left over, and it’s likely not to make sense to keep it, another loss. Some vines are not very productive, others are; to make space and encourage growth, the unproductive vines are cut and thrown away, perhaps burned up.
I think Jesus’s warning describes the natural consequences of encouraging what is good; it implies a pruning of what is bad. The difference between this and what happens on the farm and even (to a certain extent) with our children is that we have, more or less, the capacity to choose what is good over what is bad. Having that capacity doesn’t remove the natural consequences of what we choose. If anything, it intensifies them, since our knowledge that good choices (generally) cause good results, and bad choices (generally) cause bad results should lead us to knowingly ask which of our choices are good, and thus to choose them–it’s a piece of meta-knowledge, knowledge about knowledge, a choice about choices.
Bess, however, once put it more simply, in words of one syllable: good is good; bad is bad; don’t be a fool.
