Lectionary Meditation: random act of defoliation?

http://www.satucket.com/lectionary/1Proper15.htm

Cursing the curse

Jesus sounds like he was in a bad mood that day, cursing a poor fig tree that was only doing what came naturally to it (not bearing fruit out of season), then going in and laying on the moneylenders, who were only doing what came naturally to them (as human beings)--commodifying--fracturing a living relationship with God into objects for consumption.

I always thought it a bit unfair, cursing the fig tree, since it was not its time to bear fruit, after all. But it starts to seem less like a hunger-based temper tantrum (something I am not unfamiliar with) if you start to see trees as fellow subjects of God’s kingdom rather than as simple mindless objects. To figure out what God might be thinking about trees, let's consider other important fruit trees: the ones in the Garden of Eden.

First, God established plant life, saying, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” (Gen. 1:11) then God created Adam and “put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). So picture this as a place of continual growth and fruition, as Milton saw it, when he had Adam say, “Each Tree / Load'n with fairest Fruit, that hung to the Eye / Tempting, stirr'd in me sudden appetite /To pluck and eate; whereat I wak'd, and found / Before mine Eyes all real, as the dream [Paradise Lost Bk VIII, v. 306- 310]. From the beginning we were meant to eat, and be nourished by the Creation. Growing stuff and eating it: that’s Life 101. That’s the world that God blessed as good. The world God desired and loved. But that’s not the world that ensued after the Fall, when Adam and Eve ate the one fruit they were not supposed to eat. Not the world that Jesus entered and worked in, as a carpenter, a man who works with trees that are no longer living (wood), shaping dead objects from that which was meant to be living. And it is this fallen world of sweat and hunger, where plants do not feed us whenever we want, that Jesus is saying is wrong, is not the way it was meant to be… It is this cursing of the curse that we see when we view the withered fig tree, not a random act of defoliation.