By Their Fruits

Years ago someone told me — I have never verified it, but it has stayed with me the way a good story does — that the agents who learn to spot counterfeit currency are never trained on the fakes. Their whole apprenticeship is spent handling genuine bills, thousands of them, hour after hour, until a forgery announces itself the instant it touches their fingers. They do not study what is false. They come to know the true so thoroughly that the false has nowhere to hide.

But I digress — or perhaps I do not, because our Lord and Saint Paul hand us exactly this test twice this morning, in the Epistle and in the Gospel, under two different names. Paul calls it the Spirit of adoption. Our Lord calls it fruit. Both are answering the same question: how do you tell the real from the counterfeit, the child from the pretender, when both may speak the same religious language and wear the same religious clothes?

Sons, Not Slaves

Paul begins with a debt. We are debtors, he says, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. Every one of us serves something; the only question is what. Serve the flesh, and the wages are death, paid out slowly, in the small deaths of a life spent on what cannot last. Serve the Spirit, and something else happens: ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. Abba is not a formal word. It is closer to “Papa” than to “Father Almighty” — the cry of a child who has stopped calculating whether it is safe to ask for help, and simply asks.

But do not mistake that cry for a lowered bar. The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ — and an heir is not excused from proving whose house he belongs to. He is held to it more, because his life now carries the family name. A son’s word costs him nothing to give; his deeds cost him something, if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together — and it is the deeds, not the word, that our Lord will call fruit.

Wolves in the Right Clothing

Now turn to the Gospel, and notice how our Lord frames the same danger from the other side. Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. The danger he names is not obvious unbelief. Nobody needs to be warned against a wolf in wolf’s clothing; we see that coming. The danger is a wolf who has learned to dress correctly — who says the right words, keeps the right hours, wears the right vestments of piety, and yet is not, underneath, what he appears.

How, then, do you tell them apart, when the clothing is identical? Our Lord gives the counterfeit-detector’s answer: Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? You do not examine the label. You wait for the harvest. A thornbush can be tied about with silk ribbons and grape leaves, and it will still, in its season, produce thorns, because the nature of a thing determines its fruit far more surely than its costume does.

There is an old sense of the word prove worth keeping in mind here — not argue, but test, the way silver is proved in the furnace, or a bridge is proved by the weight it carries. Our Lord means exactly that kind of proof two verses later, when he says that every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. The fire does not invent the rot in the wood. It only shows, at last, what the wood already was.

And then comes the hardest sentence of the three lessons, the one that will not let any of us entirely off the hook: Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Correct words are not fruit. “Lord, Lord” is sheep’s clothing too, if it is all we have. The fruit our Lord is looking for is obedience that has become so habitual it no longer feels like a performance — which brings us right back to Paul’s Spirit of adoption, crying Abba without rehearsal.

Ordering Both Heaven and Earth

This is why the Church sets this Collect before these two lessons: O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; we humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable for us. We are not praying, first of all, for circumstances — for an easier week, a lighter cross. We are praying to have the false thing put away and the true thing given: that same Spirit of adoption that cries Abba, the Spirit whose fruit cannot be faked because it is not a performance at all, but a nature.

Go back to the counterfeit detectors for a moment, because I think they have one more thing to teach us. Nobody spends years training on genuine currency and comes away suspicious. They come away confident — able to move through a hundred transactions a day without anxiety, because they know, in their hands, what is real. That is what Paul promises is already ours, and what our Lord is asking us to become: not wolves anxiously perfecting our sheep’s clothing, item by item, but children who have handled the genuine article — the Father’s own voice, the Father’s own Spirit — so often and so closely that everything false simply falls away in our hands. Put away the hurtful thing; give us the profitable thing; and let the fruit, in its season, speak for itself.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen ✟