First Chapel on Kierkegaard.

As I said in my last post, I am working on chapels for school based on Kierkegaard's Works of Love. Here's the first, on Luke 6:44 "each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers." It was fun writing it, and should be fun delivering it, since I have some confidence in my philosophy background. Here it is:

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In a series of works on Love, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard begins with the text of Luke 6:44 “each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers”. Since he is discussing works of love, this seems a reasonable place to start, since he acknowledges that love is inexpressible and indescribable. He writes that “something that in its total richness is essentially inexhaustible is also in its smallest work essentially indescribable just because essentially it is totally present everywhere and essentially cannot be described”. And since love itself is inexhaustible and indescribable, we cannot simply begin by aiming straight at love itself. We must, Kierkegaard suggests, work towards it obliquely; by examining its fruits, its works.

With this in mind, Kierkegaard begins his examination of the works of love by positing, as he likes to do elsewhere, two different kinds of people. He distinguishes between these two types of people by way of their relationship to love, and more importantly, their relationship to deception and love. One person is one who has been, or is being, deceived concerning love, and has found out, or will find out, that love is not where he had hoped it to be. Thus, what he though to be love is in fact something else, and so becomes ‘sick unto death’. The other person is one who does not want this to happen to him, and so he deceives himself into not loving at all. Perhaps he is thinking ‘there is too much potential for pain involved in love, and so I will be better off by not loving at all’. However, while this person may consider that he has wisely saved himself from a great deal of pain (or at least imagined potential pain), Kierkegaard describes him as defrauding himself of love. He has lost something of eternity because of his worldly wisdom. But because he is deceived, he thinks that he knows about love, and therefore can console the fellow who had been deceived in love. And this is where the fruits of love come in. Kierkegaard writes that “it will be recognizable from the fruits that there is no love within him”.

In using this text and saying that love is known by its fruits, Kierkegaard brings out two important elements: namely that love is known by its own fruits, and love, since it is known by its fruits, must be hidden. In the first place, when Luke writes that we do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers, this is because thornbushes and briers have, so to speak, fruit of their own, and figs and grapes have plants of their own. Thus there are things that might look like love, and people may be deceived by them, but in the end they will be shown for what they are. Christian love, Kierkegaard writes, is different than any humanly love we can find. Christian love is “eternity’s truth” and will never perish, while humanly love, no matter how long-lasting it may be, must perish. Also, since love is known by its fruits, it is therefore hidden. It is hidden in the same way that the life of thought is hidden, and thought is made known by its expression, and nothing else. In the same way love, being hidden, is only known by its expression, its fruits, or rather, its works.

How is it, though, that love is hidden? Kierkegaard writes, and here brings out some of the brilliance of his style:
"Love’s hidden life is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quite lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love."
We have love, he says, because our love originates in God’s love, albeit mysteriously. And since God is eternal and infinite, there is nothing that can dry up this ‘spring of love’ within us, if indeed we do possess it.

Also, in saying that love has, as such, a spring from which it flows, Kierkegaard also brings to attention that love must be living. He describes it as love’s need to be recognized by its fruits. Love, without expression, without fruit, is not love at all, or at least will not be love for very long. The need that love has for expression cannot simply find its outlet in words. Kierkegaard uses 1 John 3:18 “Dear children let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth”, and suggests that mere word cannot express love; there must be something more to it. This is not to say that we cannot express our love with words, but that words alone are insufficient. Kierkegaard, bringing our attention to Matthew 12:34, “out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks”, shows that there must be something behind the words, something substantial, in our expressions of love.

And this, to Kierkegaard, seems to be the crux of the matter: that we work so that our love can be known by its fruits. Kierkegaard writes:
"it remains firm that love is to be known by its fruits. But the sacred words of that text are not said to encourage us to get busy judging one another; they are rather spoken admonishingly to the single individual ... to encourage him not to allow his love to become unfruitful but to work so that it could be known by its fruits."
We have a responsibility in the matter, not to judge whether our brother or sister is allowing their love to be fruitful (or even whether or not they have this love), but we have a responsibility to give expression to the love within us. For the text does not say, as Kierkegaard points out, that we are to know the tree by its fruit, but rather, that the tree itself is to be known by its fruit. And we, he adds, are that tree. For:
"The divine authority of the Gospel does not speak to one person about another, ... no when the gospel speaks, it speaks to the single individual. It does not speak about us human beings ... but speaks to us human beings."
We, therefore, are not to be ‘expert knowers’ and judge love by its fruits in others. We are simply to bear fruit.
And with this, Kierkegaard returns to the beginning of his discourse, to the two types of people. The one, remember, was one who had been deceived in love, the other was one who had guarded himself against such deception by defrauding himself of love. The first, we can say, believed in love, while the other believed in his own (foolish) wisdom. Kierkegaard uses the difference to show that we must believe in love. To say that love must be known by its fruits is not to say that we can demand to see love’s fruits, and then judge love on that evidence. We must believe in love, and so see its fruits, but see, in our belief in it, the far greater thing that lies behind these fruits; the plant from which these fruits spring. Kierkegaard writes that “if mistrust can actually see something as less than it is, then love can also see something as greater than it is”, showing us that while love is to be known by its fruits, then it also takes love to know love in this way.
Kierkegaard concludes his discourse on love’s fruits by saying that love can only be known by love:
"The life of love is indeed recognizable by its fruits, which make it manifest, but the life itself is still more than the single fruit, and still more than all the fruits together that you could count at any moment. Therefore the last, the most blessed, the most unconditionally convincing mark of love remains—love itself, the love that becomes known and recognized by the love in another. Like is known only like; only someone who abides in love can know love, and in the same way his love is to be known."

The passage in question, Luke 6:44, is placed in a large section of teaching; Jesus’ “sermon on the plain”. The parallel passage in Matthew is also placed in a section of Jesus’ teaching; the “sermon on the mount.” The question here is are these two separate times in which Jesus taught his followers, or are these two passages describing one event? At first glance, it seems that they may be reporting two separate events, since Luke writes that Jesus had spent the previous night in prayer on a mountainside (Lk. 6:12), and in the morning, Luke writes, Jesus went down with his disciples and stood on a level place. Matthew, however, reports that Jesus, when he saw the crowds (Matt. 5:1) he went up on a mountainside and sat down. Before this, Matthew does not relate the night spent in prayer, but that Jesus traveled through the Jewish countryside, healing many people.

Jakob van Bruggen, a name we are all familiar with (or soon will be), sees these two narratives as reporting the same event. He harmonizes the two by stating that Jesus would have descended, as Luke reports, because in order to address a large crowd, he would have to be below them, in order for his voice to carry far enough. So Luke writes that Jesus descends to a level place, which could maybe be a level plateau on the mountainside. Matthew writes that Jesus went up to the mountain. This does not necessarily mean that Jesus climbed the mountain and preached to the people from the heights, but could simply mean that Jesus ascended to the mountain, maybe stopping at its lower slopes, or even the foot. Thus, to van Bruggen, the two narratives relate the same event. And with this, he stands in good company. Calvin, in his harmony of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, also mentions that there are people who think that these two narratives relate two different events. But, he says, they “rest their opinion on a light and frivolous argument. Calvin then points to Luke 6:20, in which it says that Jesus ‘lifted up his eyes to his disciples’ and began to teach. While it is true that in the Greek it does, quite literally, say that Jesus lifted up his eyes to his disciples, it does not necessarily mean that Jesus was standing below his disciples, and so we cannot read too much into the view that these are two distinct events.

While I agree with both van Bruggen’s and Calvin’s assessments, it is also not wise to make too little of the differences between the synoptic gospels. While Matthew records the teaching about the trees and their fruit within the context of teaching on false prophets, concluding that by their fruit we will know them, Luke does no such thing. Luke’s account of this teaching seems to be a unit on its own. He begins this teaching by stating that ‘no good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit’, and concludes it by saying that out of the overflow of our hearts our mouths speak. The focus on these two accounts of Jesus’ teaching is different. To take Luke as referring here to false teachers would be, I think, to harmonize him too much, in affect subordinating him with Matthew. In this instance, while the broader sermons may be the same event in the history of Jesus’ life, there are two lessons which can be learned from these two passages. Matthew reports a teaching about false teachers, while Luke seems to report a general statement which can serve as a teaching about every single person.

In this respect, Kierkegaard takes Luke’s account of the teaching, and applies it to the life of Love. He begins quite generally, it is true, and applies this verse to love itself. He takes this verse to abstract heights, and uses it to explain something that he wishes to explain. In this context, he lets the verse speak, and explains it in terms of his greater theme; but the verse is still a tool, useful for his purposes. In this respect, I would say that maybe parts of the text, integral parts, elude him.

The passage, of itself, does not discuss love, but people. Luke gives Jesus’ explanation of this passage in vs. 45: “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.” Kierkegaard makes reference to this fact near the end of his discourse, stating that we are to show the fruits of love, but it is still contained within his larger theme of the fruits of love. Obviously Kierkegaard never studied here, and I’m pretty sure his discourse would not pass at Classis. However, though his discourse is not an explanation of the text, I do not think that it is an abuse of Scripture either. In fact, I think that Kierkegaard, with his existential focus, brings something out of the text which may have little expression otherwise; that this passage is not merely a passive description of the state of things (which it is), but also serves as a very personal warning to us: if out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks, I must keep careful watch on my words, the fruit of my heart, to see what is truly in my heart. We are the trees, as Kierkegaard, writes, and so the question to all of us is: what kind of fruit am I bearing?