The First Ripe Fruit

The law, the prophets, and the Gospel writers have all declared that Christ was born of a virgin and suffered on the cross; that he was raised from the dead and taken up into heaven; that he was glorified, and that he reigns forever. [a]

“Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came up to him with her sons, bowing down and asking something of him.” These people are not without understanding, and the words set down in that passage are not without meaning. Placed in front like a preface, they agree with the points already explained. [d]

“Then she came up to him.” Sometimes we admire a virtue not only for the display it makes, but for the moment when it appeared. Take an early grape, for instance, or an early fig, or any fruit at all that nobody expects to be ripe or full grown while it is still coming on. Anyone can see that such fruit is not yet what it should be, and yet he does not throw the unripe grape away as worthless once it is picked. He is glad to gather it, because it has come early in the season. He does not stop to ask whether it is perfectly sweet; he is pleased at once, simply because this one has arrived ahead of the rest. God does exactly the same. When he sees that the faithful have wisdom, but not yet full wisdom, and only a little faith, he overlooks what is missing and does not turn them away. On the contrary, he welcomes them kindly and takes them in as early fruit; and he honors any mind at all that is stamped with virtue, even when the virtue is not yet complete. He makes allowance for it, counting it among the first runnings of the vintage, and he values it highly: it was readier than the rest, and so it has, in a way, got to the blessing first.

So Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, our fathers, are to be honored above everyone, since they really did give us such early examples of virtue. How many martyrs can be compared with Daniel? How many martyrs, I ask, can match the three young men in Babylon — even though the one group is not set before us as conspicuously as the other? These men were truly firstfruits, a sign of the crop that would follow. That is why God ordered their lives to be written down, as a pattern for those who would come after.

And that their virtue was accepted by God in just this way, as the firstfruits of the produce, hear what he says himself: “As a grape I found Israel in the wilderness, and as the first ripe figs I saw your fathers.” So do not call Abraham’s faith blessed merely because he believed. Do you want to look at Abraham with admiration? Then see how that one man, alone, kept his reverence for God when six hundred in the world had been corrupted by error. Do you want Daniel to carry you away in amazement? Then look at Babylon, proud in the full flower of its irreverence, its people given over completely to every kind of sin. But he came up out of the deep, spat out the brine of sin, and gladly dived into the fresh water of reverence for God. And now, in the same way, with that mother of Zebedee’s sons: do not admire only what she said, but also the moment at which she said it. When was it that she came up to the Redeemer? Not after the resurrection, not after his name had been preached, not after his kingdom had been set up. It was when the Lord said, “Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes. They will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.”

These are the things the Savior told them about his sufferings and his cross; it was to these people that he foretold what he would undergo. And he did not hide that it would be a thoroughly shameful death, at the hands of the chief priests. This woman, though, had read another meaning into the plan of his sufferings. The Savior was foretelling death; she asked for the glory of never dying. The Lord was saying that he had to stand trial before irreverent judges; she took no notice of that trial and made her request as though to the judge: “Grant that these two sons of mine may sit, one at your right hand and the other at your left, in your glory.” The one speaks of the suffering; the other has the kingdom in mind. The Savior was talking about the cross, while she was looking at a glory that admits no suffering. So this woman, as I have already said, deserves our admiration — not only for what she asked, but for the occasion on which she asked it.

She did indeed feel it, and not merely as someone who reverenced God, but as a woman. For she had been taught by his words, and she weighed them and believed that it would come to pass: that the kingdom of Christ would flourish in glory, and range across the world in all its vastness, and grow by the preaching of reverence for God. She understood, and rightly, that the one who had appeared in such lowly form had both delivered and received every promise. I will ask on another occasion, when I come to speak about this humility, whether the Lord refused her request about his kingdom. But she thought that she would not have the same freedom to speak later on, when the angels appeared and he was waited on by angels and served by the whole heavenly host. So she took the Savior aside into a quiet place, and asked him earnestly for things that go beyond anything human.