Be not afraid, you beasts of the field: for the pastures of the wilderness do spring up, for the tree bears her fruit, the fig tree and the vine do yield their strength.
For the fig tree, on account of its sweetness and richness, represents the delights of humankind, which they had in paradise before the Fall. Indeed, not rarely, as we shall afterwards show, the Holy Spirit takes the fruit of the fig tree as an emblem of goodness. But the vine, on account of the gladness produced by wine and the joy of those who were saved from wrath and from deluge, signifies the change produced from fear and anxiety into joy. Moreover, the olive, on account of the oil which it produces, indicates the compassion of God, who again, after the deluge, bore patiently when people turned aside to ungodliness, so that he gave them the law and manifested himself to some, and nourished by oil the light of virtue, now almost extinguished.
David said that “the Lord would reign from the tree.” Elsewhere too the prophet predicts the fruit of this tree, saying, “The earth has given its blessings”—of course that virgin earth, not yet irrigated with rains or fertilized by showers, out of which humanity was of old first formed, out of which now Christ through the flesh has been born of a virgin. “And the tree bears its fruit”—not that tree in paradise, which yielded death to the first humans, but the tree of the passion of Christ, whence life, hanging, you did not believe! Answer to the Jews
