The Pear Tree

Today's Scripture

Genesis 3:6 — "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate."

Romans 7:15 — "For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate."

Jeremiah 17:9 — "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"

The Big Idea

Sin is deeper than bad choices. Augustine stole pears he did not want, from a tree he did not need, for no reason he could name — and that scared him more than any big, explainable sin ever could. Today is about the bent in the human heart that loves crossing the line just because the line is there. Only when we admit how deep the problem goes can we understand why the cure had to be so costly.

Reflection

A crime with no motive

Picture the scene. Augustine is sixteen. It is late at night in his hometown of Thagaste, and he and his friends are bored. Near his family's vineyard stands a neighbor's pear tree, loaded with fruit. The boys shake it, strip it, and run — not to eat the pears, but to hurl them to the pigs.

Detectives solve crimes by finding motives. This crime had none. Augustine's family was not starving. The pears were not even good. Decades later, the bishop interrogates his teenage self like a prosecutor and comes up empty:

"I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong." — Augustine, Confessions, Book II

Out of an entire wild youth — and Augustine had one — this is the sin he spends the most pages on. A handful of pears. Why? Because every other sin came with an excuse attached. Ambition at least wants success. Lust at least wants pleasure. But this theft wanted nothing except the wrongness itself. It showed him his heart with all the costumes off:

"Foul was it, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself." — Augustine, Confessions, Book II

That is the most honest sentence most of us will never say. Not "I made a mistake." Not "I was going through a lot." It was ugly, and I loved it.

Augustine is not inflating teenage mischief into melodrama. He chose the small crime as his specimen precisely because it is small. If sin were only about getting things we need, you could cure it by meeting needs. The pear tree proves something darker: sometimes the heart wants the wrongness itself.

The oldest story in the world

Augustine knew his little theft was a rerun. The first sin in the Bible also happened at a tree, and it also was not about the food. Eden was full of fruit. Genesis 3:4-5 — "But the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.'" The bait was never the taste. The bait was you will be like God — the thrill of being your own boss, answerable to no one. Augustine concluded that his pear theft was exactly that: a poor, twisted imitation of God's freedom. He wanted to feel, for one night, what it was like to have no rule above him.

Jesus says this bent does not come from our surroundings. It comes from inside. Mark 7:21-22 — "For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit..." Notice theft, third on the list. We like to explain wrongdoing by pointing outward — bad neighborhoods, bad parents, bad luck. Jesus and Augustine both point in.

So does Jeremiah: Jeremiah 17:9 — "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" That last phrase is key. Our hearts do not just mislead others; they mislead us. We do not fully understand our own motives — which is exactly what Augustine discovered when he searched the theft for a reason and found a mystery.

G.K. Chesterton, with his usual grin, pointed out that this doctrine is the easiest one to verify:

"Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved." — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"Original sin" is the old name for what we have been describing — not just the first sin in history, but the crooked condition every heart inherits, the reason no one has to teach a toddler to grab and lie. You cannot see God under a microscope, Chesterton is saying, but the evidence for this doctrine is on every news feed and in every family — including yours and mine.

Alone, he would never have done it

There is one more layer to the pear story, and it stings. Augustine admits that if he had been by himself that night, he would not have touched the tree. The theft needed an audience. He and his friends egged each other on, each one ashamed to look weak in front of the others:

"As soon as the words are spoken 'Let us go and do it', one is ashamed not to be shameless." — Augustine, Confessions, Book II

Ashamed not to be shameless. Sixteen centuries before group chats, Augustine described how they work. Alone, you would never say it, send it, take it, or dare it. But in the pack, the dares pile up, and suddenly the most embarrassing thing in the world is having a conscience. Sin loves company because company splits the guilt into pieces small enough for everyone to carry.

Augustine is so stunned by this that he turns and addresses friendship itself — "O friendship too unfriendly!" — astonished that one of God's best gifts can become the engine of evil the moment the gang replaces the conscience. The cure is not fewer friends. It is asking what your particular crowd makes easy that solitude would make unthinkable.

Isaiah saw the whole human race moving in exactly this kind of herd: Isaiah 53:6 — "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way." Notice the strange double truth: we stray together, like a flock, yet each of us turns to his own way. The crowd makes sin easier, but it does not make sin less mine.

Paul felt the same split inside himself that Augustine felt under the pear tree. Romans 7:15 — "For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." And again, Romans 7:19 — "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing." This is an apostle writing — a mature Christian — and he sounds like a confused teenager standing in a stripped orchard. That should make us both humbled and strangely comforted: the war is real, and it is universal.

John Calvin said that this kind of self-knowledge is half of all wisdom:

"Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

You cannot really know God while pretending to be fine, and you cannot bear to know yourself without knowing the God of grace. The two lessons arrive together or not at all.

Why dig all this up?

A fair question: why would a respected bishop publish his worst memories? Augustine answers it himself, right at the start of Book II:

"I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God." — Augustine, Confessions, Book II

He is not wallowing, and he is not bragging the way people sometimes retell their wild years. He digs up the past for one purpose: every remembered sin becomes another reason to love the God who forgave it. Honest confession is not morbid. It is how grace gets measured.

King David did the same thing in writing, after his worst failure: Psalm 51:3 — "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me," and then deeper, Psalm 51:5 — "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." David traces the crime back past the act to the condition — the same move Augustine makes from the pears to the heart that picked them.

And here is where the gospel turns the lights on. The Bible's honesty about sin is not meant to crush us; it is meant to make the cure make sense. 1 John 1:8-9 — "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Confession — simply agreeing with God about what is true — is the doorway, and forgiveness is guaranteed on the other side. Why guaranteed? Romans 5:8 — "but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Not after we found a motive. Not after we cleaned up. While we were still the kids stripping the tree. At the cross, Jesus took the punishment for sins that had no excuse — which means there is mercy even for the sins we cannot explain.

That is why Christians can afford to be the most honest people in the room. We are not optimists about human nature; we have read our own files. But we are not despairing either, because the diagnosis came with a cross attached.

The Puritan pastor John Owen drew the practical conclusion in six words:

"Be killing sin or it will be killing you." — John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers

Grace does not make us casual about the bent in our hearts; it finally makes us able to fight it without despair. Augustine closes Book II looking back at the boy under the pear tree:

"I wandered, O my God, too much astray from Thee my stay, in these days of my youth, and I became to myself a barren land." — Augustine, Confessions, Book II

A barren land — that is what a heart curved in on itself becomes. But Augustine writes those words as a man whose wasteland God had turned into a garden. The same God still does that.

Going Deeper

Write one confession sentence today with no excuses in it. Not "I'm sorry I snapped, but I was exhausted." Just the thing itself: "I did ____. It was wrong. I even partly enjoyed it." Read it to God, then read 1 John 1:9 over it slowly — faithful and just to forgive — and tear the paper up. That is not pretending it didn't happen. That is what forgiven actually means.