At the churches I attended growing up, very young children don't typically go to the regular sermon -- they go to Sunday school, and then to either daycare, or some kind of children's church. So, most of our earliest Bible lessons come from a Sunday school teacher, rather than from the minister. Ministers usually have gone to some kind of divinity school -- they are trained professionals. Sunday school teachers are usually volunteers, which means they are very often daft old ladies who fail utterly to make any kind of distinction between their own quirks, actual doctrine, and weird jokes you are too young to get.
(Paul tells a story about a Sunday school teacher who insisted that angels shot from the tips of your fingers when you prayed, so that you should make sure to have your hands pressed together with fingers pointing up when you prayed, so that the angels would fly up to heaven. If you clasped your hands together, you were shooting those fingertip angels straight to hell.)
So, the youngest and most impressionable members of the congregation are the ones being schooled by daft old ladies. Which explains a lot.
As a child, I was confused by most of the things that confuse Terra here, except for the fig tree withering. I didn't discover this particular "miracle" of Jesus until much later -- it's right there in Matthew 21, right after he drives the moneychangers out of the temple, but somehow I missed it. And, oddly enough, nobody ever preached a sermon on it. It doesn't show up in dramatizations of the story. Nobody ever talks about it, except Lore Sjöberg, who rates it along with other Miracles of Christ. It goes like this:
And he left them and went out of the city to Bethany, where he spent the night. Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, "May you never bear fruit again!" Immediately the tree withered.
So, you know, I figure Jesus must have been hypoglycemic or something.
Anyway, when you teach stories to children, consider: you might think that the story of Adam and Eve conveys the message "do what adults tell you" when actually, what they are getting out of it is "don't eat apples."
And, Jesus was not a zombie.
Probably.
