And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
Mark 11.17, NIV
I want to overview most of Mark 11 this time, from v 11 onwards. The preceding 10 verses constitute “the Triumphal Entry”. I am interested here in what happens next.
The order is this:
Jesus has a look around the temple and goes back to Bethany because it is late in the day;
Going into Jerusalem from Bethany the next day, He is hungry, goes to a fig tree in leaf and – finding nothing on it (because it isn’t the season for figs) – “it having been rejected upon examination, He says to it, “may no one ever eat from you again”. And yes, the disciples heard Him say it.
An aside; translators all ‘know’ that ἀποκριθεὶς means ‘answered’; which is the problem: over and over again it is clear that translators would do better if they left their lexical certainties (and their dictionaries of NT Greek) behind and actually did their homework: ἀποκριθεὶς has far more fundamental meanings than ‘answered’, and the one that fits is “be rejected upon examination”. Most realise it is odd to have Jesus answering a tree, so leave it out altogether. Doh!
Next Jesus goes into the temple and stops all the trade that is going on in there, and teaches – including the quote at the top of this post. In passing please note that what He says – the quotation from Isaiah 56.7 and the description of the temple as “a cavern of robbers” from Jeremiah 7.11 are both word perfect with the LXX of those passages (see my recent post for more). They all return to Bethany.
Next day, Jesus and His disciples return to Jerusalem and on the way: there is the now-dead fig, shrivelled to the roots. It took 24 hours (as opposed to the instantaneously of Matthew 21.19-22) but I find Mark’s version more compelling. When Peter calls this out, Jesus talks about faith (ie how He did this) and not what it meant; and that is very important.
Finally, when they reach Jerusalem, He is accosted by the Chief Priests, Scribes and Elders who demand of Him that He tell them His authority for “doing these things”; or “who gave Him this authority to do them”. Jesus says He will tell them if they first tell Him whether John’s baptism was of God or of man; they are too scared to answer that one, so He refuses to answer their question.
So what are we looking at here?
Is Jesus cruel to nature? Curse the fig tree for being without fruit at a time no fig has fruit? Was He teaching His disciples how to do extreme landscape gardening? “This mountain looks terrible from my balcony, let’s throw that into the sea…?”
The truth is that all the little episodes (biblical scholars call them pericopes, especially when doing synoptic study across the Gospels) are broken up in our bibles, each with their own heading; but they are far more connected than that.
Here is the meta narrative:
Jesus goes to Jerusalem and to the Temple, which since Solomon’s day (barring destruction, exile and reconstruction) has been the centre of Jewish worship. There is no surprise in what He sees, but He spells out the consequences in His living parable the next day. Fig trees in leaf look extremely green and vigorous in any context, especially in a dry Mediterranean climate; but like any fruit tree, if it isn’t harvest time, there is nothing to eat. Jesus uses this as a parable of Jewish religion and Temple-centric worship: whatever fruit there has been in the past, and however fancy Herod’s temple upgrades look, there is no fruit now. The prediction He speaks over the fig tree is for all of that. No one will eat fruit from you again. 24 hours later the fig is dead and withered to the roots. Likewise the Temple and all that goes with it, will be gone shortly.
So why does He not spell that out for the disciples? Would it be too great a shock for them as observant Jews? I don’t think that is the issue at all, and we can see what is going on when Peter says “wow, Lord, look at the fig tree…”
As I mentioned above, Jesus deflects what could have become a discussion of “what it meant” to an explanation of “how you do this kind of stuff”. And I think the obvious reason is that if He had spelt it out – the Temple is coming to an end, from now on the very Spirit of God will dwell in men – there was a real danger that Satan would have finally caught up with the plan. As usual when that is of concern, Jesus employs misdirection for effect.
But very clearly the whole fig thing wasn’t about an innocent fig tree.
He clears the temple of traders (I have written a whole post about this, and see no evidence that He ran around like a wild man, whipping and slashing; turning the tables upside down was like a McDonalds employee putting chairs on tables: “we are done for the day”.) Then He teaches what the Temple was meant to be – a house of prayer for all the nations (meaning a house into which all the nations could come in order to pray – except that the court of the gentiles was full of traders now); but you have turned it into a cave of robbers. He stopped the offence to His Father’s house (for a day, maybe a few? There was nothing to stop them coming back…) but said absolutely nothing about restoring the Temple as a house of prayer for all the nations.
That time is past. Nobody else knows it yet.
So to finish with the questioning of His authority to “do these things”, just note that there are two questions the Chief Priests and their posse ask Him. What authority (meaning scripture or the words of an accepted rabbi); and failing that, who gave you authority?
The truth is that Jesus has both on His side; every word spoken by God and recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures show that He was right and they were in the wrong; and He was commissioned by the Glorious Father whom they claimed to represent but didn’t.
But He wasn’t about to tell them that, at least not directly. Instead He asks them a question which demonstrates that they are nowhere near being on God’s side, and which therefore they are unable to answer without severe personal hazard. “Tell me about John’s baptism…”
So, to summarise, this is not a group of curious little actions and sayings. This is the most consequential commentary upon a system whose time is now over, and which has fallen into its final moral abyss. The question about John’s baptism is significant; John the Baptist was, Jesus says elsewhere, the final positive act of the Law and the Prophets.
Henceforth, it is all about the Kingdom, and the religious elite are a complete and irrelevant back number for this next chapter.
Seeing the Kingdom 