Mark 11:20-25

Jesus Rejects the Temple (3) – Faith Gives Access to God

Mark 11:20-25 – Jesus Explains His Cursing of the Fig Tree

²⁰ Early in the morning as they walked past it,

they saw the fig tree had withered to its roots.

²¹ Peter remembered and said to Jesus,

“Rabbi, the fig tree you cursed has withered.”

By splitting Jesus’ comments on the fig tree and placing them before and after the incident in the temple, Mark intended his reader to see the fate of the fig tree as throwing light on the meaning of the temple episode.

²² In answer Jesus said to them,

“Have faith in God.

²³ I tell you quite seriously,

should people say to this mountain,

‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea’,

and do not waver in their hearts,

but believe that what they say will happen,

it will happen for them.

Jesus was not referring to any mountain. He spoke deliberately of this mountain. (In the quotation from Isaiah just cited, God had spoken of his holy mountain. He was referring to Mount Zion, the temple mountain.) This mountain to which Jesus was clearly referring could be taken then to mean the whole religious, social and cultural system centred on the temple. The previous day Jesus had symbolically closed down movement through the temple. Now he was referring to the overthrow of the whole system. The system had been cursed, and had withered radically - to its roots. For all its outward show, it had failed to produce fruit, the fruit of genuine inclusiveness.

In symbolically enacting the destruction of the temple system and what it had come to stand for, Jesus went far beyond the vision of the prophet Malachi who, aware of the injustices and contradictions perpetrated by many of those in charge, had still placed his hopes in a temple system and priesthood purified and restored to its pristine vision. (Right at the start of his narrative (1:2), Mark had drawn on this prophecy to introduce the person of John the Baptist):

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me,

and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.

The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—

indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.

But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?

For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap;

he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver,

and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver,

until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.

Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord

as in the days of old and as in former years. (Malachi 3:1-4)

Jesus may well have had in mind this prophecy of Malachi, and felt the need clearly to repudiate its conclusions.

Even the Essenes dreamt of a new temple order and the restoration of legitimate priesthood. The Zealots, too, in their opposition to Rome and to those in the current leadership who had accommodated to Rome, never questioned the centrality of the temple and the system it represented.

Reference had been made earlier to the strains occurring in the small body of disciples, their questioning of Jesus, their concerns about precedence and their arguments among themselves. Were the disciples disturbed by Jesus’ open defiance of the Jewish leadership? Mark gave no explicit answer, but before long Judas would definitively break ranks (14:10-11), and all of them would show some uncertainty about whether in their own hearts they might have betrayed him (14:19).

Given Jesus’ opinion of the temple, what then would be left without Israel’s house of prayer, the place of God’s assumed presence? The question was significant not just for the immediate group of Jesus’ disciples, but particularly for the disciples of Mark’s community, who had been excluded from participation in the daily life of Judaism, and who, at the time of their hearing Mark’s narrative, were possibly facing the possibility of the imminent overthrow of Jerusalem, including the temple and its precincts.

Jesus’ answer was simple. There was no need for any temple. What mattered was faith in God. This had been Jesus’ preoccupation throughout the whole of Mark’s narrative, the challenge he had constantly thrown out to those seeking healing, and particularly to the wavering disciples. Yet it was obvious from the whole of the narrative that Jesus was not speaking of some anodised, general faith in God, but of faith in the possibilities of God’s Kingdom, faith that things could be different, that change could happen, that people, with the help of God that was so readily available, could live in ways that deeply and practically respected the dignity of everyone. (In fact, forty years after the death of Jesus, not only Christians learnt to live without the temple, but all Jews did – not because of a change of heart but because the temple was destroyed during the Roman siege of Jerusalem.)

²⁴ That is why I tell you, whatever you pray for and seek,

believe that you will receive it,

and it will happen for you.

²⁵ And should you keep at your prayer,

forgive people if you have anything against them,

and your heavenly Father will forgive you.””

In this context, the two texts about prayer and forgiveness made sense. The temple had been seen as Israel’s classic house of prayer. Jesus said that any prayer, made in faith, would be effective, wherever the prayer was made. It was a comment less about the way to pray or its efficacy than about the superfluous role of the temple.

In the “debt code” of Israel, debts to God (trespasses) were repaid through sacrifices made by the priests in the temple. Jesus insisted that God was always open to forgive, without the mediation of temple sacrifices, provided that those in need of pardon opened themselves to it by choosing to forgive those who had offended them.

Next >> Mark 11:27-33