I want to dive into what I think is a pivotal piece of scripture today: Mark Chapter 11 Verses 12-25. This scripture comes to us from the end of Jesus’s journey of teaching and ministry. He’s been all around Judaea at this point, preaching, healing, forgiving. At almost every stop along the way he and his disciples are embraced by the common people. Huge crowds attend him when he teaches. Many have their lives transformed by his presence—his kindness. There are two entities, however, that find themselves consistently opposed to his efforts: the religious ruling class of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the Roman Empire.
Now Jesus comes to his final destination—the final act begins. At last, he arrives at the inarguable seat of religious and political power in Judaea: Jerusalem. Jesus has premonitioned that here, in this city, he is to be arrested and handed over to the state to be killed, but he’s not cowering. He’s not looking to hide, or to find some excuse to go teach elsewhere. No, indeed, he rides right into Jerusalem to fanfare and celebration, shouts of “Hosana!” ringing. But he’s not here in Jerusalem for festivities or leisure. Jesus makes a beeline for the temple, his spiritual home, needing to establish how far the temple has fallen—how much work he has left to do before the end.
What he finds does not make a good impression. The scripture says Jesus enters the temple courts and “sees everything”: corruption maybe, false idolization perhaps, certainly predatory profiteering by the moneychangers and the sacrificial animal hawkers. In a word: desecration. He leaves the temple—the city—disgusted. Jesus and his disciples decide to stay the night in the nearby village of Bethany. This is where we get our tie to the wilderness in this text. See, Bethany is this little town, really a village in Jesus’s time, tucked away at the foot of the Mount of Olives—surrounded by the rugged rolling hills east of Jerusalem. It’s telling that Jesus decides to stay in Bethany overnight, instead of staying in the bustling metropolis of Jerusalem. Jesus often retreats to places of nature as sanctuary when he needs a break, or to commune with The Father. There’s something about the intrinsic sanctity of being close to nature that Jesus knows intuitively. We don’t get any clues from Scripture about what Jesus did that night in Bethany, but I’m going to venture a guess that it involved a lot of praying.
We pick up the story the morning after when Jesus, for some reason, decides not to eat breakfast in Bethany. On the two mile trek back into the city he spots a fig tree and decides to check for some fruit, not realizing that…it’s not the right time of year for fig trees to fruit. This is where we see one of the very rare times where Jesus is given to a violent outburst. He curses the tree, proclaiming that no one will ever eat it from it again. This is a little outside the norm for Jesus. He’s no stranger to speaking truth to power or authority, but he doesn’t often wantonly cast curses around. It is, however, a verbal prelude to his violent disruption to come. I imagine Jesus stalking away from the tree in a huff, Jerusalem bound—hungry, angry, and maybe even embarrassed that he didn’t remember it wasn’t fig season. Scripture tells us that straight away when he enters the city that day, he heads for the temple courts and starts causing havoc: driving out anyone buying and selling there, overturning the tables of the moneychangers and sacrificial animal hawkers, forcibly preventing anyone from carrying a product of profit-driven enterprise through the temple. Obviously, Jesus is PISSED. He’s already seen the state of the temples and the level of disgrace and defilement has his blood boiling. How else could we explain such a normally calm and measured—if sarcastic—thirty year old completely exploding in public like this?
And there’s no question that this was an act of violent protest. Turning over the tables of the moneychangers and animal hawkers would unquestionably be equivalent to throwing a brick through a storefront window and smashing open the display cases. Money would have been strewn everywhere. The sacrificial animals would have gotten loose. It would have been chaos. There’s no Biblical evidence that Jesus took anything, but it is certain that other people would have taken advantage of the chaos to pocket some extra coin. Jesus’s goal wasn’t just to slightly inconvenience the business men—no, he wanted their businesses destroyed because in his eyes these men were desecrating the sanctity of the temple with their profiteering, publicly condemning them for turning the temple into a “den of robbers”. Our peaceful Lamb of God has turned full riotous troublemaker.
Now, verse 19 is fascinating to me: AFTER the riotous disturbance at the temple, Jesus is allowed to leave Jerusalem! He’s not arrested, nor detained, or even questioned by the religious or spiritual authorities within Jerusalem. How is this even possible? The only probable reason I can come up with is that at this point, the movement behind Jesus, supporting him, is SO large and politically and culturally dangerous to the ruling class that the Roman military—who was under the direction of both the Roman Prefect and the Jewish Sanhedrin—didn’t dare to make a public arrest for fear of further public riots or even sparking a full-blown revolt. This speaks to the undeniable power of collective action and demonstration led by radical visionaries who are unafraid to use their positions of cultural power to fix injustice, call to account those abusing structural power, and to vilify gross hoarding of wealth.
So, hold on, let’s take a step back. What’s the big deal with the fig tree? Why is this seemingly random arboreal anecdote in the middle of the climax of the story of Jesus’s political and socioreligious revolution? The key, as so often is the case in The Bible, is the cultural symbolism used in the text. See, the fig tree has been used for millennia as a symbol for both the spiritual health of the Jewish people, but also the spiritual health of the Jewish nation overall. Taken in this context, the condemnation of the fig tree that refuses to bear fruit for the Son of Man, withering and dying in its current form after being cursed, takes on a completely new meaning. As has been his mission throughout all of his ministry, Jesus intends to cut out the roots of corruption: the false idolatry of wealth, and the usurpation of his religion for the centralization of power. Whether or not there was a real fig tree, or if it ACTUALLY died in one night, the message of the passage is clear: Jesus is done playing around and he expects the world to be starkly different from the one that he is seeing before his eyes!
But the question I ask you now is this: is Jesus a powerful threat to the status quo because of his clear moral compass and fierce temerity to stand against the threats to his princedom of peace? Or is it because he had the weight of an entire movement behind him? Thousands upon thousands of regular people fed up with the way things were going, radicalized by the simple idea that they actually mattered. That their lives were valuable and in fact, much closer to holiness because of their relative lack of power, because of their relative poverty, and because of their relative simplicity. In our time, we don’t have the sublime luxury of having Jesus of Nazareth here to lead our marches against the forces of evil. But we can come together in collective action and a full-throated rebuke of the modern day forces of corruption, greed, and Empire. We can draw on his grand legacy, not just of love and peacemaking, but of holy troublemaking. This is the lesson of scripture, and this is our call as followers of the way. Amen.