Holy Monday: The cleansing of the Temple and the example of the fig tree

 

Opening Prayer

O Lord open our lips.
That our mouths may proclaim your praise.

O God, come to our aid.
O Lord, make haste to help us.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.

Almighty God,
you have made us for yourself,
and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you:
pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself,
and so bring us at last to your heavenly city
where we shall see you face to face;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Holy Monday: The cleaning of the Temple and the example of the fig tree

 

‘On the following day, when they came from Bethany, [Jesus] was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. He said to it, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’ And his disciples heard it.

 

‘Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘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.’
And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

 

‘In the morning [That is Holy Tuesday] as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. Then Peter remembered and said to him, ‘Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.’ Jesus answered them, ‘Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, “Be taken up and thrown into the sea”, and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

 

‘‘Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.’’

[Mark 11.12-26]

The fig tree is an intriguing, if also confusing moment in the story of the gospels. It can feel as though Jesus is throwing an unnecessary and uncharacteristic strop over its lack of fruit. (Perhaps he has that most irritating of human grumps ‘the h’angries’: that mix of hunger and anger.) But surely more must be going on than that, St Mark like all the gospel writers gas limited space, and an important story to tell. Why does Jesus curse this hapless tree?

 

Figs Wikipedia tells me, put our leaves in Spring, but don’t produce ripe fruit until early Summer (June at the earliest). Why then is Jesus cursing the fig tree’s fruitlessness in the middle of Spring, a time when there should be no fruit on its branches?

 

Here, as in all biblical scholarship, context is everything. This story relates to directly to what comes just after it, the cleansing of the Temple. In that story Jesus cleanses the Temple of the traders in sacrificial animals, and the people who changed Roman coinage into that acceptable to the Temple (at an inflated rate of exchange). In his words that ‘my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’ Jesus is restoring the Temple as a place of worship of God, suggesting that the Temple had fallen away from that calling prior to his arrival there. The example of the fig tree is the retelling of this story, but through the language of metaphor.

 

In the Old Testament the image of the vine and fig tree bearing fruit are both used to represent the nation of Israel. In finding the fig tree fruitless Jesus is also finding the people of Israel to not be bearing the fruit they should, and he condemns them for it.

 

Finally, on leaving the Temple and Jerusalem Jesus and the disciples notice that the cursed fig tree has now died, a reminder of Jesus words about the true Temple of his body: the dwelling place of God is no longer limited to the Temple, but now in the hearts and minds of God’s people. The Temple used to be the one place where the sacrifice for sin could be made. Now God in Christ forgives us wherever we are: we do not need to travel to Jerusalem in order to make sacrifice, that sacrifice has been made by Christ on the Cross. As St Paul puts it in his letter, we the church are the temple of God, and as St Peter puts it, our lives are living stones that form the new Temple.

 

And yet the Temple remains an important place for the early Church, and they will continue to meet there for fellowship, until first persecution and then the destruction of the Temple in the 60sAD and the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem, when the church is spread throughout the whole world.

 

Closing Prayer

Grant, we pray, almighty God,

that, though in our weakness we fail,

we may be revived through the Passion of your Only Begotten Son.

Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God, for ever and ever.