The beginning of Chapter 11 strikes me as just so typical of how Mark writes. We’ve seen all through the Gospel that while there’s often a theme, Mark’s way of telling the story of Jesus still seems to jump around suddenly from one event to another. The story of Jesus seen through Mark’s eyes often seems to be a series of vignettes as opposed to a well structured narrative. This is a case in point. Chapter 10 had ended with the story of the healing of blind Bartimaeus. The only thing that might have suggested that something important was about to happen was that even though Jesus had told Bartimaeus to “go” the story tells us that Bartimaeus didn’t actually “go” – instead, Bartimaeus followed Jesus. Aside from that slightly curious note the story of Bartimaeus ends without any hint that anything of great significance is about to happen. And yet Chapter 11 starts with the words “When they were approaching Jerusalem.” Both Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel set the stage for Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem. In fact, Luke has Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem as he approaches. For Mark, Jesus and the disciples (including, presumably, Bartimaeus) are just suddenly “approaching Jerusalem.” For Christians of the 21st century (and for most of Christian history, in fact) Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem is seen as a high point in the Christian year. We set aside an entire Sunday to reflect on it: Palm Sunday. We re-enact in church parades Jesus’ arrival in the city. Matthew and Luke (writing some years later) give it a little more attention and make clear that this is a part of the plan. In Mark, it just seems to happen. Jesus is just suddenly there. That may actually be a good reflection of how early Christianity treated the story. There’s really no record of Palm Sunday as a major liturgical occasion before the 4th century. Sometime in the 380’s, a woman named Etheria wrote a letter offering an account of her travels in the holy land. The letter is known today as the Peregrinatio Etheriae (in English, the Travels of Etheria) and she describes some of the liturgical practices she discovered in Jerusalem, one of which was a commemoration of some sort of Palm Sunday, although we don’t know exactly what form it took. We do know that Palm Sunday didn’t become a regular part of Western Christian worship until the 8th century. So while it’s perhaps a bit jarring that Mark gets us to Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem so suddenly and with so little fanfare, it’s probably a reflection of the fact that it wasn’t considered a particularly significant event in itself at the time – it was just another part of Jesus’ journey.
Having said that I’m not suggesting that Mark doesn’t see it
as important. He may not have done much of a job of setting it up, but Jesus
arriving in Jerusalem was important enough for Mark to devote a fair bit of
attention to it. It was after all a feature of Old Testament prophecy that the
Messiah would return to Jerusalem, and the events of this particular day are
interpreted by the Gospel writers (including Mark) as a fulfilment of those
prophecies. In particular, the story of Palm Sunday is told in such a
way that it fulfils a prophetic text found in Zechariah 9:9: “Rejoice greatly,
O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the
foal of a donkey.” So both the way in which Jesus enters Jerusalem and the
reception he receives are seen as fulfilments of that verse, and I want to
consider both of those parts of the Palm Sunday story.
Mark begins the story mysteriously. Jesus sends two
disciples ahead of him to get a colt for him to ride into the city. If the
colt’s owner asks what they’re doing, they are simply to respond “the Lord
needs it and will send it back!” There’s a couple of things happening here. The
first is the question of how Jesus knows that this colt will even be where he
says it will be and how he knows that the owner will let his disciples take it.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways of approaching that, and they represent
what you might call the divide between evangelical and charismatic Christianity
and more mainstream, liberal Christianity. The former group sees this as an
example of Jesus having foreknowledge. So Jesus simply knows (because he is
Jesus, after all) that there will be a colt where he says it will be and that
the owner will let his disciples take it. So it’s a kind of supernatural event.
The latter group sees a more worldly explanation – almost a cloak and dagger
type of thing. That presumption is that Jesus already had followers in
Jerusalem, and that this was set up. “The Lord needs it” is said by this view
to have been a kind of code for the colt’s owner to confirm that it’s Jesus
who’s coming for the colt. Either of those interpretations solves the problem
of Jesus taking something that doesn’t belong to him. The colt isn’t stolen –
there’s a promise to return it and the owner gives permission for the colt to
be taken in any event. In terms of whether this is a supernatural example of
Jesus having special knowledge or of Jesus having set something up beforehand –
the text doesn’t take a position on that. If you use the theory of Occam’s
Razor (the simplest explanation for something is usually correct) then you
probably assume that this is a set up. But you’re also reminded that just in
the previous chapter we had been told that with God all things are possible. The
important part of the story is that Jesus somehow knew that the colt would be
there and that the owner would let him use it. The fact that Jesus enters on a
colt is interesting to the story. This point is commonly made so I don’t have
to go into it in great detail I don’t think – but a person of power would have
been expected to be riding a horse, as if going into battle. The fact that even
the Zechariah prophecy portrays the animal as a colt suggests that even in the
Jewish prophecies, the Messiah isn’t necessarily a figure of power, but of
humility. There is perhaps also a link from the imagery to Isaiah:” Jesus is
not a warrior king – but the “Prince of Peace.” Clearly, though, the crowds
thought otherwise. As much as we want (as people of faith) to be guided by the
Bible, our current contexts also impact how we interpret the Bible and what we
take out of the Bible. Since we know that by the time of Jesus the Messiah was
expected to be a mighty warrior we also know, then, that the cultural context
of Israel had changed so that prior expectations (even if prophetic) had been
adjusted to the new realities. Regardless of Zechariah’s or Isaiah’s prophecies,
the people of Jerusalem were not expecting a humble Messiah bringing peace, but
a conquering Messiah to lead a rebellion.
Having said that, Jesus’ welcome to the city is still an
enthusiastic one. Whatever was supposed to be implied by the humble imagery of
the donkey colt, the people did not grasp it, and they welcomed Jesus as a
warrior king. Their expectation was for the restoration of Israel; the
expulsion of the Roman occupiers. That’s ironic, because so much of what
happened as the people welcomed Jesus to the city was filled not with Jewish
symbolism but with Greco-Roman symbolism. Covering the road for someone to
travel over was a Roman sign of honour for a conquering general, and palm
branches were associated by Roman culture with triumph and military victory.
Since Mark (and the other Gospel writers) knew how the story would unfold, it’s
clear that they were making the point that the people misunderstood the nature
of Jesus’ mission. They saw him only as a king in the tradition of Israel’s
warrior kings of the past: “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the
name of the Lord! Blessed
is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” It might also be
important to point out that this welcome was received outside the gate of the
city – Jesus is said to have entered Jerusalem after this reception. It’s possible
that there would have been too many watchful eyes (Roman, Pharisee, etc) inside
the city for the people to have been so exuberant. According to Mark, Jesus
then entered the city and made a quick visit to the temple before retiring for
the night.
I want to
leave aside the story of the fig tree for a moment. That story fits in with a
typical style Mark has shown before – he uses the two parts of the fig tree
story to bracket the story of Jesus in the temple. So I want to look at Jesus
in the temple first, and then look at the overall story about the fig tree.
Jesus does
not like what he saw in the temple. That much is clear. Nothing much is made by
Mark of his brief visit to the temple the night before. It was a visit at
night, so perhaps the temple was quiet. By the time Jesus returns the temple
area has become a bustling place – even a marketplace of sorts. Mark doesn’t
make clear what it is that’s being bought and sold in the temple area. He just
makes the point that Jesus was very angry about what was happening and lashed
out, overturning “the tables of the money changers.” Some very strict
Christians have taken from this story the idea that there should never be
buying and selling in a place of worship – and so they oppose things like church
sales, etc. We in the United Church generally speaking don’t take that strict a
view obviously. And I’m not convinced that such a strict interpretation really
captures what Jesus found upsetting about what was happening in the temple. We
know that there were money changers – Mark tells us that – and Matthew and Luke
fill in enough details to let us know that what was being bought and sold were
animals – the animals that would have been needed for the Passover sacrifices
in the temple. Jesus was upset not so much by the exchange of currencies or by
the buying and selling, but by dishonesty. Jesus then conflates two bits of
prophecy: one from Isaiah (“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all
the nations”) and one from Jeremiah (“But you have turned it into a den of
robbers.”) We have to read between the lines to figure out why Jesus is so
angry at what’s happening. Pilgrims travelled to Jerusalem for Passover from
all over the Empire, and the Roman Empire was built in such a way that there
wasn’t one universal currency, but many local currencies. If you travelled from
one part of the Empire to another you had to exchange your currency – that’s
what money changers did. It was inconvenient and it wasn’t always clear how
much one currency was worth in another. (There are shades here of the reasons
for the adoption of the Euro as the common currency of the European Union,
replacing all the local currencies.) It was difficult for people to travel to
Jerusalem for Passover with all of the animals they would need for sacrifices,
so upon arrival in Jerusalem, people would exchange their money to the local
currency and then go to the market to buy the sacrificial animals. The picture
that gets painted is that this had developed into a simple matter of business. Passover
created a demand for both the sellers of animals and the exchangers of money.
There was no point being at the temple if you didn’t have an animal to
sacrifice, so the prices of the animals were raised, and the animals could only
be purchased with the local currency, so the exchange rates were raised. The
end result was that people got cheated by the money changers in order to then
be cheated by the animal sellers. Jesus likely didn’t object to money being
exchanged or to animals being sold – both were necessary if the people were to
do what was required of them by God’s Law – but he did object to the money
changers and animal sellers using Passover as an excuse to make exorbitant
profits. That’s the issue. People were being cheated, in a sense in the name of
God, in order for them to be able to perform their religious duty. If that’s
the issue (and it seems to be) then I think we can rest easy: Jesus probably
doesn’t care too much about a UCW Christmas Bazaar or a church Yard Sale, as
long as it’s all honest and above board.
And now,
back to the fig tree. It’s one of the more confusing stories of the Bible. In
the first part, Jesus curses the fig tree because it had produced no fruit for
him. That’s rather strange. The story tells us that it wasn’t the right season
for figs. Jesus surely would have known that. I can only take from the story
that it’s another example of Jesus’ humanity showing. Jesus was hungry, and maybe
he was in a bad mood and for whatever reason took it out on the tree? The
so-called explanation of the event that’s offered later really doesn’t explain
why Jesus lashed out at a fig tree and is rather an opportunity for Jesus to
speak about the importance of faith and prayer. So we’re left to ourselves to
figure out why Jesus cursed the fig tree, and the best explanation I’ve ever
heard is that the cursing of the fig tree was an acted out parable – so a
parable shared not with words but with actions. Since identifying the
characters is important in interpreting a parable, what does the fig tree
represent? In the Old Testament the fig tree is often used metaphorically and
symbolically to represent Israel. So some see this story of the cursing of the
fig tree as a sign of Israel’s coming rejection of Jesus. This fig tree had no
fruit and would never bear fruit. Israel would reject Jesus and his message
would go largely unheeded. The disciples were Jews who would have been familiar
with the Scriptures, so they likely would have understood the symbolic
connection between the fig tree and Israel. The idea that this is an acted out
parable of what’s going to happen in the near future makes as much sense as
anything.
The
chapter ends with the questioning of Jesus’ authority by his familiar
adversaries. If you remember, I’ve been arguing through much of the opening
chapters of the Gospel that Mark’s intention was to portray Jesus as possessing
authority: over nature, over disease, over demons. Upon his arrival in
Jerusalem, Jesus is confronted once again by the Pharisees – and remember, he
has been confronted by the Jerusalem Pharisees before. They had travelled to
Galilee to check him out, so to speak and Jesus had treated them with a degree
of contempt. In Jerusalem, much of the same dynamic takes place. Perhaps still
smarting from their earlier inability to get the better of Jesus, they now
openly challenge him: “By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave
you this authority to do them?” And Jesus turned the tables once again on them,
confounding them with his question about John the Baptist: was his baptism of
God or not? The Pharisees realize that they can’t answer his question. If it
was of God then they would implicitly recognize Jesus’ authority, since Jesus
had John’s stamp of approval, so to speak. If it wasn’t of God, they would be
at odds with the people, who apparently revered John and would have been
angered if the Pharisees had spoken against him. So the Pharisees had to back
down. Once again, they had been outwitted by Jesus. With Jesus now in
Jerusalem, and with the end approaching, mark once again enters into a
description of the conflict between Jesus and his opponents.
Comments
Post a Comment