Mark 11: 12 On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry.13 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. 14 He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.15 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; 16 and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.17 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.” 18 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. 19 And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.20 In the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. 21 Then Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” 22 Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God.23 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. 24 So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. 25 “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.”
If you’re wondering why you just heard this Gospel reading on Palm Sunday, it’s because it’s about the very next event in Jesus’ ministry, and it sets the stage for why so many people, who hailed Jesus with cries of “Hosanna!” would cry out, “Crucify Him!” and “Give us Barrabas!” only a few days later. In particular, I am focusing on Jesus’ words in verses 23-25: “Have faith in God.23 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. 24 So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. 25 “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.”
Some of us may also be wondering, “Aren’t those the verses that so many radio and TV preachers quote to say that, whatever you want, just ‘name it and claim it’ in Jesus’ name, and, if you have enough faith, it will be yours! Instant healing from a physical ailment? A fancy, schmancy new car? Wealth coming in hand over fist? Jesus said, in verse 24, ‘Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’
If you don’t get it, it’s because your faith was weak; you must have entertained some doubt! And to prove how great your faith is, you know what you can do, right? Send a check to our ministry. The bigger the amount, the greater your faith. And if you still don’t get from God what you’re asking, there must be some secret sin in your life that hinders your prayers and makes you unworthy of God’s answer to your prayers.
We all struggle with doubt, but not only is that a setup for even more doubt and distress, its also a setup for misguided and unnecessary guilt.
In this morning’s message, I hope to accomplish three things: 1) to rescue these words of Jesus from the kind of abuse and misuse that I just mentioned; 2) to explain how God’s upside-down, inside-out, sovereign, extravagantly generous and humanly counter-intuitive grace is also costly, but 3) to explain how this grace also offers us, in place of everything it costs us, things infinitely greater, greater even than high end cars and plush bank accounts, and how God in his grace sees in us, and calls forth from us, things infinitely greater than what we would ever dare to see in ourselves, so that, as the meaning of Jesus’ words sink in, we want to say, “Who? Me? Us?” and “Wow!” As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “Grace is costly because it calls us to follow; It is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.”
To get at why today’s passage is costly, and yet compensates us and compliments us, we have to address a major problem in this passage: Why would Jesus curse a fig tree for not giving figs, when it’s not even the season for producing figs? If this is supposed to be an example of faith in action, in this day and age of deforestation and global climate change, shouldn’t Christians be planting trees, instead of cursing them dead?
It helps me to see this fig tree episode as part of a sandwich. The first slice of bread is when Jesus comes up to the tree, finds it barren, and curses it. “May you never bear fruit again!” he says. The filling is when he runs the money changers and animal merchants out of the Temple Precinct. The second slice of bread comes afterward, when Jesus and the disciples find the fig tree withered, just like he said. When you find one story sandwiched like that inside another in the Bible, we’re supposed to stop and ask ourselves, Hmmmm… what do the two events have in common? Which is the first question in the outline.
They share two things. First off, they are both parables in action, that is, they are stories that tell of something other than themselves, but stories acted out, not told in words. Like what some Old Testament prophets did. Jeremiah walked around Jerusalem wearing a yoke on his shoulders, to demonstrate what he had long been saying: “Prepare to serve the Babylonians.” But then, just before going into exile, Jeremiah bought a field, so as to say, “Have hope; we’ll be back.”
So, when Jesus cursed the fig tree, he was not just gratuitously killing trees in order to say, “Hey, look what I can do! And you, too, if you have enough faith.”
No. Cursing the fruitless fig tree was a parable in action that would remind biblically literate Jews of Jeremiah 8: 10 b) “from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely 11 They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.
12 They acted shamefully, they committed abomination;
yet they were not at all ashamed, they did not know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;
at the time when I punish them, they shall be overthrown, says the Lord.
13 When I wanted to gather them, says the Lord,
there are no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree;
even the leaves are withered, and what I gave them has passed away from them.”
Which is also what the inner part of the sandwich, the cleansing of the temple, says. And that’s the second thing that the cleansing of the temple and the cursing of the fig tree have in common: they both convey the same message, a message of judgment, and a warning to repent. Jesus ran the money changers and the animal merchants out of the temple because they had twisted the whole system of sacrifice and worship into a lucrative monopoly racket. You came to make an offering of money, doves or lambs to God, and you got fleeced, by the priest. And that racket was cluttering up the Court of the Gentiles.
Cleansing the temple would have reminded biblically literate Jews of Malachi 3:1-3) “…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.2 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; 3 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.”
Both parables in the sandwich point to same thing: The Lord has come to inspect and do some spiritual housecleaning in his temple, and has found the people, the priests and rulers lacking in justice, integrity, and devotion to God. Repent or prepare for another siege and exile. Which came to pass 40 years later. And that’s one reason why some people went from shouting “Hosanna!” and “Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord!” on Sunday, to calling for his Crucifixion on Friday. Because Jesus was exposing and challenging the oppressive, exploitative ways of his own people, and not just those of the Romans, like they expected.
Jesus spells this dire message out even more with words in verse 23, “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.”
Which brings me to the next question in the outline: “Which mountain does Jesus want flipped?” in verse 23? We often hear these words used to refer to any and every possible kind of mountain in our lives. Mountains of sickness, mountains of need, of debt, of opposition or injustice. Of course it helps to think of personal challenges in those terms, and to marshal the resources of our faith and the church against them. But the longer it takes those mountains to fall and to flip, or if they don’t, does that mean that our faith is any the less valid?
We could take the approach that Garth Brooks does in his song, “I Thank God for Unanswered Prayer.” It’s about going to a football game at his former high school with his wife, there to see his former high school sweetheart, the one for whom he prayed to God every night that she would be the one he would marry. She wasn’t. But seeing and talking with her again, so many years later, makes him understand why he is so much better off with the woman who is his wife. The refrain goes, “Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers
Remember when you’re talkin’ to the man upstairs
That just because he doesn’t answer doesn’t mean he don’t care,
Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”
In case you’re wondering, Yes, I actually like that song. I too can look back on more than a few of my prayers and say, “Thank you, God, for saying No.”
But we’re missing out on big mountains of meanings whenever we fail to pay attention to one very important little single-syllable word in verse 23, a simple, common pronoun, the word, “this” as in “this mountain.” Jesus is not saying that we can or should go around telling any old mountain to just flip itself over and fly into the ocean. Ask the good people of Kentucky and West Virginia if they want any more mountains flipped, living as they do among the rubble and the contamination of strip mining and mountain-top removal for coal.
When Jesus talks about flipping “this mountain,” which mountain is he talking about? Where was he, at the time he said that? He’s talking about the mountain on which they are standing, Mount Zion, where stand the city of Jerusalem and the temple. The mountain to which they would go, maybe three times a year, from infancy, for festivals, sacrifices and ceremonies, “The city of the Great King,” the navel of the earth, the footstool of God. Tell this mountain, and everything that stands on it, to go take a flying leap and land upside-down among the fishes, and it will happen, Jesus says, because it is soon to happen, and is happening even then. Not literally, of course. Mt. Zion is still there, physically. But no more the temple, nor the priesthood of the tribe of Levi, nor the 24/7 system of sacrifices, ceremonies and pilgrimages.
The thought of which left the twelve disciples inspired, comforted and encouraged. NOT! More likely they were scandalized, horrified, terrified. And here we’re getting at my next question, how upside-down, inside-out and costly the sovereign, surprising and subversive grace of God was for those 12 disciples.
“THIS MOUNTAIN? Mt. Zion? Overthrown? Into the sea?” the disciples were surely wondering. “Why would we ever even pray for such a thing? Why, if Mt. Zion flips and falls and becomes a reef for the fishes, where can we go to pray and know that our prayers are really, truly heard?” That’s the question that Jesus is addressing, and not, “How shall I get a better car or a bigger bank account,” when he says, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” He’s saying that from here on out, trust that God hears you and attends to your prayers equally everywhere, anywhere you pray, anytime, and not just here atop Mt. Zion.
And if they were wondering, “And where will we go for cleansing, purification and the forgiveness of sins by sacrifice and ceremony?” (how could they not?) Jesus replies, “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.” With those words, Jesus is taking the ministry of forgiveness out of the hands of a hereditary, professional priesthood that has been corrupted, commercialized and co-opted, and is putting it into his disciples’ hands. And ours.
Here is where we start to see not only the tremendous cost, but the greater compensation, and the even greater compliment to us, of God’s grace. On one hand, Jesus is taking away something sacred, comfortable, familiar, that has given the disciples and their ancestors and relatives meaning, community, identity, structure and security: the temple, the priesthood, the pilgrimages, the rituals, the ceremonies and sacrifices in the law of Moses. That had to be scary. That had to hurt. That, again, is the cost of this upside-down, inside-out grace. But Jesus has not come to destroy this sacred world, and this sacred Word, but to fulfill them. The time for that fulfillment has come with Christ and his coming.
Here’s the overwhelming compensation that God’s grace offers (the next question in the outline): In place of Mount Zion, and the temple of stone, Jesus is constructing a new temple, a mobile temple, the long-promised portable footstool of God on earth, in which God is present and powerful everywhere, and anywhere, at any time, to anyone. That was promised at least as far back as when Habakkuk said that, “the knowledge of the glory of the Lord shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea,” even further back to when God told Abraham, “In you shall all nations be blessed.” This new temple is, first of all, Jesus himself. But it is also us, the church. This new temple of flesh and blood that we get, and that we are, is an extravagant compensation of God’s grace, for the temple of stone that is all but gone.
As for the next question, What is the outrageous, stupendous compliment that God’s grace offers us?: in place of the hereditary, professional priesthood, God is calling you and me to be the new priesthood, charged with the ministry of forgiveness and cleansing, no longer with blood sacrifices, but just by forgiveness, peacemaking and prayer. Jesus looks at his motley crew of ragtag disciples and sees nothing less than a new, eternal priesthood. He sees the same in us.
And if we should marvel at the compensation and the compliment of God’s grace and wonder, “Who? Me? Us?” well, we serve a God who, as Paul put it in Romans 4, “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist,” a God who specializes in impossible things and brings victory out of lost causes. If he can bring a Crucified Carpenter back to victorious resurrection life, he can make a new, portable temple out of a faithless and fractious world church, as well as a new holy priesthood out of us confused and conflicted Christians. That’s what God sees in us, and that’s what God will accomplish.
Sometimes I wonder if Jesus is not still in the business of flipping mountains. We are the heirs of a great mountain-flipping movement that was the Reformation of the 16th Century. It flipped the tables of the religious racket infecting the Western church and returned the priesthood to the people. When I visited the Mennonite churches of Ethiopia some ten years ago, I learned how their mountains were flipped when they lost church buildings, a mission hospital, even a Bible college, to government persecution.
But God’s generous grace still offers outrageous compensation, and compliments, in place of whatever God’s costly grace takes away. The Ethiopian church came out of that crisis and cleansing ten times bigger in numbers, and is now a missionary force in the Middle East.
That crashing, smashing and splashing sound we hear today could be our familiar Mennonite mountain of interrelated families, and of schools, organizations, conferences and culture that we once could count on to unite, support and sustain us in certain Mennonite beliefs, Mennonite practices, flipping over and falling into the sea. For several generations now we have been seeing the old familiar alignment of Mennonite family, church, colleges, culture and beliefs coming apart at the seams, while new people from all over the world are picking up the banner of Mennonite beliefs, and are forging ahead, bringing new cultures, connections and family names in. Will we respond by trying to shore up the old mountain of custom, culture, clan and kinship, even if at the cost of our original Anabaptist vision, or will we embrace the new and old thing that God is doing? For the goal of God’s cosmic recreation project is to make of the whole earth again a temple in which he dwells. Is all that crashing, smashing and splashing of denominational mountains and monuments—and not just Mennonite ones– what it takes to become the church “without spot or wrinkle” at Christ’s return?
But nor is Christ done with extending us the greatest and highest callings and compliments. Like that of Lorenzo Trujillo, the great-great grandfather-in-law of Linda Peters. He came to Southern California from New Mexico in the 1840’s. This cross (project) on our decorative wall came from his granddaughter, Perfilia Trujillo Peters, through her granddaughter-in-law, Linda Peters. There had already been a system of Spanish mission churches throughout California for several centuries. But they had a sad and sordid reputation for enslaving Indians and amassing great wealth. Where Perfilia’s grandfather, Lorenzo, settled, in what’s now the Los Angeles area, it was a long a walk to the nearest mission church. So they built their own sanctuary and started a new parish, The Church of San Salvador de Jurupa, the first parish in California apart from the Spanish mission system.
Lorenzo was not an ordained priest. From Linda Peters’ story, and my research online, I got to wondering, How big a risk, how bold a step, was that, of this simple settler and rancher and family man, to start a whole new parish, when there wasn’t even the certainty of finding a pastor? That’s completely in the spirit of Mark 11, when Jesus promises to make of the former fishermen and tax collector and revolutionary among his disciples a new temple, and a new priesthood.
As for those preachers who told us to apply these words of Jesus to whatever we want, as though God were just a celestial Santa Claus, or giant cosmic vending machine—just put in enough faith and out comes whatever you want–and to prove our faith by sending them money, they are not expecting of God too much; they are expecting too little, things beneath God and ourselves. That sells God and the gospel short by dangling before us vain promises of high status cars and plush bank accounts, when God offers us nothing less than a royal priesthood. They would entice us with empty promises of trophy homes, when God would make of us his eternal temple.
Yes, Jesus is telling us to pray with bold and audacious faith. And if our prayers are not answered just when and how we want, don’t worry about whether or not we ginned up enough feelings of certainty within ourselves, or whether we allowed just a little bit too much doubt to run through our heads. Of course we have doubts. To be human is to think in question marks. And let’s not worry about being unworthy of God’s attention to our prayers. God has no one to pray to him except sinners. Just marvel with me that we have been called to be the new temple, in which praise and prayers to God shall ever ascend, and let’s get on with our priestly service to God and people, as does, for example, the prayer team that gathers every Sunday morning during the Christian Education hour. Whenever God lays a calling upon us, I’d be concerned if we didn’t feel some fear and hesitation. But faith in the God who calls requires faith as well in his calling as well. So, marvel with me at our calling to be God’s new royal priesthood, and let’s get on with our ministry of forgiveness, and the sacrifices of praise and offerings.
God sees all that in Who? Me? Us? Really? this passage should make us wonder. But then, what part of God’s sovereign, surprising, counter-intuitive, costly but even more complimentary grace don’t we understand?