Prayer Instead of Sacrifice.

Mark 11:1-25.

I.

            Jesus and his disciples come into the city of Jerusalem with great fanfare.  Mark says they “went into the Temple,” and then just “looked around at everything,” but it was late in the day so they went back out to Bethany.  Bethany is a couple of miles from Jerusalem, but it seems further because one has to descend deep down into the Kidron Valley and trudge up the other side.

            Early the next morning, they leave Bethany to go spend the day in the Temple.  As they are walking, Jesus sees a fig tree across the way.  He tells the disciples he is hungry, and he approaches it.  The tree is in full leaf, but there are no figs on it because, as Mark tells us, “it was not the season for figs.”

            Jesus is not being clueless or naïve here.  He knows what he is doing; he knows it is not the season for figs and that therefore there won’t be any figs on this tree.  So do his disciples.  So when he leaves the road and starts walking over to the tree, they must have looked at each other.  Obviously, this is a lesson Jesus is trying to get across to them. 

            He gets to the tree and makes a show of being hungry and looking for figs.  Then he steps back and says to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”

            It seems rather unfair to the poor tree, to be cursed for being unproductive when it isn’t even fig season.  Cut the tree some slack, already!  What is Jesus doing?

            The Lord gives them no explanation at the time.  He comes back to the road and they resume their walk to Jerusalem, the disciples shrugging like, “Maybe he will let us know someday what that was about.”

            When they get to the city Jesus goes directly to the Temple again, just like the day before.  But this time he does more than just look around.  He immediately starts to make a disturbance.  In the Temple precincts there was this whole section where people had to go to change their money – because regular Roman coins were considered graven images and therefore prohibited in the Temple – and where people would buy sacrificial birds and animals.  Jesus goes berserk.  He’s yelling, he’s turning over tables so that coins are flying and rolling all over the place; he’s setting birds free and generally causing a frightening commotion. 

            We don’t know if the disciples got into the act, but we do know that Jesus was applauded by the common people, who experienced these money changers and animal sellers as an exploitative racket and general rip-off.  At this point, Jesus is meeting the expectations of anyone who might have thought he had come to Jerusalem to spark a revolution.

II.

            While he is doing this, and probably after he was done and finds a place to sit and give more formal instruction, Mark says Jesus was “teaching the people.”  In these actions he intends to set an example for people; he is teaching the people to do as he does.  Neither are they to tolerate the presence of bankers, loan sharks, and other religious profiteers in the Temple.

            Jesus’ basic message here is to remind everyone that in Scripture God says of the Temple, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.”
   But, he says, the authorities have turned it into a den of robbers, yet another scheme for enriching the already rich.

            The Temple is supposed to be a place where the people get fed, spiritually and literally.  It is supposed to be a place where worshipers from all over the world may come to pray.  It is supposed to be a font of God’s grace, flowing into the world through the people.           

            But instead, it has been turned into a place where people get fleeced, robbed, exploited, and otherwise relieved of their money.  Mark specifically mentions Jesus’ activity in the parts of the facility where sacrificial birds were sold.  Birds were the offering of poor people who could not afford lambs or other more expensive animals.  Jesus is most concerned about robbing from the poor.

            The sacrificial cult in the Temple was thus a racket designed to steal from people who were least able to pay.  And it also constituted a crime against nature.  With all these animals being slaughtered, there are ancient accounts indicating that one problem was what to do with all the blood.

            Then there is the whole theology of sacrifice itself.  With the exception of the birds offered by his parents at his birth and the lamb that was procured for this Passover, there is no record of Jesus making or sharing in any sacrifices.  That’s what people come to the Temple for, and yet Jesus not only declines to participate, but makes this big scene.

            Some scholars believe that sacrifice rituals developed by humans over time as a way to create social unity by focusing violence on one person rather than on each other.  This eventually evolved into a system where animals were used as substitutes for people.  But human societies continue to “sacrifice” people in less formalized ways, like lynching, even today.

            Jesus comes to smash that whole apparatus.  He does it eventually by offering himself as the final sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the once-and-for-all sacrifice which ultimately expresses the trajectory of the Scriptures in which God identifies, not with the society and its leaders who manufacture an artificial social unity by putting scapegoats to death, but with the scapegoats, the losers, the excluded, and the lynched themselves.

III.

            Jesus recognizes the sacrificial system as a bloody racket that glorified violence and misrepresented God as a bloodthirsty deity whose mindless wrath needed constantly to be appeased with ever greater quantities of blood.  For pointing this out, Jesus draws down upon himself the wrath of the chief priests and the scribes, who at this point were convinced that for the sake of domestic tranquility they had to make a sacrifice out of him.   

            But the authorities are still afraid of the people, who are transfixed by Jesus’ preaching and inspired by his revolutionary message and actions.  So they leave him alone as he teaches and preaches in the Temple.  They skulk off to figure out some kind of plan to get rid of him.

            When it starts to get late, Jesus and his disciples prepare  to leave the Temple to go back over to Bethany.  In the gathering darkness, they make the long, 40 minute walk.

            The next morning, bright and early, they are up and leaving Bethany again.  On their way to the city, the disciples notice the fig tree Jesus spoke to the day before.  The leaves are now shriveled and falling off.  It is clear that the tree had died.  Peter is the one who points this out.  “Look, Rabbi,” he says, “The fig tree you cursed has withered.”

            “Yes,” replies Jesus.  “Trust in God.  Prayer rooted in absolute trust in God is extremely powerful.  Truly I tell you, if you were to say to this mountain” – and here he may have pointed ahead of them to the very mountain to which they were headed, the mountain upon which the Temple was built, which is to say this particular mountain, this mountain representing the religion, the site of sacrifice and atonement, the focus of Israel’s hope and faith – “if you were to say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and you do not doubt but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.”

            So Jesus connects the fig tree to “this mountain,” the Temple mount.  What he has demonstrated in microcosm with the tree is what he is in the process of doing in macrocosm with the Temple.  The Temple is also “out of season,” which is to say that its time has past, the efficacy of centralized, priestly, sacrificial worship is over.  It is not producing fruit; it is not feeding God’s people or nourishing them spiritually; it has become a superficially beautiful yet completely ineffective institution.  Hungry people who come to the Temple will not be fed.  And they never will be.  When Jesus speaks to the tree he is really speaking to the Temple when he says, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”  It wasn’t a curse, as the disciples assumed, so much as a statement of fact.  The institutional religion of the Temple is finished.

IV.

            Instead of sacrifice; instead of this attempt to appease an angry, vindictive God; instead of choosing some weak loser as the focus of our wrath and killing them; instead of developing priestly, intercessory institutions, Jesus says true faith, real trust in God, is about prayer.  “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” he says. 

            So prayer is not about what we don’t have but must propitiate and beg God to give to us even though we don’t deserve it.  Prayer is not based on our consciousness of scarcity and lack.  Prayer is not a matter of getting God’s attention so God will do what we want.  

            On the contrary, prayer is about realizing, actualizing, verifying, and participating in what God has already done and is already doing, and is always doing for everyone, all the time.  Prayer is a trust in God that God has already provided everything we need and desire.  Prayer is not an attempt to change God but a way to change ourselves so we can perceive and participate in the benefits and blessings we have already been given.

            Then Jesus adds one final little but very important lesson about prayer.  It has to do with forgiveness, or release.  He says this here because the most powerful force preventing us from perceiving and participating in the benefits God has already given is our insistence on holding on to people’s wrongs against us.  This retention of anger, fear, resentment, hurt; this dwelling on bad memories and desire for retribution or vindication; this cherishing our pain, is the strongest blockage and hindrance to prayer.  Prayer only works if we let go of all that.

            Prayer only works if we release bad memories of the past and fear of the future.  Prayer only works if we are open to what God is doing right now, and if we see our past and especially our future in terms of blessing, peace, justice, and grace.  Prayer is letting go of this garbage blocking the flow of grace in and through us, so that we can see and participate in the truth of God’s love for the world revealed in Jesus Christ.

V.

            In the coming week, Jesus will finish off the sacrificial system by offering his own life for the life of the world.  He will identify with the lynched, the scapegoats, and the victims of human violence, fulfilling the role John the Baptizer gave him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  He will expose the heartless and cynical violence of the powers that maintain their order and wealth on the backs of suffering people.  And he will reveal the unfathomable depths of God’s love for us all.

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