The King comes to his temple: the entry, the fig tree and the question of authority

Mark 11 begins the last week of Jesus' life, which takes up chapters 11 to 16, about a third of the Gospel of Mark. The author is not named in the book. Tradition, reported by Eusebius from Papias, identifies him as Mark, Peter's interpreter, usually understood to be John Mark of Acts 12:12. Many critical scholars treat the name as a later attribution, and a minority doubt any link to Peter. The usual date is about AD 65 to 70, near the Jewish war, and some think the book was written after the temple's fall in 70, which would shape how its readers heard this chapter. The usual setting is Rome, with Gentile readers, and Mark explains Jewish customs and translates Aramaic for them. His purpose is to present Jesus as Christ and Son of God (1:1) whose identity is clear only through suffering.

The chapter sets the final week in motion. On the first day Jesus enters Jerusalem and looks round the temple (11:1-11). On the next he curses the fig tree and acts in the temple (11:12-19). On the third day the disciples see the tree withered, Jesus speaks about faith and prayer, and the leaders challenge him (11:20-33). Mark uses a common device of his, in which one story is wrapped around another: the fig tree frames the temple action, and each explains the other.

The Gospels tell this week differently. Matthew 21 has the temple action on the day of the entry and says the fig tree withered at once. Luke 19:28-48 has no fig tree but records that Jesus wept over the city. John 12:12-19 mentions palm branches and quotes Zechariah, and John places a temple action at the start of Jesus' ministry (John 2:13-22), which some take as a second cleansing and others as the same event placed there for John's own purposes. On the relationship of the Gospels, most scholars think Matthew and Luke built on Mark, though a minority hold that Mark used Matthew.

Mark 11 is narrative, but it is narrative made of symbolic actions, like the acted signs of the Old Testament prophets. When Jeremiah broke a jar or Ezekiel drew a city on a brick, the action was the message (Jeremiah 19; Ezekiel 4). Jesus' entry, his cursing of a tree and his turning over of tables are such acts, and each should be read as a statement as well as an event.

The key to the chapter is the arrangement. Mark joins the fig tree and the temple so that the reader reads one through the other. The tree has leaves and no fruit, and the temple has the busy look of worship and no fruit of what it was for. The reader should also follow the Old Testament texts that the crowd and Jesus use. The crowd's cry comes from Psalm 118:25-26, a pilgrim psalm sung at the feasts, and Jesus quotes Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11. Reading those texts in their own context is necessary to see what they mean here.

Two cautions apply. The saying about moving a mountain (11:23) is a hyperbole of the kind found in Jewish teaching, and in context it is about faith in God, not a general promise that any request will be granted. The phrase 'not the season for figs' (11:13) has long puzzled readers, and the explanation must be given from Mark's own pattern of symbolic action, not by guessing at horticulture.

Verses 1–6

Near Bethphage and Bethany on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sends two disciples to a village for a colt on which no one has sat. The detail has two sides. In the Old Testament an animal not yet used for work was set apart for sacred purposes (Numbers 19:2; 1 Samuel 6:7), and the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9 describes the king coming on a colt. Mark does not quote Zechariah, but Matthew 21:4-5 and John 12:14-15 do. The disciples are told to say, 'The Lord needs it and will return it shortly.' Whether this was a prearranged sign or foreknowledge, Mark shows Jesus in command of events.

Verses 7–10

The disciples throw their cloaks over the colt, and Jesus sits on it. Many spread cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches cut from the fields (John 12:13 calls them palm branches). Spreading cloaks recalls the acclaiming of Jehu as king (2 Kings 9:13). The crowd shouts 'Hosanna', a Hebrew cry meaning 'Save, please', taken from Psalm 118:25, and then 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!' (Psalm 118:26). They add, 'Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!' The cry does not call Jesus king outright, but it points to a Davidic kingdom coming with him.

Verse 11

Jesus enters Jerusalem and the temple courts, looks around at everything, and, since it was late, goes out to Bethany with the Twelve. The quiet is deliberate. He has come to his Father's house to inspect it, and the action follows the next day. Malachi 3:1 spoke of the Lord coming suddenly to his temple.

Verses 12–14

Next morning Jesus is hungry and sees a fig tree in leaf. He finds only leaves, 'since it was not the season for figs', and says, 'May no one ever eat of your fruit again.' The difficulty is why he would curse a tree for lacking what it could not have. The best answer is that the action is a prophetic sign. The Old Testament often uses the fig tree and the vine for Israel (Hosea 9:10; Jeremiah 8:13; Micah 7:1). A tree in full leaf early in the year promised figs, and one with leaves and nothing else was a fitting picture of an outward show that promised more than it produced.

Verses 15–17

In the temple courts Jesus drives out those buying and selling, overturns the tables of the money changers and the seats of the dove sellers, and forbids anyone to carry merchandise through the courts. Money changers exchanged coins for the temple tax, and doves were the offering of the poor (Leviticus 5:7). The trade took place in what was probably the outer court, the one open to Gentiles. Jesus quotes Isaiah 56:7, 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations', and Jeremiah 7:11, 'a den of robbers'. Mark alone keeps the words 'for all the nations'. A 'den of robbers' is, on a common reading, a place where robbers retreat to feel safe after their crimes, and Jeremiah used the phrase to warn that trust in the temple, without obedience, would not save it from destruction.

Verse 18

The chief priests and scribes look for a way to kill him, afraid of him because the whole crowd is astonished at his teaching.

Verses 20–25

The next morning they see the tree withered from the roots. Peter points to it, and Jesus says, 'Have faith in God.' He then says that whoever says to 'this mountain' that it be lifted up and thrown into the sea, and does not doubt, will have it done. Some interpreters take 'this mountain' to be the Mount of Olives; others, the temple mount, which would link the saying to the temple's end. In either case the saying is about the power of faith in God, not about human force. Jesus adds that whatever they ask in prayer, believing, will be theirs, and that when they stand to pray they should forgive anyone they hold something against, so that the Father in heaven may forgive them. The ordering of faith and forgiveness echoes the Lord's Prayer. Some manuscripts add a verse 26 that repeats the warning; the best manuscripts omit it.

Verses 27–33

In the temple courts the chief priests, scribes and elders, the three groups of the Sanhedrin, ask by what authority he does these things. Jesus answers with a question: was John's baptism from heaven or from men? They reason that 'from heaven' would expose their unbelief and 'from men' would anger the crowd, who held that John was a prophet. They answer, 'We do not know.' Jesus replies that neither will he tell them. The reply is not evasion. John had pointed to the one coming after him, and to answer was to answer about Jesus.

The chapter teaches that God dwells with his people and expects the worship of his house to match his character. The temple was the place of God's presence, sacrifice and prayer. Isaiah 56:7 shows that God had always intended it to receive the nations, and Jeremiah 7 shows that God would judge a temple that had become a pretext for injustice. Jesus' action stands in the line of the prophets who warned that ritual without obedience was empty (Isaiah 1:11-17; Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:6-8).

The chapter also bears on the doctrine of God's kingship. The crowd's acclamation of a coming Davidic kingdom takes up promises made in 2 Samuel 7 and the royal psalms, and Mark's account shows the king arriving not with an army but on a young animal in the manner described by Zechariah 9:9-10, who says that the king will proclaim peace to the nations.

The teaching on faith and prayer in 11:22-25 should be read within the whole Bible's teaching on prayer: God hears his people and answers according to his will (1 John 5:14-15), and Jesus' own prayer in Gethsemane (14:36) shows that believing prayer submits to the Father. Forgiveness is tied to prayer, as in Matthew 6:12-15. On authority, the passage anticipates a recurring theme in the Gospels: Jesus' claim is from God, and his hearers must decide whether it is.

The entry is the clearest public claim to kingship in Mark. The crowd's words come from Psalm 118, and Jesus rides in as the king of Zechariah 9:9, as Matthew and John say explicitly. Mark's own emphasis is on the authority with which Jesus directs events, and on the fact that the king who arrives goes first to the temple. Psalm 118 is also the psalm Jesus will quote in the next chapter about the stone the builders rejected (12:10-11), so the acclamation and the rejection belong to one story.

In the temple Jesus acts as the Lord who comes to his own house. Malachi 3:1-3 promised that the Lord would suddenly come to his temple and purify it. Jesus does not ask permission or cite a rabbi, and when asked by what authority he acts he refers to John and, by implication, to heaven. The fig tree is a sign of judgment on a fruitless religion, and many readers see it as pointing to the temple's fall (13:2), though Mark does not say so in this chapter. A few scholars, among them E. P. Sanders, take the temple action as a prophetic sign of coming destruction, and not only a cleansing.

Jesus is also the one who makes the temple's purpose complete. He says it was to be a house of prayer for all nations. After the resurrection the church understood that Jesus himself had taken the place of the temple as the meeting of God and people (John 2:19-21), and that his people are built as a house for God (1 Peter 2:4-5).