LENT Day 41 (Holy Monday) Mark 11:12–23 

Jesus Disrupts the Temple On Palm Sunday 
Jesus arrived in Jerusalem but did not spend the night in the city. It was far too dangerous to stay in Jerusalem at night when the temple police could arrest him without fear of a riot. So in the evening, Jesus retreated to Bethany on the Mount of Olives and then returned to teach in the temple each morning. On Monday Jesus enacted two pieces of prophetic theatre that are highly significant. As he walked down the Mount of Olives from Bethany on his way to the Temple, he stopped to look for fruit on a fig tree. This was a theatrical performance—obviously, Jesus knew it wasn’t the season for figs. Upon finding no fruit, he spoke to the fig tree, saying, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” Then he continued his journey to the temple where he engaged in another fruit inspection, and failing to find the fruit of fidelity and justice—the fruit the Hebrew prophets always called Israel to bear—Jesus staged an even more dramatic performance of prophetic theatre. Jesus made a whip and drove out the sheep for the sacrifices, overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of the pigeon sellers, and shouted, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of robbers!” Jesus is the climax of the Hebrew prophetic tradition. What is traditionally called the “cleansing of the temple” was not a cleansing at all, but a prophetic denunciation and a symbolic destruction of the temple. Six centuries earlier the prophet Jeremiah had denounced the temple as a den of robbers, meaning that the people of Jerusalem were using the temple as a hideout, believing that it gave them exemption from divine judgment for their idolatry and injustice. Jeremiah then predicted that the temple would be destroyed by fire that “will burn and not be quenched.” This prophecy came to pass about twenty years later in 587 BC when Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by the Babylonians. On Holy Monday Jesus re-enacted Jeremiah’s prophetic protest—a symbolic act that the priests, scribes, and Levites would have easily interpreted. Just as Jeremiah had predicted the destruction of the first temple, now Jesus is predicting the destruction of the second temple. Like the fig tree, the temple was barren of the fruit that God sought and it would never produce fruit again. Jesus’ action of temporarily halting the temple sacrifices during Passover week was highly provocative and extremely dangerous. It was only due to his popularity with the crowds of Passover pilgrims that Jesus wasn’t arrested on Monday. Nevertheless this action accelerated the plot among the chief priests to find a way to arrest Jesus in secret and

Zahnd, Brian. The Unvarnished Jesus: A Lenten Journey (pp. 168-171).


Music by Simon Wester. Used With Permission. 

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