Verses 1-33
Chapter 11
11:1-6 When they were
coming near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and to Bethany, Jesus despatched
two of his disciples, and said to them, "Go into the village opposite
you, and as soon as you come into it, you will find tethered there a
colt, on which no man has ever yet sat. Loose it and bring it to me. And
if anyone says to you, 'Why are you doing this?' say, 'The Lord needs
it,' and immediately he will send it." And they went away and they found
the colt tethered, outside a door, on the open street, and they loosed
it. And some of those who were standing by said to them, "What are you
doing loosing this colt?" They said to them what Jesus had told them to
say, and they let them go.
We have come to the last stage of the journey. There had been
the time of withdrawal around Caesarea Philippi in the far north. There
had been the time in Galilee. There had been the stay in the
hill-country of Judaea and in the regions beyond Jordan. There had been
the road through Jericho. Now comes Jerusalem.
We have to note something without which the story is almost
unintelligible. When we read the first three gospels we get the idea
that this was actually Jesus' first visit to Jerusalem. They are
concerned to tell the story of Jesus' work in Galilee. We must remember
that the gospels are very short. Into their short compass is crammed the
work of three years, and the writers were bound to select the things in
which they were interested and of which they had special knowledge. And
when we read the fourth gospel we find Jesus frequently in Jerusalem. (John 2:13, John 5:1, John 7:10.) We find in fact that he regularly went up to Jerusalem for the great feasts.
There is no real contradiction here. The first three gospels are
specially interested in the Galilaean ministry, and the fourth in the
Judaean. In fact, moreover, even the first three have indications that
Jesus was not infrequently in Jerusalem. There is his close friendship
with Martha and Mary and Lazarus at Bethany, a friendship which speaks
of many visits. There is the fact that Joseph of Arimathaea was his
secret friend. And above all there is Jesus' saying in Matthew 23:37
that often he would have gathered together the people of Jerusalem as a
hen gathers her chickens under her wings but they were unwilling. Jesus
could not have said that unless there had previously been more than one
appeal which had met with a cold response.
This explains the incident of the colt. Jesus did not leave
things until the last moment. He knew what he was going to do and long
ago he had made arrangements with a friend. When he sent forward his
disciples, he sent them with a pass-word that had been
pre-arranged--"The Lord needs it now." This was not a sudden, reckless
decision of Jesus. It was something to which all his life had been
budding up.
Bethphage and Bethany were villages near Jerusalem. Very
probably Bethphage means house of figs and Bethany means house of dates.
They must have been very close because we know from the Jewish law that
Bethphage was one of the circle of villages which marked the limit of a
Sabbath day's journey, that is, less than a mile, while Bethany was one
of the recognized lodging--places for pilgrims to the Passover when
Jerusalem was full.
The prophets of Israel had always had a very distinctive method
of getting their message across. When words failed to move people they
did something dramatic, as if to say, "If you will not hear, you must be
compelled to see." (compare specially 1 Kings 11:30-32.)
These dramatic actions were what we might call acted warnings or
dramatic sermons. That method was what Jesus was employing here. His
action was a deliberate dramatic claim to be Messiah.
But we must be careful to note just what he was doing. There was a saying of the prophet Zechariah (Zechariah 9:9),
"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout aloud, O daughter of
Jerusalem. Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he,
and riding on an ass and upon a colt the foal of an ass." The whole
impact is that the King was coming in peace. In Palestine the ass was
not a despised beast, but a noble one. When a king went to war he rode
on a horse, when he came in peace he rode on an ass.
G. K. Chesterton has a poem in which he makes the modem donkey speak:
"When fishes flew ind forests walk'd
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
"With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
Of all four-footed things.
"The tatter'd outlaw of the earth
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me, I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
"Fools! For I also had my hour,
One far fierce hour and sweet;
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet."
It is a wonderful poem. Nowadays the ass is a beast of amused
contempt, but in the time of Jesus it was the beast of kings. But we
must note what kind of a king Jesus was claiming to be. He came meek and
lowly. He came in peace and for peace. They greeted him as the Son of
David, but they did not understand.
It was just at this time that the Hebrew poems, The Psalms of
Solomon, were written. They represent the kind of Son of David whom
people expected. Here is their description of him:
"Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the son of
David,
At the time, in the which thou seest, O God, that he may
reign over Israel, thy servant.
And gird him with strength that he may shatter unrighteous rulers,
And that he may purge Jerusalem from nations that trample
her down to destruction.
Wisely, righteously he shall thrust out sinners from the
inheritance,
He shall destroy the pride of sinners as a potter's vessel.
With a rod of iron he shall break in pieces all their substance.
He shall destroy the godless nations with the word of his
mouth.
At his rebuke nations shall flee before him,
And he shall reprove sinners for the thoughts of their
hearts.
"All nations shall be in fear before him,
For he will smite the earth with the word of his mouth forever."
(Wis 17:21-25, 39.)
That was the kind of poem on which the people nourished their
hearts. They were looking for a king who would shatter and smash and
break. Jesus knew it--and he came meek and lowly, riding upon an ass.
When Jesus rode into Jerusalem that day, he claimed to be king,
but he claimed to be King of peace. His action was a contradiction of
all that men hoped for and expected.
11:7-10 They brought
the colt to Jesus, and they put their garments on it, and mounted him on
it. Many of them spread their garments on the road. Others cut branches
from the fields and spread them on the road. And those who were going
before and those who were following kept shouting, "Save now! Blessed is
the coming kingdom of our father David! Send thy salvation from the
heights of heaven!"
The colt they brought had never been ridden upon. That was
fitting, for a beast to be used for a sacred purpose must never have
been used for any other purpose. It was so with the red heifer whose
ashes cleansed from pollution (Numbers 19:2, Deuteronomy 21:3).
The whole picture is of a populace who misunderstood. It shows
us a crowd of people thinking of kingship in the terms of conquest in
which they had thought of it for so long. It is oddly reminiscent of how
Simon Maccabaeus entered Jerusalem a hundred and fifty years before,
after he had blasted Israel's enemies in battle. "And he entered into it
the three and twentieth day of the seventh month, in the hundred,
seventy and first year, with thanksgiving and branches of palm trees,
and with harps, and cymbals, and viols, and hymns and songs, because
there was destroyed a great enemy out of Israel." (1 Maccabees 13:51.) It was a conqueror's welcome they sought to give to Jesus, but they never dreamed of the kind of conqueror he wished to be.
The very shouts which the crowd raised to Jesus showed how their
thoughts were running. When they spread their garments on the ground
before him, they did exactly what the crowd did when that man of blood
Jehu was anointed king. (2 Kings 9:13.) They shouted, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" That is a quotation from Psalms 118:26, and should really read a little differently, "Blessed in the name of the Lord is he who comes!"
There are three things to note about that shout.
(i) It was the regular greeting with which pilgrims were
addressed when they reached the Temple on the occasion of the great
feasts.
(ii) "He who comes" was another name for the Messiah. When the
Jews spoke about the Messiah, they talked of him as the One who is
Coming.
(iii) But it is the whole origin of the Psalm from which the
words come that makes them supremely suggestive. In 167 B.C. there had
arisen an extraordinary king in Syria called Antiocheius. He had
conceived it his duty to be a missionary of Hellenism and to introduce
Greek ways of life, Greek thought and Greek religion wherever he could,
even, if necessary, by force. He tried to do so in Palestine.
For a time he conquered Palestine. To possess a copy of the law
or to circumcise a child were crimes punishable by death. He desecrated
the Temple courts. He actually instituted the worship of Zeus where
Jehovah had been worshipped. With deliberate insult he offered swine's
flesh on the great altar of the burnt-offering. He made the chambers
round the Temple courts into brothels. He did everything he could to
wipe out the Jewish faith.
It was then that Judas Maccabaeus arose, and after an amazing
career of conquest, in 163 B.C. he drove Antiocheius out and re-purified
and re-consecrated the temple, an event which the Feast of the
Dedication, or the Feast of Hanukah, still commemorates. And in all
probability Psalms 118:1-29
was written to commemorate that great day of purification and the
battle which Judas Maccabaeus won. It is a conqueror's psalm.
Again and again we see the same thing happening in this
incident. Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah, but in such a way as to
try to show that the popular ideas of the Messiah were misguided. But
the people did not see it. Their welcome was one which befitted, not the
King of love, but the conqueror who would shatter the enemies of
Israel.
In Mark 11:9-10
there is the word Hosanna. The word is consistently misunderstood. It
is quoted and used as if it meant Praise; but it is a simple
transliteration of the Hebrew for Save now! it occurs in exactly the
same form in 2 Samuel 14:4 and 2 Kings 6:26,
where it is used by people seeking for help and protection at the hands
of the king. When the people shouted Hosanna it was not a cry of praise
to Jesus, which it often sounds like when we quote it. It was a cry to
God to break in and save his people now that the Messiah had come.
No incident so shows the sheer courage of Jesus as this does. In
the circumstances one might have expected him to enter Jerusalem
secretly and to keep hidden from the authorities who were out to destroy
him. Instead he entered in such a way that the attention of every eye
was focussed upon him. One of the most dangerous things a man can do is
to go to people and tell them that all their accepted ideas are wrong.
Any man who tries to tear up by the roots a people's nationalistic
dreams is in for trouble. But that is what Jesus deliberately was doing.
Here we see Jesus making the last appeal of love and making it with a
courage that is heroic.
11:11 And he came into
Jerusalem into the Temple. After he had looked round everything, when
it was now late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.
This simple verse shows us two things about Jesus which were typical of him.
(i) It shows us Jesus deliberately summing up his task. The
whole atmosphere of the last days was one of deliberation. Jesus was not
recklessly plunging into unknown dangers. He was doing everything with
his eyes wide open. When he looked round everything, he was like a
commander summing up the strength of the opposition and his own
resources preparatory to the decisive battle.
(ii) It shows us where Jesus got his strength. He went back to
the peace of Bethany. Before he joined battle with men he sought the
presence of God. It was only because each day he faced God that he could
face men with such courage.
This brief passage also shows us something about the Twelve.
They were still with him. By this time it must have been quite plain to
them that Jesus was committing suicide, as it seemed to them. Sometimes
we criticize them for their lack of loyalty in the last days, but it
says something for them, that, little as they understood what was
happening, they still stood by him.
11:12-14,20-21 When,
on the next day, they were coming out from Bethany, Jesus was hungry.
From a distance he saw a fig-tree in leaf, and he went to it to see if
he would find anything on it. When he came to it he found nothing except
leaves, for it was not yet the season of figs. He said to it, "Let no
one eat fruit from you for ever." And the disciples heard him say it....
When they were going along the road early in the morning, they saw the
fig-tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered what Jesus had said
the day before and said, "Teacher! Look! The fig-tree which you cursed
has withered away!"
Although the story of the fig-tree is in Mark's gospel divided
into two we take it as one. The first part of the story happened on the
morning of one day, and the second part on the morning of the next day,
and, chronologically, the cleansing of the Temple came in between. But,
when we are trying to see the meaning of the story, we are better to
take it as one.
There can be no doubt that this, without exception, is the most
difficult story in the gospel narrative. To take it as literal history
presents difficulties which are well-nigh insuperable.
(i) The story does not ring true. To be frank, the whole
incident does not seem worthy of Jesus. There seems a certain petulance
in it. it is just the kind of story that is told of other wonder-workers
but never of Jesus. Further, we have this basic difficulty. Jesus had
always refused to use his miraculous powers for his own sake. He would
not turn the stones into bread to satisfy his own hunger. He would not
use his miraculous powers to escape from his enemies. He never used his
power for his own sake. And yet here he uses his power to blast a tree
which had disappointed him when he was hungry.
(ii) Worse, the whole action was unreasonable. This was the
Passover Season, that is, the middle of April. The fig-tree in a
sheltered spot may bear leaves as early as March, but never did a
fig-tree bear figs until late May or June. Mark says that it was not the
season for figs. Why blast the tree for failing to do what it was not
possible for it to do? It was both unreasonable and unjust. Some
commentators, to save the situation, say that what Jesus was looking for
was green figs, half-ripe figs in their early stages, but such unripe
fruit was unpleasant and was never eaten.
The whole story does not seem to fit Jesus at all. What are we to say about it?
If we are to take this as the story of something which actually
happened, we must take it as an enacted parable. We must in fact take it
as one of those prophetic, symbolic, dramatic actions. If we take it
that way, it may be interpreted as the condemnation of two things.
(i) It is the condemnation of promise without fulfillment. The
leaves on the tree might be taken as the promise of fruit, but there was
no fruit there. It is the condemnation especially of the people of
Israel. All their history was a preparation for the coming of God's
Chosen One. The whole promise of their national record was that when the
Chosen One came they would be eager to receive him. But when he did
come, that promise was tragically unfulfilled.
Charles Lamb tells of a certain man called Samuel le Grice. In
his life there were three stages. When he was young, people said of him,
"He will do something." As he grew older and did nothing, they said of
him, "He could do something if he tried." Towards the end they said of
him, "He might have done something if he had tried." His life was the
tale of a promise that was never fulfilled. If this incident is an
enacted parable it is the condemnation of unfulfilled promise.
(ii) It is the condemnation of profession without practice. It
might be taken that the tree with its leaves professed to offer
something and did not. The whole cry of the New Testament is that a man
can be known only by the fruits of his life. "You will know them by
their fruits." (Matthew 7:16.) "Bear fruits that befit repentance." (Luke 3:8.) It is not the man who piously says, "Lord, Lord," who will enter into the Kingdom but the man who does God's will. (Matthew 7:21.)
Unless a man's religion makes him a better and more useful man, makes
his home happier, makes life better and easier for those with whom he is
brought into contact, it is not religion at all. No man can claim to be
a follower of Jesus Christ and remain entirely unlike the Master whom
he professes to love.
If this incident is to be taken literally and is an enacted
parable, that must be the meaning. But, relevant as these lessons may
be, it seems difficult to extract them from the incident, because it was
quite unreasonable to expect the fig-tree to bear figs when the time
for figs was still six weeks away.
What then are we to say? Luke does not relate this incident at all, but he has the parable of the fruitless fig-tree (Luke 13:6-9).
Now that parable ends indecisively. The master of the vineyard wished
to root up the tree. The gardener pled for another chance. The last
chance was given; and it was agreed that if the tree bore fruit it
should be spared, and if not it should be destroyed. May it not be that
this incident is a kind of continuation of that parable? The people of
Israel had had their chance. They had failed to bear fruit. And now was
the time for their destruction. It has been suggested--and it is quite
possible--that on the road from Bethany to Jerusalem there was a lonely
blasted fig-tree. It may well be that Jesus said to his disciples, "You
remember the parable I told you about the fruitless fig-tree? Israel is
still fruitless and will be blasted as that tree." It may well be that
that lonely tree became associated in men's minds with a saying of Jesus
about the fate of fruitlessness, and so the story arose.
Let the reader take it as he will. To us there seem insuperable
difficulties in taking it literally. It seems to us to be in some way
connected with the parable of the fruitless tree. But in any event the
whole lesson of the incident is that uselessness invites disaster.
11:15-19 They came
into Jerusalem, and when Jesus had come into the sacred precincts, he
began to cast out those who sold and bought in the sacred place, and he
overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who
sold doves, and he would not allow that anyone should carry their gear
through the sacred precincts. The burden of his teaching and speaking
was, "Is it not written, My house shall be called a house of prayer for
all nations, but you have made it a brigands' cave?" The chief priests
and the experts in the law heard him, and they sought a way to destroy
him, for they were afraid of him, for the whole crowd was astonished at
his teaching.
And when evening came he went out of the city.
We will visualize this far better if we have in our mind's eye a
picture of the lay-out of the Temple precincts. There are two closely
connected words used in the New Testament. The first is hieron (Greek #2411),
which means the sacred place. This included the whole temple area. The
temple area covered the top of Mount Zion and was about thirty acres in
extent. It was surrounded by great walls which varied on each side,
1,300 to 1,000 feet in length. There was a wide outer space called the
Court of the Gentiles. Into it anyone, Jew or Gentile, might come. At
the inner edge of the Court of the Gentiles was a low wall with tablets
set into it which said that if a Gentile passed that point the penalty
was death. The next court was called the Court of the Women. It was so
called because unless women had come actually to offer sacrifice they
might not proceed farther. Next was the Court of the Israelites. In it
the congregation gathered on great occasions, and from it the offerings
were handed by the worshippers to the priests. The inmost court was the
Court of the Priests.
The other important word is naos (Greek #3485),
which means the Temple proper, and it was in the Court of the Priests
that the Temple stood. The whole area, including all the different
Courts, was the sacred precincts (hieron, Greek #2411)). The special building within the Court of the Priests was the Temple (naos, Greek #3485).
This incident took place in the Court of the Gentiles. Bit by
bit the Court of the Gentiles had become almost entirely secularised. It
had been meant to be a place of prayer and preparation, but there was
in the time of Jesus a commercialised atmosphere of buying and selling
which made prayer and meditation impossible. What made it worse was that
the business which went on there was sheer exploitation of the
pilgrims.
Every Jew had to pay a temple tax of one half shekel a year.
That was a sum of 6p. It does not seem much but it has to be evaluated
against the fact that the standard day's wage for a working man was 3p.
That tax had to be paid in one particular kind of coinage. For ordinary
purposes Greek, Roman, Syrian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Tyrian coinages
were an equally valid. But this tax had to be paid in shekels of the
sanctuary. It was paid at the Passover time. Jews came from an over the
world to the Passover and with all kinds of currencies. When they went
to have their money changed they had to pay a fee of lp., and should
their coin exceed the tax, they had to pay another lp. before they got
their change. Most pilgrims had to pay this extra 2p. before they could
pay their tax. We must remember that that was half a day's wage, which
for most men was a great deal of money.
As for the sellers of doves--doves entered largely into the sacrificial system (Leviticus 12:8, Leviticus 14:22, Leviticus 15:14).
A sacrificial victim had to be without blemish. Doves could be bought
cheaply enough outside, but the temple inspectors would be sure to find
something wrong with them, and worshippers were advised to buy them at
the temple stalls. Outside doves cost as little as 3p a pair, inside
they cost as much as 75p. Again it was sheer imposition, and what made
matters worse was that this business of buying and selling belonged to
the family of Annas who had been High Priest.
The Jews themselves were well aware of this abuse. The Talmud
tells us that Rabbi Simon ben Gamaliel, on hearing that a pair of doves
inside the temple cost a gold piece, insisted that the price be reduced
to a silver piece. It was the fact that poor, humble pilgrims were being
swindled which moved Jesus to wrath. Lagrange, the great scholar, who
knew the East so well, tells us that precisely the same situation still
obtains in Mecca. The pilgrim, seeking the divine presence, finds
himself in the middle of a noisy uproar, where the one aim of the
sellers is to exact as high a price as possible and where the pilgrims
argue and defend themselves with equal fierceness.
Jesus used a vivid metaphor to describe the temple court. The
road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notorious for its robbers. It was a
narrow winding road, passing between rocky defiles. Amidst the rocks
were caves where the brigands lay in wait, and Jesus said, "There are
worse brigands in the temple courts than ever there are in the caves of
the Jericho road."
Mark 11:16
has the odd statement that Jesus would not allow anyone to carry his
gear through the temple court. In point of fact the temple court
provided a short cut from the eastern part of the city to the Mount of
Olives. The Mishnah itself lays down, "A man may not enter into the
temple mount with his staff or his sandal or his wallet, or with the
dust upon his feet, nor may he make of it a short by-path." Jesus was
reminding the Jews of their own laws. In his time the Jews thought so
little of the sanctity of the outer court of the temple that they used
it as a thoroughfare on their business errands. It was to their own laws
that Jesus directed their attention, and it was their own prophets that
he quoted to them. (Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11.)
What moved Jesus to such wrath?
(i) He was angry at the exploitation of the pilgrims. The Temple
authorities were treating them not as worshippers, not even as human
beings, but as things to be exploited for their own ends. Man's
exploitation of man always provokes the wrath of God, and doubly so when
it is made under the cloak of religion.
(ii) He was angry at the desecration of God's holy place. Men
had lost the sense of the presence of God in the house of God. By
commercialising the sacred they were violating it.
(iii) Is it possible that Jesus had an even deeper anger? He quoted Isaiah 56:7,
"My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples." Yet in
that very same house there was a wall beyond which to pass was for the
Gentile death. It may well be that Jesus was moved to anger by the
exclusiveness of Jewish worship and that he wished to remind them that
God loved, not the Jews, but the world.
11:22-26 Jesus
answered, "Have faith in God. This is the truth I tell you--whoever will
say to this mountain, 'Be lifted up and be cast into the sea,' and who
in his heart does not doubt, but believes that what he says is
happening, it will be done for him. So then I tell you, believe that you
have received everything for which you pray and ask, and it will be
done for you. And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything
against anyone, forgive it, so that your Father who is in heaven may
forgive you your trespasses."
We return now to sayings which Mark attaches to the story of
the blasting of the fig-tree. We have noticed more than once how certain
sayings of Jesus stuck in men's minds although the occasion on which he
said them had been forgotten. It is so here. The saying about the faith
which can remove mountains also occurs in Matthew 17:20 and in Luke 17:6,
and in each of the gospels it occurs in a quite different context. The
reason is that Jesus said it more than once and its real context had
often been forgotten. The saying about the necessity of forgiving our
fellow-men occurs in Matthew 6:12; Matthew 6:14
again in a quite different context. We must approach these sayings as
not so much having to do with particular incidents, but as general rules
which Jesus repeatedly laid down.
This passage gives us three rules for prayer.
(i) It must be the prayer of faith. The phrase about removing
mountains was a quite common Jewish phrase. It was a regular, vivid
phrase for removing difficulties. It was specially used of wise
teachers. A good teacher who could remove the difficulties which the
minds of his scholars encountered was called a mountain-remover. One who
heard a famous Rabbi teach said that "he saw Resh Lachish as if he were
plucking up mountains." So the phrase means that if we have real faith,
prayer is a power which can solve any problem and make us able to deal
with any difficulty. That sounds very simple, but it involves two
things.
First, it involves that we should be willing to take our
problems and our difficulties to God. That in itself is a very real
test. Sometimes our problems are that we wish to obtain something we
should not desire at all, that we wish to find a way to do something we
should not even think of doing, that we wish to justify ourselves for
doing something to which we should never lay our hands or apply our
minds. One of the greatest tests of any problem is simply to say, "Can I
take it to God and can I ask his help?"; Second, it involves that we
should be ready to accept God's guidance when he gives it. It is the
commonest thing in the world for a person to ask for advice when all he
really wants is approval for some action that he is already determined
to take. It is useless to go to God and to ask for his guidance unless
we are willing to be obedient enough to accept it. But if we do take our
problems to God and are humble enough and brave enough to accept his
guidance, there does come the power which can conquer the difficulties
of thought and of action.
(ii) It must be the prayer of expectation. It is the universal
fact that anything tried in the spirit of confident expectation has a
more than double chance of success. The patient who goes to a doctor and
has no confidence in the prescribed remedies has far less chance of
recovery than the patient who is confident that the doctor can cure him.
When we pray, it must never be a mere formality. It must never be a
ritual without hope.
James Burns quotes a scene from Leonard Merrick's book, Conrad
in Quest of His Youth. "Do you think prayers are ever answered?"
inquired Conrad. "In my life I have sent up many prayers, and always
with the attempt to persuade myself that some former prayer had been
fulfilled. But I knew. I knew in my heart none ever had been. Things
that I wanted have come to me, but--I say it with all reverence--too
late...." Mr. Irquetson's fine hand wandered across his brow. "Once," he
began conversationally, "I was passing with a friend through Grosvenor
Street. It was when in the spring the tenant's fancy lightly turns to
coats of paint, and we came to a ladder leaning against a house that was
being redecorated. In stepping to the outer side of it my friend lifted
his hat to it. You may know the superstition. He was a 'Varsity man, a
man of considerable attainments. I said, 'Is it possible you believe in
that nonsense?' He said, 'N-no, I don't exactly believe in it, but I
never throw away a chance'." On a sudden the vicar's inflexion changed,
his utterance was solemn, stirring, devout, "I think, sir, that most
people pray on my friend's principle--they don't believe in it, but they
never throw away a chance."
There is much truth in that. For many people prayer is either a
pious ritual or a forlorn hope. It should be a thing of burning
expectation. Maybe our trouble is that what we want from God is our
answer, and we do not recognize his answer when it comes.
(iii) It must be the prayer of charity. The prayer of a bitter
man cannot penetrate the wall of his own bitterness. Why? If we are to
speak with God there must be some bond between two people who have
nothing in common. The principle of God is love, for he is love. If the
ruling principle of a man's heart is bitterness, he has erected a
barrier between himself and God. If ever the prayer of such a man is to
be answered he must first ask God to cleanse his heart from the bitter
spirit and put into it the spirit of love. Then he can speak to God and
God can speak to him.
11:27-33 Once again
they came to Jerusalem, and, when Jesus was walking in the Temple, the
chief priests and the experts in the law and the elders came to him, and
said to him, "By what kind of authority do you do these things? Or, who
gave you authority to do these things?" Jesus said, "I will put one
point to you, and, if you answer me, I will tell you by what kind of
authority I do these things. Was the baptism of John from heaven? or was
it from men? Answer me!" They discussed the matter among themselves.
"If," they said, "we say, 'From heaven,' he will say, 'Why did you not
believe in it?' But, are we to say, 'From men'?"--for they were afraid
of the people, for all truly held that John was a prophet. So they
answered Jesus, "We do not know." So Jesus said to them, "Neither do I
tell you by what kind of authority I do these things."
In the sacred precincts there were two famous cloisters, one on
the east and one on the south side of the Court of the Gentiles. The
one on the east was called Solomon's Porch. It was a magnificent arcade
made by Corinthian columns 35 feet high. The one on the south was even
more splendid. It was called the Royal Cloister. It was formed by four
rows of white marble columns, each 6 feet in diameter and 30 feet high.
There were 162 of them. It was common for Rabbis and teachers to stroll
in these columns and to teach as they walked. Most of the great cities
of ancient times had these cloisters. They gave shelter from the sun and
the wind and the rain, and, in point of fact, it was in these places
that most of the religious and philosophic teaching was done. One of the
most famous schools of ancient thought was that of the Stoics. They
received their name from the fact that Zeno, their founder, taught as he
walked in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, in Athens. The word stoa
(Greek #4745)
means porch or arcade and the Stoics were the school of the porch. It
was in these cloisters in the Temple that Jesus was walking and
teaching.
To him there came a deputation of the chief priests and the
experts in the law, that is the scribes, rabbis and elders. This was in
reality a deputation from the Sanhedrin, of which these three groups
formed the component parts. They asked a most natural question. For a
private individual, all on his own, to clear the Court of the Gentiles
of its accustomed and official traders was a staggering thing. So they
asked Jesus, "By what kind of authority do you act like that?"
They hoped to put Jesus into a dilemma. If he said he was acting
under his own authority they might well arrest him as a megalomaniac
before he did any further damage. If he said that he was acting on the
authority of God they might well arrest him on an obvious charge of
blasphemy, on the grounds that God would never give any man authority to
create a disturbance in the courts of his own house. Jesus saw quite
clearly the dilemma in which they sought to involve him, and his reply
put them into a dilemma which was still worse. He said that he would
answer on condition that they would answer one question for him, "Was
John the Baptist's work, in your opinion, human or divine?"
This impaled them on the horns of a dilemma. If they said it was
divine, they knew that Jesus would ask why they had stood out against
it. Worse than that--if they said it was divine, Jesus could reply that
John had in fact pointed all men to him, and that therefore he was
divinely attested and needed no further authority. If these members of
the Sanhedrin agreed that John's work was divine, they would be
compelled to accept Jesus as the Messiah. On the other hand, if they
said that John's work was merely human, now that John had the added
distinction of being a martyr, they knew quite well that the listening
people would cause a riot. So they were compelled to say weakly that
they did not know, and thereby Jesus escaped the need to give them any
answer to their question.
The whole story is a vivid example of what happens to men who
will not face the truth. They have to twist and wriggle and in the end
get themselves into a position in which they are so helplessly involved
that they have nothing to say. The man who faces the truth may have the
humiliation of saying that he was wrong, or the peril of standing by it,
but at least the future for him is strong and bright. The man who will
not face the truth has nothing but the prospect of deeper and deeper
involvement in a situation which renders him helpless and ineffective.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)