A note a day for Holy Week-A Case of the Mondays

I really like Mark 11:11. In scripture it stands as this pregnant pause between the exuberance of Palm Sunday and the seemingly suicidal actions of Monday. Jesus goes to the temple, scopes it out and then leaves. It feels like the hammer being pulled back on a loaded pistol.

Monday morning he gets up hungry and has a fairly unpleasant exchange with a fig tree. This passage tells us, "And his disciples heard it." I'll bet they did. I think I would have spent the rest of the day walking well behind him and trying not to do anything stupid.

Was Jesus having a bad day? I don't necessarily know about "bad" but occasionally it must have been difficult managing the universe AND walking around in skin. Just saying. What I mean is that he didn't just yell at the money changers. No, he knocked over their tables and chairs, and then he didn't let anyone even carry anything through the temple. Wow.

The priests and scribes who feared him were now set on a path to kill him before he mucked up any more of their tidy routine with the Romans... but the people were spellbound. It must have been like watching a building implode. Scary awesome. Then he leaves and you get the impression that Tuesday isn't going to be any better. Buckle up...



Mark 11:11-19 (NRSV)
Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. 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. He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.
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; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. 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.”



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. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.