NOTES for Mat 21:1-17

Then as now, passionate message of prophets pulls those who’re able to receive it out of the swamp of common religious convictions and practice. Indeed we tend to make a god for ourselves after our image and likeness. We always know what he should think on this or that subject (and though the Scriptures give a solid base for such assumptions, we somehow never get to notice it being paradoxical and at times allowing more than one interpretation). We're always there to help God judging the living and the dead, and to remind Him of something that He has forgotten to do for us etc. But God is a different person from what we think of Him. While accepting his incarnation we mustn’t deceive ourselves and make him as small-minded, wicked and stupid as we are. He is faithful to himself. He is not there to fulfill our dreams and wishes (which, by the way, are a little too primitive). He is inconceivable. His thoughts are not our thoughts. The only will he fulfills is his own. He always remains the same – no matter whether he is dwelling in the unapproachable light, permeating the creation, or going down the road to Jerusalem.

Into almost every line of this story the evangelist places a parallel with biblical prophecies, and some of them are quoted directly in the text. But almost every quotation is interpreted and understood here in a new way: Jesus becomes the center of all the prophecies and psalms. And this newness is naturally dictated by the course of the events that follow: everything will be fulfilled both as expected and, at the same time, in a way completely different from what the disciples and the people accompanying Jesus expect.

He enters the holy city, but what awaits Him there is not triumph, but execution. He is greeted as King, but He will be condemned as an impostor and criminal. He cleanses the Jerusalem Temple, but soon He Himself will become the new Temple for those who follow Him after His Resurrection.

Christ shows a new way, not at all the one people expect, even His disciples. He will fulfill the prophecies in a new way, in a way that even the wisest of the wise will not think to read them. He does not do what we expect of Him; He calls us to follow Him into His new life, into a new Heaven and a new Earth.

The people greet Jesus with joyful cries: "Salvation to the Son of David!" Many of us came to faith with the same joy, meeting Christ for the first time, suddenly realizing that He is truly alive, truly answers prayer, and leads us through life.

But after the enthusiastic cries of greeting come decisive changes: the Lord encounters the complete mismatch between the Temple, the center of Jerusalem's spiritual life, and the purpose for which it was built; the spiritual blindness of the religious leaders; and the unfaithfulness of the people, who are ready to shout both "hosanna" and "crucify Him." He encounters all this also at the "micro level," when He comes into the life of an individual person who, though glad at the Savior's coming, has already managed to turn from a temple of the Holy Spirit into a "den of robbers," and who will prove unfaithful and blind to Him many more times. But, as we know, this is not yet the end of the story...

The Lord's entry into Jerusalem is a unique event. Unique, among other things, in that Jesus is welcomed here as the Messiah-Christ, the 'son of David' (v. 9), and for the first time in His earthly ministry He neither rejects the honors paid to Him nor conceals His messiahship. One might wonder what prevented Him from declaring it earlier. Yet He reveals Himself only now, just a few days before His death on the cross, when nothing can be changed any longer. And this, of course, is no accident.

It is not difficult to imagine what would have happened if Jesus had declared His messiahship earlier. He would have been made yet another leader of yet another popular uprising, of which there were many in Judea at that time. Instead, after His triumphal welcome in the streets of Jerusalem, He goes straight to the Temple and drives out the traders (vv. 12–13). Evidently this task seemed more important to Him than any uprising against Rome. And no wonder: what was at stake was the purity of the Temple.

Of course, trading in the Temple was actually forbidden. But over time people began to turn a blind eye to it: pilgrims arriving at the Temple needed many things—animals for sacrifice, advice from learned rabbis, and, of course, a place to change money. Gradually, breaking the rule became the norm, and no one any longer doubted that it was right. Jesus, however, clearly had no intention of putting up with these generally accepted violations.

Those around Him would most likely have regarded His action as a prophet's symbolic gesture, but even so its meaning was quite clear. Here, incidentally, we also have the answer to why Jesus was in no hurry to proclaim Himself the Messiah. The people expected a Messiah who would expel the Romans and restore an independent Jewish state; Jesus begins by cleansing the Temple. The Kingdom does not begin with a war of independence; it begins with making God's house truly God's house, so that it ceases to be, in the Savior's words, a 'den of robbers.' This is what matters most; the rest will follow.

Remembering Christ's entry into Jerusalem, it is difficult not to experience mixed feelings. We see jubilant crowds and the people's joy as they welcome the One who brings deliverance from evil—and in this the people are not mistaken! Even without really understanding the true meaning of Christ's coming, the people sense that He is no ordinary teacher, of whom Israel had seen many.

Yet the very fact that most of those welcoming Him are guided by distorted ideas about what is happening will soon cause the crowd to recoil from Him. The people's words that the One entering Jerusalem is a prophet explain much. They were ready to welcome a prophet, but it was harder for them to accept that He was more than a prophet. Even for those capable of understanding this, established judgments about what the Messiah should be like would prove dearer than Jesus, who did not fit their ideas about Him.

This is how the inhabitants of Jerusalem met Him. But are we not ready to meet Christ in the same way today? Do we not likewise want useful miracles from Him and punishment for our enemies? And if He is in no hurry to satisfy our whims, are we always prepared to accept His will rather than insist on our own?

It cannot be said that temple trade appeared as something bad from the beginning. Within proper limits it is necessary. But how easily we destroy necessary limits... Let us note that when Christ drives out the merchants, He is indignant not because the house of prayer has been turned into a "market," but because it has become a den of robbers. Still, there is a difference between normal trade and robbery, however hard launderers of dirty money may try to erase it. Apparently, the trade and financial activity connected with the use of the temple exceeded economic needs and became an end in itself, drawing people into sinful ways of enrichment.

In every age sinful humanity has more than once brought the fruits of its own imperfection into the Church, and has also yielded to the temptation to use church opportunities for practical purposes. Everything began with good intentions and led to sad results. And yet our bodies too are called temples of the Holy Spirit. And if we defile what has been given to us by the Lord, then again we become worthy of what He did to those who traded in the temple.

The image of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers, those ancient exchange booths, and the benches of the sellers of doves, the Zion equivalent of a candle kiosk, is so unfamiliar that in the course of life Christians often have to answer puzzled questions: why does He act this way? It sharply contradicts the sugary little face of that religious painting called "the third half of the nineteenth century," but not the real Son of God. Yet indeed the Lord, of whom it is said that He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoking wick (Isa. 42:3), would seem not to act in such a way.

What Jesus does at this moment is called a prophetic action. As Hosea and Isaiah give symbolic names to their children as witnesses to the fulfillment of prophecies, as Jeremiah buys a field in Anathoth when all Israel is about to be occupied, these are visible images that enter the consciousness of people who do not want to listen, having ears and not hearing. Yet this action of Christ is not a prophecy, but the fulfillment of a prophecy: "Zeal for Your house consumes Me" (Ps. 68:10), says the famous messianic psalm. The evangelist John writes on behalf of the disciples in the second chapter of his Gospel that they understood this action of Jesus precisely in this way: He acts as the Messiah, according to the prophecies, must act.

Frankly speaking, this is indeed a distinguishing sign of the Messiah, because all of us treat social proprieties and stereotypes of pious sweetness with far greater reverence than the holiness of the Almighty. Because He may perhaps forgive us our irreverence, but society will not forgive reproach, just as it did not forgive Jesus.

Today's composite passage from the Gospel of Matthew tells of two similar actions of the Lord Jesus Christ that caused no small astonishment among those who witnessed them. Both of these moments - the driving of the merchants from the Temple and the withered fig tree - fit within the framework of the "prophetic actions" well known in the Old Testament. These actions are performed at God's command and serve as a kind of visible parable. The prophets performed them in order to convey some revelation to their contemporaries, and to do so in a way that would be remembered for a long time.

The driving of the merchants from the Temple is directly the fulfillment of what was said about Christ in the Psalms and the prophets. This action is interpreted quite unambiguously as the fulfillment of prophecies, and therefore literally the next day the chief priests and elders ask Christ: "By what authority are You doing these things?" The Lord does not give them a direct answer, but His disciples, as the evangelists testify, understood Him well and remembered forever.

The withered fig tree most often raises the question: "for what?" The fig tree, of course, is guilty of nothing, but from ancient times the tree was a symbol that the prophets also used often. They spoke of Israel as God's planting, needed exclusively in order to bear fruit for God. If this does not happen, the existence of this planting loses its meaning. This is what the Lord directs His disciples to.

At first sight, the story of the withered fig tree seems somewhat strange: why should Jesus have expected to find fruit where there could not possibly be any? By the laws of the untransformed world, demanding fruit from a tree out of season looks like an absurd, arbitrary whim. But Jesus lives not by the laws of the untransformed world but by those of the Kingdom, whose fullness he always carries with him. The changing seasons familiar to our world do not apply to the Kingdom. It is no accident that, in the biblical books, a garden of evergreen trees bearing fruit all year round becomes a symbol of the messianic Kingdom.

True; but there we have a symbol, whereas here we have an actual tree, living by the laws of the untransformed world and having nothing to do with the Kingdom. Or perhaps it does have something to do with it after all? For the One who brought the Kingdom into the world approached the fig tree, the One in whose presence everyone who dared to trust him came to share in the Kingdom. And nature always proved obedient to him, responsive to every spiritual influence, every breath of the Kingdom. Yet, for some reason, the fig tree did not yield to that breath. It did not become part of the Kingdom but remained within the old, untransformed order of things.

Why did this happen? We may not know the answer until the end of time. Apparently, this was the effect upon the world of the evil in which it lies: evil for which the tree was, of course, in no way to blame, evil of which it became a victim. But one thing is clear: the withered fig tree is a vivid illustration of what awaits those who reject the Kingdom.

Of course, when it comes to a human being, the end does not come so quickly, but only because God himself delays the consequences, giving the person ever more chances of a better outcome. In essence, however, it is precisely the story of the withered fig tree that enables us to understand what rejecting the Kingdom means. There is no real life in the untransformed world; it is a lifeless world by definition. If some semblance of life is still found in it, that is only insofar as it is not entirely cut off from the fullness of God's life. But now that the Kingdom is entering the world, life is possible only there and nowhere else. Whoever ignores this fact is doomed to death. Of course, God slows the dying of those who reject the Kingdom to give them a chance of salvation. But if he did not, the fate of people who reject the Kingdom would be like that of the withered fig tree. In these circumstances, the ancient call ‘Choose life!’ becomes especially relevant.