NOTES for Mar 11:12-33

Today's reading is devoted to several themes that, at first glance, seem completely unrelated to one another. But this is only how it looks at first glance; with a more attentive reading, the connection between them is not hard to notice. The parable of the fig tree, which dried up at Jesus' word because it did not bear fruit when the Savior needed its fruit, becomes a kind of frame for the story. At the same time, the text says directly that there was no fruit on the tree because the season for that fruit had not yet come (v. 13). Later, the image of the dried-up tree becomes the occasion for Jesus' conversation with the disciples about what true faith is (vv. 21-26). And from this conversation it becomes clear that true faith is not at all about drying up trees or moving mountains with a single word. The image of a mountain obediently throwing itself into the sea is only an image. The point is something else: if faith is genuine, there are no barriers for it in this world. It belongs not to this world, but to the Kingdom of God. And in the Kingdom there is no place for the unalterable laws of nature that determine the life of this world. In the Kingdom the will of the living God acts, and everything in it is determined by this will and by a person's relation to it. For in biblical language, faith means, above all, a person's trust in the one in whom he believes. And faith in God means trust in Him and in the One through whom the Kingdom entered this world. The measure of such trust determines everything, including questions of life and death. And this, as we can see, concerns not only people, but even trees. According to the laws of this world, the fig tree should not have borne fruit at the time when Jesus approached it. But according to the laws of the Kingdom, it should have borne fruit, and it dried up because it did not bring forth fruit. Jesus carries the Kingdom with Him, and everything that finds itself in this Kingdom is either transformed or, if not transformed, destroyed. But a person is not a tree, and therefore for a person his fate in the Kingdom is determined by his own choice. And the concluding part of today's story (vv. 27-33) speaks precisely about what prevents a person from making the right choice. On the one hand, the temple leadership ("chief priests") and the learned theologians ("scribes") do not want to recognize John as a prophet because, after such recognition, they would have to give up much in their own already familiar way of religious life. They would have to admit that their religious leadership, obvious both to themselves and to many others, is in fact far from so obvious, and that their whole life is not nearly as morally and religiously blameless as they were accustomed to think. There is hardly anyone to whom such an admission comes easily, and not everyone in such a situation decides to make the right choice. But simply to reject what a prophet of God says is frightening too, especially if such a prophet has authority and respect among the ordinary people. And then a person often decides on what the chief priests and scribes eventually decided to do: keep silent, avoid a definite answer, and therefore avoid a definite decision about the question. When one very much does not want to resolve a difficult problem, the temptation appears to evade it, perhaps even to try to forget about it altogether. But if one gives in to this temptation, relationships with God become impossible in principle, because even a clear and unambiguous denial still leaves God some possibility of acting on the one who denies. But the absence of choice (and therefore the absence of a definite position) makes such action completely impossible: in that case God would have to make decisions for a person that are fundamentally important for him, and God does not want to do this, leaving the freedom of choice to the person. Here, of course, one can no longer speak of any relationship of trust, because any relationship presupposes a readiness to choose, make a decision, and carry it out. The same situation developed with the merchants whom Jesus drove out of the Temple (vv. 15-18): they truly had no place there, but their presence in the Temple had already become one of those folk customs that, in the eyes of the mass of believing people, often become an integral part of genuine Tradition, though most often they have nothing to do with that Tradition. Both the temple leadership and the learned theologians, of course, could not fail to understand this. But in this case too they preferred to keep silent about the problem: attempts to change something would have caused too much unrest, too many interests would have been affected. It seemed simpler to try to get rid of the disturber of the peace than to solve the problem (v. 18). Thus the unwillingness to make a choice gives rise to the desire to get rid of the source of disturbance at any cost.