Mark 11:15-19;22-33 (Wednesday Evening Bible Study)

Mark 11:15-19;22-33

Mark 11:15-19
15 They came to Jerusalem, and he went into the temple and began to throw out those buying and selling. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves, 16 and would not permit anyone to carry goods through the temple. 17 He was teaching them: “Is it not written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations? But you have made it a den of thieves!” 18 The chief priests and the scribes heard it and started looking for a way to kill him. For they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was astonished by his teaching. 19 Whenever evening came, they would go out of the city.
- This story will be easier for us to understand if we know the layout of the Temple precincts
- There are two closely connected words used in the NT
  - Hieron, which means the sacred place
  - This included the whole Temple area
    - This 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 long
    - There was a wide outer space called the Court of the Gentiles
      - Into it, anyone, Jew or Gentile could 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 further
    - 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
  - Naos means the Temple proper
    - It was in the Court of the Priests that the Temple stood
  - The whole area, including the different Courts, was the sacred precincts
  - The special building within the Court of the Priests was the Temple
- This incident took place in the Court of the Gentiles
  - Bit by bit, the Court of the Gentiles had become almost entirely secularized
  - It had been meant to be a place of prayer and preparation, but there was in the time of Jesus a commercialized atmosphere of buying and selling which made prayer and mediation impossible
  - Even worse, 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
      - This was equivalent to nearly two days wages for a working man
      - It could only be paid in one particular kind of coinage, the shekels of the sanctuary
      - It was paid at the time of the Passover
      - Jews came form all over the world to the Passover and with all kinds of currencies
      - Changing their currency incurred a fee, and should their coin exceed the tax, they had to pay another fee before they got their change
      - Most pilgrims had to pay this extra commission before they could pay their tax, and the commission amounted to half a day’s wage, which for most was a great deal of money
    - As for the sellers of doves—doves entered largely into the sacrificial system
      - They 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
      - The price of a pair of doves inside could be as much as fifteen times the price that might be paid outside
      - 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
        
        Rabbi Simon ben Gamaliel called for the price to be reduced to a silver piece from a gold piece in the Talmud
        
        It was the fact that poor, humble pilgrims were being swindled which moved Jesus to wrath
        
        The same situation still happens in Mecca. Pilgrims find themselves 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 (Same road used in the parable of the Good Samaritan)
  - It was a narrow winding road, passing between rocky gorges
  - Among the rocks were caves where the robbers lay in wait
  - Jesus was basically saying there were worse robbers in the Temple courts than ever there were in the caves of the Jericho road
- Verse 16 has an odd statement that Jesus would not permit anyone to carry goods through the temple
  - The Temple court provided a short cut from the eastern part of the city to the Mount of Olives
  - The Mishnah itself says, “A man may not enter into the Temple Mount with his staff or his sandal or his wallet, or with the dust upon his fee, nor may he make of it a short cut.”
  - Jesus was reminding the Jews of their own laws
  - In His time, Jews thought so little of the sanctity of the outer court of the Temple they used it as a thoroughfare on their business errands
  - It was their own laws that Jesus directed their attention, and it was their own prophets He quoted to them (Isaiah 56:7; Jeremiah 7:11)
- What moved Jesus to such anger?
  - 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
    - The exploitation of one human being by another always provokes the wrath of God, and doubly so when it is made under the cloak of religion
  - He was angry at the desecration of God’s holy place
    - The sense of the presence of God in the house of God had been lost
    - Commercialization of the sacred was violating it
  - Is it possible that Jesus had an even deeper anger?
    - He quoted Isaiah 56:7
    - I will bring them to my holy mountain and let them rejoice in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be acceptable on my altar, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.”
    - Yet in that very same house there was a wall beyond which to pass was a death sentence for Gentiles
    - 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 just the Jews but the world
Mark 11:22-26
22 Jesus replied to them, “Have faith in God. 23 Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. 24 Therefore I tell you, everything you pray and ask for—believe that you have received it and it will be yours. 25 And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven will also forgive you your wrongdoing.”
- We have noticed more than once how certain sayings of Jesus stuck in people’s minds although the occasion on which He said them had been forgotten. That’s what we have here
  - Faith that can move mountains also occurs in Matthew 17:20 and Luke 17:6, and in each of the gospels it occurs in a quite different context
  - Jesus probably said it more than once and its real context had often been forgotten
  - The necessity of forgiving one another occurs in Matthew 6:12,14 again in a quite different context
  - We must approach these sayings as not so much having to do with the particular incidents, but as general rules which Jesus repeatedly laid down
- This passage gives us three rules for prayer
  - It must be the prayer of faith
    - Moving mountains was a quite common Jewish phrase, meaning removing difficulties
    - It was used especially of wise teachers. A good teacher who could remove the difficulties which the minds of his students encountered was called a mountain-remover
    - 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 involves two things
      - It involves that we should be willing to take our problems and our difficulties to God
        
        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?”
      - It involves that we should be ready to accept God’s guidance when He gives it
        
        It is the most common thing in the world for people to ask for advice when all they really want is approval for some action that they are 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
  - It must be the prayer of expectation
    - It is the universal fact that anything tired 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 provide a cure
    - When we pray, it must never be a mere formality or a ritual without hope
    - 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
  - It must be the prayer of charity
    - The prayers of bitter people cannot penetrated the wall of their own bitterness
    - If we are to speak with God there must be some bond between us and God
    - There can never be any intimacy between two people who have nothing in common
    - If the ruling principle of our hearts is bitterness, we have erected a barrier between ourselves and God
    - In such circumstances, if our prayers are to be answered we must first ask God to cleanse our hearts from the bitter spirit and put into them the spirit of love. Then we can speak to God and He can speak to us
Mark 11:27-33
27 They came again to Jerusalem. As he was walking in the temple, the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders came 28 and asked him, “By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority to do these things?” 29 Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one question; then answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. 30 Was John’s baptism from heaven or of human origin? Answer me.” 31 They discussed it among themselves: “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ 32 But if we say, ‘Of human origin’”—they were afraid of the crowd, because everyone thought that John was truly a prophet. 33 So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”
- In the Temple courts, there were two famous covered porches, 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 porch made by Corinthian columns 35 feet hight
  - The one of the south was called the Royal Porch
    - It was even more magnificent
    - It was formed by four rows of white marble columns, each six 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
  - It was in these porches in the Temple that Jesus was walking and teaching
- A group from the chief priests and the experts of the law came to Him. In reality, it was a group sent from the Sanhedrin
  - Their question really was the most natural question
    - For a private individual to clear the Court of the Gentiles of its accustomed and official traders was a staggering thing
    - So they asked Jesus, “By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority to do these things?”
  - They hosted to put Jesus into a dilemma
    - If He said He was acting under His own authority they could arrest Him as a megalomaniac before He did any further damage
    - If He said that He was acting on the authority of God they could arrest Him on an obvious charge of blasphemy, on the grounds that God would never give anyone 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 even worse
    - He would answer their question on one condition. “Was John’s baptism from heaven or of human origin?”
    - If they said it was divine, they knew that Jesus would ask why they hand stood out against it
      - If they said it was divine, Jesus could also reply that John had in fact pointed everyone to Him, and that therefore He was divinely attested and needed no further authority
      - If the members of the Sanhedrin agreed that John’s work was divine, they would be compelled to accept Jesus as the Messiah
    - 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 people around 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 those who will not face the truth
  - They have to twist and get themselves in a position in which they are so helplessly involved that they have nothing to say
  - Those who face the truth may have the humiliation of saying that they were wrong, or the peril of standing by it, but at least the future for them is strong and bright
  - Those who will not face the truth have nothing but the prospect of deeper and deeper involvement in a situation which renders them helpless and ineffective