Essential Skills for our Journey with Jesus
Reading the Bible Well (Pt. 7) A deep dive into Mark 11:12-14.
Essential Skills to Read the Bible Well
Skill #1: Abandon ourselves to the storyline of the passage.
Skill #2: The more we know the Bible the more we will understand it.
Skill #3: Embracing the “dissonance” between the Bible and the world we live in today.
Skill #4: Ask our questions of the text
Mark 11: 12-25 is a perfect passage to practice our four skills for reading the Bible well. It is an essential text for understanding Jesus’ relationship with institutional religion. All four skills are needed to understand and apply the passage to our lives. Without further ado, let’s dive into the first scene of the passage!
The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig-tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’ And his disciples heard him say it. -Mark 11:12-14
Our first skill comes naturally with this story. Like Ruth and Jonah, it draws us in from the start. This scene pulls us in with unanswered questions. Here are a couple that come to my mind:
Why is Jesus angry?
Why does he take his anger out on the fig tree?
When we use our second skill and look at this passage within the wider story of Mark’s gospel another question surfaces:
Why would anyone who fed 5,000 people with 5 loaves of bread and two fish five chapters earlier in Mark’s gospel be hungry?
These are rather uncomfortable questions to ask about Jesus. We would rather wish them away than acknowledge that he is being very “un-Jesus-like” over the lack of a fig snack. Mark’s telling makes this even worse by adding “…because it was not the season for figs.” Talk about dissonance. But if we use our third skill we realize we are meant to ask “Why is Jesus, not just angry, but hangry?”
Mark adds to our dissonance with the final two sentences: “Then he said to the tree, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’ And his disciples heard him say it.” On the one hand, the final phrase seems a bit obvious. Of course the disciples heard him say it. On the other hand, we don’t know why the fact that the disciples heard him say “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” needs to be emphasized.
But before our questions can be answered the story jumps to another scene. This tells us to hold off on our fourth skill until we read further. But we are used to this. Mark 11 ends just like a good TV series urging us to watch the next show in the hopes that our questions will be answered. Maybe we will be able to make sense of this scene once they enter Jerusalem in our next post.