Essential Skills for Our Journey with Jesus
Essential Skills for Our Journey with Jesus
Reading the Bible Well (Pt. 10) A deep dive into Mark 11:15-17.
“Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations?’ But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” (Mark 11:17)
In our last post, we looked at what Jesus taught regarding his desire for the Temple to be a community of inclusion for everyone wanting to share in God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3. He used a phrase from Isaiah 56:7 to make this point. But then he added an additional quote from Jeremiah 7:11. We need to continue to practice our second skill of becoming familiar with the wider story of the Bible to deepen our understanding of Jesus’ expectations for institutional religion. We now turn to the wider context of the second quote in Jeremiah 7:4-11:
Do not trust in deceptive words and say, ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!’ If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave to your ancestors for ever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.
‘“Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, ‘We are safe’– safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the Lord. ‘“Go now to the place in Shiloh where I first made a dwelling for my Name, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of my people Israel. While you were doing all these things, declares the Lord, I spoke to you again and again, but you did not listen; I called you, but you did not answer. Therefore, what I did to Shiloh I will now do to the house that bears my Name, the temple you trust in, the place I gave to you and your ancestors. (Jeremiah 7:4-14)
These words of Jeremiah threatened the assumption of many of his people. They believed that God’s promises to Israel meant that the central religious institution of their day would never be destroyed. The Temple in Jerusalem was the ultimate safe space. But, as Jeremiah points out, people would go there seeking protection while fully intending to continue living in whatever way they saw fit.
But as Isaiah and Jeremiah make clear, the Temple exists to fulfill God’s promise to bless the whole world. If it does not serve this purpose it will be destroyed. Jeremiah, building on Isaiah, gives the final warning. Unless the people hiding in institutional religion change their ways, the Temple will be destroyed. He reminds them this won’t be the first time. Shiloh was the institutional center of religion before the center moved to Jerusalem. Shiloh is referenced 32 times in the Old Testament. But by Jeremiah’s day, it was in ruins. It is still in ruins today.
Jeremiah’s words went unheeded. The Babylonians destroyed the first Temple in Jerusalem in the 6th century BC. It was rebuilt by Zerubbabel and Jeshua 60 years later. By the time Jesus entered this second Temple, it had existed for centuries.
Jesus intensifies Jeremiah’s words. In Jeremiah, the question is whether the people have turned God’s house into a den of robbers. Jesus tells the people that they have indeed done so. The prophetic warning becomes a judgment. Just a few decades after Jesus spoke in this Temple it was destroyed by the Roman Empire. In almost 2,000 years it has never been rebuilt.
Jesus’ teaching takes some historical work for us to understand. But the implications were immediately clear to those listening to Jesus, including the religious leaders.
The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching. (Mark 11:18)
This leads us to expect some confrontation. But our story, instead, ends rather anti-climactically:
When evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city. (Mark 11:19)
The answers to our questions are visible on the horizon. But they need to be pulled together and their implications need to be crystallized. This begins to happen in the next two verses (20-21):
In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig-tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered and said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, look! The fig-tree you cursed has withered!’
We will unpack this together in our next post.