Mark 11

Mark 11 is the beginning of the end, and Mark tells it with his usual speed and one carefully built sandwich. Jesus comes over the Mount of Olives on a borrowed colt that no one has ridden, and the crowd knows what it means: cloaks on the road, branches from the fields, Hosanna, blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David. It looks like a coronation. Then, anticlimax: he walks into the temple, looks at everything, and, because it is late, goes back out to Bethany. The next morning he is hungry and finds a fig tree covered in leaves and empty of fruit, and says, so the disciples hear it, that no one will ever eat from it again. Then he goes into the temple and turns it upside down, tables and money and dove cages, and stops the porters carrying goods through the courts, and says that the house that was meant to be a place of prayer for every nation has become a robbers' cave. The priests, who are afraid of him, start planning to kill him. The next morning the fig tree is dead to the roots, and that is when the sandwich closes: the tree with leaves and no fruit was the temple, and the withering is what is coming. Jesus turns it into a lesson about faith that can throw a mountain into the sea, about prayer that believes it has already received, and about forgiving before you pray. When the authorities finally confront him, demanding to know by what right he does these things, he asks them whether John's baptism was from heaven or from men, and they discover that they cannot answer either way without losing.