It’s the day after the great entrance. Palm Sunday was yesterday. Jesus seems to change before our eyes. But he doesn’t. It’s our stunning inactivity which gets called out at the beginning of Holy Week.
We all know this story. It often goes by the strange name: the cleansing of the Temple. But it doesn’t sound anything like Jesus taking a sponge to the floors and a toothbrush to the grout.
And even if we actually buy the idea that Jesus has come to purify the temple—that it has turned wrong and Jesus is the one to make it right—we don’t really get the sense of why or how here.
This story isn’t about purity and cleansing. Not like that, anyway.
Far more potent is Jesus’s anger.
We don’t see that much.
Jesus gets angry and tears into the Temple in a way we can’t truly fathom.
To be honest, it generally seems out of character. Like when my old Scotty named Sassafras got a criminal record—she nipped the ear of another dog. The owners were horrified and we were embarrassed. We tried to help them understand that pulling on their leash wouldn’t protect their dog or that our dog maybe wasn’t pure evil incarnate.
They just needed to drop the leash and let the dogs sniff and bark and sort it out. But they didn’t listen.
Funnier was the visit from animal control a couple of days later. They kept looking around for the beast only to find the menace to society was quietly staring up at his feet.
There’s something to the packaging. We don’t buy that Jesus is a jerk. This story doesn’t make sense that way.
But this story is explained by its frame.
The Figs
On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus wants figs. Of course, it isn’t time for figs and the fig tree isn’t going to have figs, but this disgruntled messiah is going to make a big show of it, cursing the tree.
Really smart, well-meaning people can understand Jesus “cleansing” the Temple but not cursing the fig tree. But these are the same character. They make the same kind of sense.
These images don’t match the image we have of Jesus. But they also don’t match our image of Messiahs, rabbis, or Christians. They don’t match the image of rational, thoughtful, or compassionate people. It doesn’t fit.
But Jesus isn’t just all of those things. He’s something else.
Jesus is the one who cured the demoniac and stilled the storm. He has power beyond the normal person. So if he wanted a fig, he’d get a fig. And if he wanted to clean up the temple, well, you know he would.
He doesn’t use his power that way.
This isn’t about Jesus and power. And it isn’t about rational action based on present expectation. There’s one other thing that connects them:
God’s got a dream for them that they aren’t fulfilling.
Jesus is trying to show us that fruit born when it isn’t needed is spoiled and fruit born only in the season is not surprising, but fruit born according to need fulfills God’s true purpose.
The tree, like the Temple, wasn’t fulfilling the need. It was stuck in its old ways. And Jesus had a mind to change it.
This is Jesus’s act the day after.
The day after he made his great march into the city. A march which he made on a donkey, but his followers came with him by the hundreds. And the people chanting “Hosanna!”—a cry which is both one of hope and angst. It is the cry of people long-suffering, looking to the past to explain a future hope.
Hosanna is the cry of anguish and distrust and futility. The sound of one so long broken, they cannot believe in true hope.
Perhaps.
And perhaps it is precisely that oppression which devastates and terrorizes the message.
There was electricity on Saturday to see millions of people all over the world in hundreds of cities marching against oppression and despondency. The sense of nothingness and futile expressions of half-measures.
As if millions of people were marching to say that we’re the ones who need the figs and this tree may as well be withered because it’s denying everybody the chance to eat.
This Week
The strange confluence of events, which, at some level refuse to be unintentional, the March for Our Lives came on the day the church honors Oscar Romero, the brave catalyst for organizing farm workers. Twenty-eight years earlier, he was leading the mass in a hospital chapel. (The hospital specialized in oncology and the terminally ill.) He finished his sermon and stepped in front of the altar and the archbishop was gunned down.
Saturday’s march with the ghosts of the dead around them seeped into Sunday’s march into Jerusalem. For the nearly 200,000 student survivors since Columbine, the PTSD flaring with every loud bang.
This procession was eerily familiar.
Palm Sunday was also World Youth Day. Too eerie and on-the-nose to avoid. A connection Pope Francis embraced.
“The temptation to silence young people has always existed,” Francis said. “There are many ways to silence young people and make them invisible. … There are many ways to sedate them, to keep them from getting involved, to make their dreams flat and dreary, petty and plaintive. ”
But, he said, “you have it in you to shout,” even if “we older people and leaders, very often corrupt, keep quiet.”
“It is up to you not to keep quiet,” he said, and “even if others keep quiet if we older people and leaders keep quiet if the whole world keeps quiet and loses its joy, I ask you: Will you cry out?”
Producing Fruit
The problem of the fig tree is that it doesn’t produce according to the need. It always has excuses.
Our job isn’t to defend the tree. Or the Temple authorities. It’s to meet the needs of the people failed by the powerful.
It’s to speak out, as the pontiff says, on behalf of Jesus’s joy, not to keep silent in our cynicism.
These are the days after the march when inertia sends us back toward normal. But the spirit of God drives us on. Drives us toward a new life, a new hope, a new opportunity. Free of threats, of violence, of devastating assaults on our communities.
These are the days of work, of solidarity, and of common purpose. They are the days of expectation and preparing for the pain to come, and it will come.
But it is the joy that may be here, and hope that drives the dark away, and love which may guide us to our true humanity. Our youth know this better than anyone. These are their days. This is our mutual work, compelled and inspired.
And so we are opened up to what could be, the flourishing fruit of a divine kin-dom, ripening in the days ahead. And the picking will be worth it, the flavor, at it’s sweetest, and the juice? Abundant.