A Living Corpse, Pt. 1
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We all curate a version of ourselves for public view. Scroll through social media for sixty seconds and you’ll see people posting vacation photos, promotion announcements, and a smiling family portrait. But is it real? Pastor Nick Gatzke asks what happens when our outside looks healthy but our inside tells a different story
Good morning, everybody. I want to ask you to grab a Bible and open with me to the Gospel of Mark chapter 11.
Theranos was the hottest company on the street. In fact, many former cabinet secretaries had been convinced to join its board of directors. And Elizabeth Holmes, its founder, persuaded people to invest millions upon millions of dollars into the company. But wasn’t long until it was discovered that they had falsified the data. The company was in a downward spiral. Holmes was convicted of fraud. And before you know it, Theranos was dead. The company that looked so good on the outside wasn’t actually alive on the inside. It was a living corpse.
A little over 10 years ago, Great Britain’s Food Standards Agency closed a slaughterhouse and a processing plant after investigators found horse carcasses had been used to make beef burgers and kebabs that were sold in Great Britain. A month later, the Swedish furniture maker IKEA was drawn into the scandal as authorities had detected horse meat. in those delightful Swedish meatballs. In fact, 13 countries across the continent had received such meatballs at Ikea. Shortly after that, the story took an unexpected twist because when officials in Iceland heard about the horse meat scandal in Europe, they decided that they would run some tests to ensure the same thing wasn’t happening in Iceland. And much to their pleasure, they did not find any horse meat. But one brand of locally produced beef pie left them stumped. It contained no meat at all. Instead, it appeared to be some kind of vegetable product. And one of the lead inspectors said, well, that’s a peculiar thing. It was labeled as beef pie. So there should be beef in it. You know, there are no shortages of things in this world that look alive on the outside, but inside they are full of rot and decay and leading to death.
In Mark chapter 11, Jesus is heading into Jerusalem. He’s heading to the house of his father. He’s heading to the temple, but there’s a problem. Because Israel as a nation wasn’t fulfilling its purpose, the Pharisees, the religious leaders, appeared to be healthy, but their failings weren’t too hard to spot. And the temple, the very house of God in the center of Jewish religious life, was big and glorious and beautiful and serving hundreds of thousands of people. And it looked really good and quite alive. But upon further examination, what happened on the inside was a different story. Please follow with me as we read Mark 11, starting at verse 12 and going through verse 25. This is what it says. It says, “on the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. But when he, being Jesus, came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. But he said to it, may no one ever eat fruit from you again. And his disciples heard it. And they came to Jerusalem and he entered the temple and he began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple. And he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.”
“And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of robbers.” And the chief priests and the scribes heard it, and they were seeking a way to destroy him. For they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching.”
“And when evening came, they went out of the city. And as they passed by in the morning, he saw the fig tree. They saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered, and he said to him, Rabbi, “look, the fig tree that you cursed has withered.” And Jesus answered them, “have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea and does not doubt in his heart, but believes what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive. If you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also, who is in heaven, may forgive you your trespasses.””
At first glance, it’s not the best look for Jesus. He and the disciples are walking from Bethany to Jerusalem, just as they had done the day before. The day before, they had experienced something that they had never experienced. entered the city of Jerusalem to shouts of Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. The streets had been lined, the cloaks had been dropped on the ground, the palm branches were spread, and Jesus entered the holy city to much fanfare. It was the fulfillment of prophecy. It was the symbol of his royalty. It was the display of his kingdom that was unlike the kingdoms of the earthly kings.
As the fanfare was great, but the pageantry was humble. No chariots or horses, no spoils of war, no large entourage. Jesus entered the holy city of Jerusalem on a donkey with some fishermen, a tax man, and some boys from the neighborhood. And after they looked around a bit, they went back out to Bethany for the evening. But as we see in verse 12, the following day, they walk back into town. And Mark 11 tells us that on the walk in, Jesus cursed a fig tree, a fig tree that was plush with leaves, saying, “may no one ever eat fruit from you again.” Now, at that time of year, fig trees would produce little buds, fig knops they’re called, before they would produce leaves. And so once a fig tree was in leaf, like this one was, one expects to find its branches full of these little immature figs, which are called “pagim”, and they would be in various stages of maturation. Jesus, seeing a fig tree in full foliage, turns aside from the path in hopes to find something edible on it. And in the spring of the year, The pagim are, of course, not yet ripe like full mature figs of the summer, but nevertheless, they can be eaten, and natives often would do just that.
But this tree, however, it says in verse 13, turns out to be deceptive, for it has the green foliage, but as Jesus inspects it, it has no pagim. It’s a tree. with the signs of fruit, but no fruit. It looks alive on the outside, but something isn’t right on the inside. And Jesus takes the opportunity to use the tree as a living parable for what’s about to come next. It says in verse 15, that “they entered into Jerusalem and they went right to the temple. And Jesus saw the money changers and those who sold animals for sacrifice. And immediately he began to flip their tables.”
The account is really short, so short that the description might be lost on us. But to really grasp the immensity of what’s happening here, you need to try to picture the temple with me. Herod’s temple, as it was called, was still under construction in the time of Jesus, and the temple itself consisted of four divisions that were enormous in their proportion. The first and the largest court or division was called the Court of the Gentiles, which is that big open space you see on the screen. It’s an open-air quad that measures 500 yards long by 325 yards wide. That’s about 33 and a half acres of space. It’s enclosed by a portico, which is supported by rows of columns. And according to a Jewish historian, Josephus, those columns were so wide that it would take three people joining hands just to get around the base of the column. And as you move toward the center, past the court of Gentiles, you would find the court of women. And then the court of Israel, which was for Jewish men. And then at the center, the holy of holies. And as Jesus walked into the courtyard of the Gentiles at the temple, in all of its immensity, the thing that he was overcome with was not worship.
The thing that he was overcome with was not prayer. The thing that he was overcome with was economy. Exodus chapter 30 verses 13 to 16 requires that every male ages 20 or older would give an offering as they entered the temple of a half a shekel. But the temple didn’t allow people to give this offering in just any currency. They needed to give the offering in a currency with no image of a person on it. And so people had to change their currency into the Hebrew shekel.
And of course, as you probably know, if you have ever gotten off an airplane in another country or another city around the world, in Rome or London or Shanghai, one of the first things you see when you get off the airplane is the currency exchange. People who are there… to help you transact in the currency of the land. And of course, they’re going to make some money off of you for this service. So too, the money changers in the temple would make money off of those transactions with their foreign travelers.
But there’s more. Because when the people come to the temple, more often than not, they don’t just come to give offerings and to pray. But they also come to make sacrifices to God. And so someone who is coming from a far off land, maybe Egypt or modern day Syria, or maybe even as far as Turkey or Europe, the difficulty of bringing grain for the offering or pigeons or lambs to sacrifice such a great distance became quite impractical. So as a service to these weary travelers, You could purchase the animals required for your sacrifice in the temple court.
But remember, they don’t sell those animals in your currency. So you might want to head over to the money changer table first. To further accentuate the nature of what’s going on here and what Jesus is seeing is that he is entering the temple during the week of the Passover. The greatest of Jewish holidays. And the worshipers from all over the known world would descend upon Jerusalem and come to the temple to worship God in the Passover celebration. The population of Jerusalem at the time was between 150,000 to 250,000.
But during the week of the Passover, it swelled to 10 times that amount. Two and a half million people in Jerusalem. Two and a half million people. spilling into the streets. Two and a half million people moving in and out of the court that is 33 acres that feels really big until you cram that many people in there and it feels really small very quickly. Two and a half million people changing money into the local currency. Two and a half million people offering sacrifices for the Passover.
In fact, that Jewish historian Josephus accounts that by the year AD 65, 255,000 lambs were sacrificed just during the one week of the Passover. A quarter of a million animals. And so as Jesus enters the court of the Gentiles, the noise of the crowd, the bleeding of the sheep, the bartering of the salesmen, the money changers, the smell of the sacrifices must have been nothing short of profound. This was the temple. Remember what the temple was supposed to be and supposed to do. The temple was the place where Jews believed God resided.
The temple was representative of his presence among his people. And when God was near, nothing could destroy them. The stories of God’s nearness to them were the stories of their forefathers, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and the story of King David who wrote psalm after psalm of… love for the nearness of God. And now Jesus is witnessing that this holy place was being desecrated. The caretakers had parked thousands of sheep in his father’s entryway. For thousands of years, these grounds were considered to be holy and sacred because this was the place people would come to meet God.
When King Solomon dedicated the temple to God, it tells us in 2 Chronicles 7 that as soon as he finished his prayer, “fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. And the priests could not enter the house of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled the Lord’s house. And when all of the people of Israel saw the fire come down and the glory of the Lord on the temple, they bowed down with their faces to the ground on the pavement and worshiped and gave thanks to the Lord saying, he is good and his steadfast love endures. forever.”
It was 200 years after that, that the prophet Isaiah had a vision of God on his throne in the temple. It says in Isaiah six, “in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple. And above him stood the seraphim, each with six wings. With two, he covered his face. With two, he covered with his feet. And with two, he flew. And one called to another and said, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is filled with his glory.” And the foundations of the thresholds shook. And the voice of him who called. And the house was filled with smoke.”
This was the ground on which these things had occurred. God’s presence, his manifestation of his glory, his awesome power, his unmatched holiness.
And now King Jesus enters the court of what is supposed to be the center of the kingdom. And he finds that it is a den of robbers. And so it says in Mark 11, 15, that “he entered the temple and he began to drive out those who sold, those who bought in the temple and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them, saying to them, “is it not written, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations, but you have made it a den of robbers.”
“And the chief priests and the scribes heard it, and they were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. And when the evening came, they went out of the city.”
The temple. looked alive on the outside, but it was decaying from the inside out. The attendance was high, maybe an all-time high. And when people come, it must mean that things are successful, right? The finances were strong, and the temple was on sure footing. And from a distance, everything looked healthy on the outside. But on the inside, it did not produce what it was supposed to produce. It was like a man who walked up to a fig tree and saw some lush green leaves. But upon further inspection, the tree had no fruit. You see, death on the inside will sooner or later lead to death on the outside.
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This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.
