Mosaic Teaching 149 - John 12:19; Mark 11:11-12; Matthew 21:15-16

Mosaic is an in-depth teaching discovering Jesus through all four of the Gospel accounts in the Bible. This teaching is led by Rev. Dr. Chad Foster, reaching into the Hebraic roots, Jewish roots, Torah references and messianic fulfillment of Jesus to find truth and life.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Good morning, everyone. Bobotov. Welcome to the Mosaic Teaching Service today, as we continue the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and as we have begun what is known as the Passion, we've been in the last several teachings on the triumphal entry, what is known liturgically in the church as Palm Sunday in that entrance, finally getting Jesus uh to the Kidron Valley, if you will, and ready to enter into Jerusalem proper and up on the Temple Mount, where he will very much engage many people there and will begin to uh set in motion that final week of his earthly life. Uh, and so that is where we are going to be picking it up today. And as we have been doing uh in that portion, uh, we're gonna be kind of looking in many ways at all four of those gospels, as our goal is to uh uh cover all four gospels, all of the verses, and so when there's uh the parallel accounts, we try to do that. So we'll be in uh John, we'll be in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and kind of looking in all of those. Uh so be prepared to kind of thumb around the Bible this morning. Uh but let's get started first with prayer. So if you will, please bow your heads and we pray. Blessed Lord who has caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning. Grant that we would so hear them. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. So that by patience and comfort of your holy word, we would embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life that you have given to us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. In Mosaic, we value our Bibles, cherish our Bibles. Always encourage you to bring your Bible with you to the Mosaic Teaching Service. Uh, but if you need one today, not a problem. Just grab one in the pew or chair around you. And if you need to make that a Bible for your very own, just accept that as a gift from us to you. Uh but please take a Bible, hold it up, and repeat after me. This is my Bible. Jesus is who it says He is. I am what it says I am. I can do what it says I can do. Today I will be taught the Word of God. My mind is alert. By God's grace, my heart is receptive. The Bible is the incorruptible, indestructible, ever-living word of God. My encounter with the Bible today will transform and grow my faith. And we say together, in Jesus' name, amen. So let's uh open up our Bibles to the Gospel of John chapter twelve. And as we are looking there, John chapter twelve, verse nineteen. Again, Jesus has been processing uh with his entourage on his donkey on the Mount of Olives, making his way toward the eastern gate to the city of Jerusalem. It is getting near. It has not arrived yet, but it is getting near to the festival known as Passover, which is going to be what he has been hinting at all along in the Gospels. It has been his time. This will be his time. This will be the appointed time that finally has arrived. And that is because Passover is the time of redemption. Passover is the time of freedom. Uh, Passover is the time of the breaking of bonds and chains and so forth. And so it is the fitting backdrop. It is the fitting festival, the portal uh for which uh Jesus, the Messiah, to exercise salvation and redemption uh for mankind uh in the in the vein and in the in the greater fulfillment of the way Moses exercised uh that salvation event uh from the Israelites and the Hebrew people from the bondage of the Egyptians. And so this is now getting underway. We've seen this great shift in public policy with Jesus, no more messianic secret, no more hiding who he is, no more keeping things on the down low. But Jesus is very public, very adamant, very in your face, and this is uh causing already some confrontation. And so as he is coming down, we're gonna see coming down the Mount of Olives, uh, and as his entourage obviously is creating and mixing in with all of these other groups that are coming to the festival of Passover with hundreds of thousands of other pilgrims, uh, some uh fans of Jesus, some curious of Jesus, some downright opponents of Jesus. Uh the the buzz is creating, and so now Jesus is going to be uh meeting some of that opposition, uh, which is going to inevitably from one perspective seal his fate in about a week. So let's look at John chapter nine, or John chapter, well I don't know why it's not working. There we go. John chapter 12, verse 19. Let's read this a verse together. The Pharisees spoke to one another, saying, Do you see that we will surely not succeed? Look, the entire world is drawn after him. So Jesus' procession, as we've talked about, is continuing toward the city. Even his dire prophecy, where he stopped somewhat midway down the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, where he kind of paused and in a prophetic way saw, even though everybody was celebrating and happy and around family and friends and Passover being this great festivity. Jesus sees what's going to happen around 70 AD within a generation, uh, the destruction of Jerusalem. Uh, he sees that that is the point where that generation had reached, uh had failed to reach its critical mass of repentance, and therefore, what could have been a generation that embraced the Messiah in the messianic era and welcomed in uh the Messiah and this generation of peace, now instead will incur judgment, and therefore he sheds tears. And we looked at that chapel that was erected on the Mount of Olives, Dominus Flavit. The Lord weeps uh even those tears and that prophecy of Jesus, uh, where not one stone would remain on top of another, could dampen the messianic fervor that his arrival was igniting. And so as his steed carried him across the Kidron Valley amidst the waving palms and the shouts of Hosanna, Hoshiana, save us now. Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. More and more people came pouring out of the city to see exactly who it was that was causing this great commotion. And in Matthew's gospel in Matthew 21, beginning in verse 10, it says, All the city was stirred, saying, Who is this? And the multitudes were saying, This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in the Galilee. And one sometimes hears many a sermon about sometimes this fickle nature of the crowds that who would welcome Jesus on this Palm Sunday with such enthusiasm, but only a few days later, who would stand outside of Pontius Pilate's court shouting, Crucify him. And maybe you've read devotions about that or heard sermons about that, that on this day, on the triumphal entry on Palm Sunday, Jesus is welcomed with this fanfare, with these branches waving, with Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, and that just a few days later the same crowd is shouting, crucify him, and it is somehow some kind of statement on the fickle nature we human beings have. But as I've already kind of commented and tried to foreshadow for you in previous weeks, a careful reading of the gospels revealed that this is not the case, that this is not what happens. This enthusiastic multitude that is hailing him as the Messiah, that is walking beside him on the donkey, that is greeting his arrival with the palm branches, that is hailing him as the king and as the son of David, uh, that is not, that is not the same crowd that demands for him to be crucified. The crowd that is acclaiming Jesus, that is celebrating Jesus, that is the group that came with him from the Galilee. That is the group that we've been traveling with, right? That uh from the Galilee that came with him, that stopped with him over in Jericho with Zacchaeus. That is the crowd that came from the Galilee that had his family and his disciples. That is the crowd that also came with him from Bethany, that became believers uh in him six months earlier, when he had been in Bethany and he had called Lazarus out of the tomb, and they believed Jesus had the power over death because of that. And so when Jesus returned back to Bethany, of course he was welcomed to Bethany with fanfare. Of course, they were excited to see him. That is the crowd that is going with him into the city of Jerusalem. And that is not the crowd that demands that he be crucified. The crowd that is demanding that he be crucified is an altogether different group of people that is already, as we're going to be seeing, wants him dead. They want him dead even on the day of the triumphal entry. They want him dead on the day of um uh Palm Sunday. And this is what we're beginning to encounter. Um, whether it was some of the Pharisees who had issue with him or some of the corrupt Sadducean priests who um who eventually delivered him to Pilate, they secretly despised Jesus and openly opposed Jesus because they either feared what it meant for their position, what it meant for their power, what it meant for even what they might have defended from and then what they would have said was a good reason. Like this is gonna cost lots of people's lives, right? Jesus is going to tick off the Roman government. He's gonna make the Roman government think that we have a zealot in our midst, and so Rome is going to come in and try to shut this down, and in that process, they're going to massacre thousands, tens of thousands of innocent Jews and Israelites to try to prove that this person is not to be taken seriously, and so they would have wanted to squelch Jesus for a variety of reasons, and so they and their supporters, they are the ones who are rallied for Jesus' execution, not the Galileans, not Jesus' disciples, not the ones from Bethany, not the many believers who were acclaiming him as he entered into the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And Jesus' enemies among the religious elite, the chief priests, the scribes, members of the Sanhedrin, they saw the noisy crowd approaching from the east, and they heard the shouts and the acclamation, and they took note of the wild electric enthusiasm that had seized the city, that Jesus of Nazareth had, that he had attained some type of celebrity status. Pharisees that were friendly to Jesus criticized the religious leaders who plotted against our Messiah. And they said in John 12, verse 19, You see that you are not doing any good. You see that the whole world has gone after him. Of course, that's a little bit of hyperbole, but what they're trying to say is you're up to no good trying to quiet him or trying to squelch him or trying to do him harm or trying to arrest him or trying to silence him because everybody loves him. He is a hero. Had the whole world gone after him, well, at that moment in time, again, that was some hyperbole for sure. It may have only been a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. Galileans and Judeans definitely, though, had cast their allegiance behind Jesus, but not the whole world. But despite that, history has proven their remark, at least somewhat prophetic. It's somewhat a prophetic remark because if you look some 2,000 years later, with billions of followers of Jesus all around the world, in some way, in some way you could say the whole world has gone after him. And so now we come to this very critical juncture. So let's, for that, let's flip over to the Gospel of Mark, chapter 11. Mark chapter 11, uh, verse 11. Mark chapter 11, verse 11. And let's read that verse together. It says, Jesus came to Jerusalem, to the temple, and he saw and watched everything. All right, so very critical juncture where we're at in the narrative things and the flow of things in Mosaic. Jesus has arrived at the temple. He has finally made it to the temple for the last time in his earthly life, in his earthly ministry. He's made it to officially the city limits of Jerusalem. So Jesus approaches Jerusalem's great eastern gates, which for him at that time would have been the main entrance into the temple area and the Temple Mount. He dismounted his steed because that wouldn't have been going up onto the Temple Mount. Probably entrusted it to one of his disciples before ascending to the temple's eastern gate. Jerusalem's eastern gate. Today, the eastern gate looks like this. This is not the eastern gate of Jesus' day, but today it is a sealed double gate. You can see the two gates, and you can see how they're sealed. The wall there, this is popularly known as the Golden Gate, but it does preserve the location of the Eastern Gate of Jesus' day. In fact, uh archaeologists have begun some limited excavation. It's limited because right in front of that, what you see there is a Muslim cemetery. And as you can imagine, anytime you start to do any kind of archaeological excavation on Islamic property in Jerusalem in the modern geopolitical environment, it's it's a little bit of a hotbed. It's a little bit testy. So no sooner does something get started than it gets shut down. But what they have been able to discover, and you can if if you I've never taken a group up there because you don't want to take a group up there because it draws too much attention, but you can go up there individually. I've gone up there by myself, or I've gone up there with one friend and so forth. That is permissible. If you go up there and you go where those two barricaded filled-in gates are, you can look straight down. That's been excavated. And if you look straight down, what you can see is straight down below it, like pretty deep, are the first century gates. So go 20, 30, 40 feet straight down below that, and that is the gate Jesus would have entered. So Jesus didn't see that gate. That's Turkish, that's um Ottoman Empire. All right, that's 1500s and beyond uh gate, but it's built on top of, straight on top of the one that was there in the first century. Uh so it preserves the location. Uh, so that is helpful. Now, the eastern gate has strong messianic associations. The prophet Zechariah depicted the Messiah as arriving on the Mount of Olives, just as Jesus did on Palm Sunday. Uh, it depicts his entrance into the temple as going through the eastern gate, just as Jesus did on Palm Sunday. The prophet Ezekiel also had a vision in which the divine presence of God returned to the temple through this gate. Uh and when Muslims walled up the two portals of the eastern gate back in the ninth century, so when they filled in those two gates with brick back in the ninth century, the eight hundreds, Christians took note of the prophecy from Ezekiel 44, which said, This gate, speaking of the eastern gate, shall be shut. It shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it, for the Lord God of Israel has entered by it. Therefore it shall be shut. And we anticipate that our Messiah one day will once again enter through those gates. The gates opened into an area of the temple known as Solomon's Colonnade. Uh, that should sound familiar if you are a reader of the book of Acts, because that is where the early church, that is where the disciples after the resurrection and after the ascension of Jesus, the apostles and the early church, continued to gather at the temple, and they continued to gather in Solomon's colonnade. And so they continued to gather in that same area by the eastern wall, a portico along the eastern wall of the temple courts. And so Jesus and his entourage accompanied him as he passed through uh the eastern wall or the eastern gates and through this portico, they would have been still singing the psalms of ascent, right? The psalms 120 and so forth in that area. Uh they would have been hearing the Levitical choir singing things like the Halel, Psalms 113 through 118. Uh, and in later years, as I mentioned, and Jesus' followers, that first generation of followers that would have included the apostles, would have continued to congregate and worship daily in this same space near the eastern gate, eagerly awaiting for his return. Now, let's flip over to a new location in our gospels. Let's go to Matthew. Matthew uh chapter 21, Matthew chapter 21, uh, verse 15. Confrontation with the priesthood. Let's read this verse together now that Jesus has entered through that gate, not the gate we just saw, but the gate right underneath the gate we just saw. And as he has made his way up onto the Temple Mount where the temple is, and Jesus, as Mark's gospel has told us, he's kind of soaking everything in. He's kind of looking around and he is observing things. In this process, we'll kind of note something a little bit of the differing of the reporting between the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. But he's kind of taking in the scenery and seeing how things are going. He has a confrontation. Let's read this together. When the leading priests and scholars saw the wonders he performed, and the children crying out in the temple and saying, Hosanna, son of David, they became angry. And so this text lets us in on something that it otherwise doesn't give us a whole lot of detail about, but it says they saw the wonders that he performed. So clearly Jesus was doing what Jesus apparently has always been doing whenever he came into a town, whether that was in the Galilee, whenever he went into a new town, what happened? Masses greeted him, and what happened? People brought him their sick, people brought him, you know, the their uh people who had disease or issues, and Jesus healed them, and Jesus performed miracles, and Jesus did wonders for them. And sometimes that wonders was just him being able to understand their mind and and and understand them and and speak to them and and and make them just better and at ease and whatever it is, but Jesus did that wherever he went, and apparently he was doing that again. All right, and so they see that. We don't get a lot of detail of the things that he did, um, but he apparently did that because it says he performed them. Uh, and then also, as we've seen in the gospels before, he spent time with the children. Uh, and that would have, again, as we've seen, as was his modus operandi, that would be blessing them and embracing them and spending time with them. Uh, he does the same kind of thing, and they are responding to him, and they are believing in him, and they are also confessing him and requesting of him, and even using messianic titles for him, right? Save us, Hosanna, Hoshiana, and son of David. That's a messianic title. So Jesus is doing miracles, he's doing messianic things, and people are responding, including the children, by calling him messianic titles. And so leading priests, scholars, the religious leadership, the religious elite see all of this, and it's on the Temple Mount, on the Temple Mount, in front of the temple, and they become angry. And so in the outer courts of Solomon's colonnade, where beggars would have been assembling for charity, and that would have been a normal thing to do. It's still a normal thing to do. Um, if you go to uh Israel today and you go to holy sites, whether it's uh a very famous church or a very famous pilgrimage location, there are always gonna be beggars out there asking for money. That's not a modern phenomenon, that's a human being phenomenon because they know people are gonna be traveling there, they know it's just it's an opportunity, and so that's an obvious place for them to be, and Jesus is engaging them uh and is is being kind to them and so forth. And so uh, as beggars are assembled there asking for charity from pilgrims and worshipers making their way to the Holy Temple, and Jesus' entourage enters the Temple Mount, and the blind and the lame, they're hearing the shouts that the prophet of from Nazareth is here, and so they're saying to one another, help us make our way to Jesus. And they are getting their way to Jesus, and Jesus is clearly healing them right there in the temple. The public on the spot healings only increased the pitch of the crowd. Children broke loose from their parents, joined in on the fun, falling in behind Jesus and the disciples shouting, Hosanna to the son of David. And so several of the priests, the legislators, they strode forward to try to silence the ruckus. And again, there would have been many reasons why they would have wanted to do this. One of them would have been, again, to try to put the best construction on things would have been the protection of the people, because there was a building known as the Antonio Fortress. And in the Antonio Fortress was stationed lots of Roman soldiers who had a bird's eye view over the Temple Mount complex. And at times like Passover and Sukkot and other religious festivals, it was very filled with Roman soldiers who were extra, you know, if you will, had extra cameras, extra security cameras in place to make sure that the Israelite people never got an extra hankering of nationalistic spirit, uh, never wanted to have any kind of demonstrations going on. And anytime they might get a whiff of that, the Roman soldiers from the Antonio fortress, their high view perch point, they would come down and squelch it. And they would squelch it through violence. And by violence, not just clubbing people and so forth, but often by death, they would just start murdering people to say, we mean business. So we're just going to go ahead and kill a dozen of you and maybe more just to quiet you down. And so, in some ways, the leadership's going to be like, look, you guys need to shut up. You guys need to be quiet. We don't need any trouble here. We don't need Rome getting any that thinking we have any ideas here. We've got Passover coming. This is a delicate time. Pilate, as we've talked about in Mosaic, multiple times, has already done those dirty tricks where he will pretend to hear people and he'll call them in, and then all of a sudden, boom, you know, he'll surprise attack them, or where he has slaughtered them on holy ground before and shed blood at the altar, and all of those things. Like from that perspective, they would have wanted to quiet it. In addition to, in addition to those who just don't like Jesus and don't want anybody following Jesus, and they feel threatened by like, well, this might shut down our control of things, and this this has uh this is threatening who we are and our interpretation and our understanding of things and all of all of those other political entities that are also real and so forth. There's also the other reason why they would have wanted to shut down the Ruckus. This is this orderly scene in the outer courts, it threatened the peace. And frowning down on the temple compound again was the Roman fortress Antonia, uh, that was always keeping a watch for the uprising, especially at the time of festivals. In fact, uh, listen to this quote from Josephus, our good first century historian, a very reliable first century historian. Uh, this is what he had to say about the fortress Antonia. The fortress had passages down to the temple enclosures through which the guard, for there was always a Roman legion in the tower, could enter by several ways into the temple enclosure with their weapons. On the Jewish festivals, they kept watch over the people so that there might not be any attempt to create sedition. And so the chief priests were indignant with the crowd and with Jesus. They had seen the miracles too, but they dismissed them, and they asked rhetorically, and this is in Matthew 21, verse 16, do you hear what these children are saying? And what were they saying? They were greeting Jesus with the festive welcome, Hosanna, which means save us, and they were addressing him as Messiah, son of David. The scene evokes the story from David's life. So this is actually a very clever thing that the gospel is doing. Again, everything in Jesus' life is actually connects to something in the Old Testament. And this is actually connecting to something in David's life. Um, so the jealousy that comes from the religious leadership about Jesus is evocative of the jealousy that Saul had for King David. And that's what's being evoked here from uh the story in David's life when the women would chant in 1 Samuel chapter 18, verse 7 Saul has slain his thousands, and David has slain his ten thousands. Like jealous King Saul, the chief priests thought to themselves, Now what more can he have but the kingdom? By asking Jesus, do you hear what these children are saying? The priests meant, Are you going to accept this accolade? Are you going to accept it or are you going to shut it down? If Jesus would not silence them, was he not claiming to be the Son of David? Was he not, in fact, claiming to be the Messiah? And Jesus refuses to deny it. And he refuses to silence the children. Instead, he affirms that he heard the voices of the children, and in fact, he says, Yes, have you not read, or have you never read, out of the mouths of infants and nursing babes, you have prepared praise for yourself. And so again, this different tone in Jesus, where instead of kind of silencing when people claim he's the Messiah, or kind of being cryptic, or saying some kind of bizarre parable that no one understands. This time, when they say, Hey, they're claiming you're the Messiah, are you gonna shut it down? Are you gonna tell them that it's not true? What are you gonna do? And Jesus is like, Well, yeah, of course, I am the Messiah. Have you never read out of the mouths of babes, right? And so he boldly, right there on the Temple Mount, accepts the claim that he's the Messiah, and he does so in the presence of the religious elite. Let's keep reading in the text. We'll flip back over to um Mark chapter 11. Mark chapter 11, verse 11. Let's read this together. Oops, I didn't mean to read that one. Sorry. Got ahead of myself. That one, this is the one we meant to read. Sorry. Jesus came to Jerusalem to the temple, and he saw and watched everything. The day was fading to darkness, so he went out to Bethany with the twelve. So, according to Matthew and Luke, so here is where we have in what's called the Synoptic Gospels. The Synoptic Gospels refer to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, not John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Synoptics is the combining of two Greek words, sin, S-Y-N, which means to see with, or I mean with, like the preposition with, and optics to see, so sin optic to see with, they see with the same eye. So that means they often see the same thing, they often report the same thing, they often tell the same story, and so they're called the synoptics with the same eye. Uh so but here is a case where Matthew and Luke are a little different than Mark. So, according to Matthew and Luke, after arriving in the temple, Jesus overturns the table of the money changers and drives out those selling doves. In Mark's telling of the story, Jesus simply looks around, observes everything, kind of takes everything in, which would mean he sees the money changers, and he sees that happening, and he would be soaking it in, okay, on the first day, and then he returns to Bethany, and then it's on his return that he overturns the tables and does all of that. So it's a slightly different telling of the story. Mark sets the table-turning incident on the next day. On that first day, Jesus spent some time, again, kind of taking it all in. He walked through the colonnades to the great royal stoa where he saw the commercialization of the sacred precinct and the corruption in the system, again, observing the money changers, observing all of that. And what he saw on the first day, from Mark's perspective, motivated his actions on the second day. What Matthew and Luke do is very typical of what Matthew and Luke do. They truncate things. Even though Mark is a shorter gospel, Mark oddly stretches everything out, and Matthew and Luke truncings. And so for Matthew and Luke, because that's what motivated Jesus, they just kind of tell it all together. Mark stretches it out. So after looking around the temple and most likely attending the afternoon prayer service and the afternoon time of sacrifice, Jesus left. Matthew 21, verse 17, he left the chief priests and went out to the city of Bethany, and he spent the night there. Now, a little more talk on the donkey. On a donkey or with the clouds. The Talmud interprets the Messiah's entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey, and right, we spent quite a bit of time talking about that in the Palm Sunday entrance. There is an important Talmudic passage that talks about Rabbi Yeshua ben Levi, and he points out a contradiction in Isaiah 60, verse 22. It says, I the Lord will hasten, meaning the time of the redemption, in its time. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said this. It is written, quoting this passage in Isaiah, in its time the Messiah will come, and yet it also says, I will hasten it. He explained the contradiction to mean that if the generation of the Messiah, if it's found worthy, that is, when Messiah comes, if that generation will repent, if they will embrace the Messiah, if they will recognize the Messiah, if they will respond to the Messiah and repent, then God will hasten the appointed time of redemption and bring it early. If the generation of Messiah is found unworthy, that is, they don't repent and they reject the Messiah, he will not hasten it. Instead, then the Messiah will come at the due time. That is the deadline for the final redemption. This interpretation explains the Messiah's proclamation of the kingdom and his mission to the last generation before the end of the second temple. He came, Jesus in his first coming, came in an attempt to hasten the redemption. If the nation had repented, if they had embraced him, they could have attained the kingdom and the revelation of the Messiah. It could have been hastened. I, the Lord, will hasten it. Since the Messiah found them unworthy, they did not repent. The redemption would have to come later, at his second coming. Almost two centuries after Jesus rode into Jerusalem, Rabbi Yhashua bin Levi took his interpretation a step further by contrasting two apparently contradicting verses. From Daniel chapter 7, verse 13, and behold, with clouds of heaven one like a son of man was coming. And Zechariah 9, verse 9. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold, your king is coming to you. He is just and endowed with salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey. And so the quandary was, well, which one is it? Is he coming on clouds or is he coming on a donkey? And so Rabbi Yehoshua said, It is written, and behold, with clouds of heaven, one like a son of man, while it's written elsewhere, humble and mounted on a donkey. Well, is the Messiah coming with clouds or is he coming on a donkey? Rabbi Yehoshua explained, If the generation merits the redemption, Messiah will come on the clouds of heaven. If they do not, he will come mounted on a donkey. For the vision is yet for the appointed time. He hastens toward the goal and he will not fail. And though he tarries, wait for him. For he will certainly come and he will not delay. And so there is an example of Jesus fulfilling the oral tradition in your gospels with riding on a donkey. The fact that Jesus entered into Jerusalem on a donkey, while we often talk about it being humble and that he's coming in peace, and it means all of those things for sure, it also had an element of judgment to it, because it was also saying that that generation had not repented and that it had not merited receiving the Messiah, and therefore it would have to wait until the fullness of the messianic era, until another time when he would come on the clouds. Keep reading in the text here, Mark chapter 11, verse 12. The next day as they went out from Bethany, he was hungry. So when our Messiah Jesus visited Jerusalem, the previous Suchot, festival of tabernacles, about six months early, he kept his presence essentially a secret until much of that festival had elapsed. You may recall that from our Mosaic teachings. This time, though, he came to Jerusalem with no secrecy at all, very bold. He enters publicly, he's welcomed with acclamation, popular enthusiasm. And on the day of his entrance, his only goal was to make his presence known. And he takes a brief tour of the temple, he observes the money changers and the vendors, and then he leaves for Bethany with the twelve since it was already late. Mark 11, verse 11. He then returns to Bethany for the night, lodges in the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. And that night he decides on a plan of action for the next day. Early in the next morning, he and the twelve set out to return to the temple. Again, that's on the western slope of the Mount of Olives. It's just a short two miles from Bethany, up the Mount of Olives, down the Mount of Olives, and into the eastern gate. As they walk the distance in the early morning air, the text tells us Jesus is hungry. He wants some breakfast. Despite his divine origin, this lets us know Jesus was truly human, subject to the same limitations and needs as any human. And so, like anyone else in the morning, he grows hungry, right? He gets hungry, he gets thirsty, he gets tired, and so forth. And so it lets us know that he's hungry. And along the way, since he's hungry, he decides maybe what would be great for breakfast would be a fig. A little fig. And he happens to see a fig tree. But there's only one problem. It's not the season for figs. And unfortunately, that's a real problem for this fig tree. But that is where we will pick it up next week. With the fig or the lack of a fig and the fig tree.