Sun Kwak, “The Fig Leaves of Religiosity”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M4vu0X8_sY

TEXT: Mark 11:12-25

[12] On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. [13] And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. [14] And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.

[15] And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and 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. [16] And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. [17] 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.” [18] And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. [19] And when evening came they went out of the city.

[20] As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. [21] And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” [22] And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. [23] 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 that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. [24] Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. [25] 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.”

SERMON: “The Fig Leaves of Religiosity”

Elizabeth Holmes is a name that you might remember, with all the corruption that happened at the company she created Theranos. It was this fraud of a health company that tricked people into cheap and quick blood tests through small sample sizes. She’s now facing time in prison until 2032 for fraud. I bring her name up, because I was recently looking into the connections of narcissists and sociopaths — by the way, it’s not something that I regularly do, just for the record. But YouTube lead me to Elizabeth Holmes and those lifeless eyes. And I’d forgotten all about her. But there I was hearing about all of these tell-tale signs of her narcissism and sociopathy — that they were everywhere. And once you saw it, you couldn’t unsee it. That only a sociopath could truly seem so unaffected by how she was just harming millions of lives, providing false information and stealing their money and possibly their well-being. And when you see it backwards, it’s unmistakable — the creepy deep voice, her trying to attain more respect through going an octave lower. Then, there was the black turtle neck, trying to look the part of the second coming of Steve Jobs. And even with the way her business Theranos, where at its peak was valued at 10 billion dollars. That there were all these holes and things that would easily be traced to the fallacy of the company. But it made me consider — that, at one point, she had done such a good job masquerading the corruption and all of the wickedness that she had duped people into making her business into something valued at 10 billion dollars. That even Walgreens was convinced of this, having begun to establish this budding business relationship. But as the story goes, it took some heavy questioning from the outside and some serious digging from some on the inside of the company, where the fallacies started to get unveiled and things really started to get unraveled. And once the evidences got overwhelming, it really was hard to get allured by the fabrications any longer. Because everything just got exposed.

And that’s the scary power and ability of (KEY WORD) hypocrisy — where you look one part on the outside, but it matches nothing on the inside. Actually, the word that Jesus uses to describe the Pharisees as hypocrites was literally a stage actor — those who wore a mask to tell you what they were feeling through the mask while hiding your actual face behind that mask. But not just multi-billion dollar institutions and businesses like Theranos. But even and especially religious institutions — some cults and even some churches. The story of these victims are always so similar. They were allured by something initially, but when they started suspecting things about the institution, it’s almost like it was too late. The institution had already locked its fingers around them, so to speak. And they just had too much stakein what was going on, and it was that much harder to pull out from everything that was happening. And in his satirical writing Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has this fictitious conversation happening between Screwtape and his nephew and mentee demon Wormwood. And he’s talking about the church, and he tells his nephew — One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. And mind you, this is the other side talking about us. Saying that the church is sometimes an ally not to Christians but to demons who are looking to trick and to tear down Christians. And why? Because the church is often filled with hypocrites, and often times the institution itself becomes filled with hypocrisy. It’s a scary ordeal, especially when an institution has gotten so massive and influential.

Well, on that happy note, here’s Jesus. And when he’s calling out the Temple and the scribes and the Pharisees for what they were doing, it wasn’t obvious to everyone. Just as Theranos had, at one point, been a ten billion dollar business. That when Jesus is calling out these people, it would have seemed odd. And not many would have been on his side. Because it’s not like the Pharisees were having a difficult time gathering people to what they were doing. Historian Josephus notes that there were something like 255,000 lambs that were being brought into Jerusalem for the time of Passover during Jesus’ day. The people were coming in droves. It seemed that everyone was bought into what was happening, so what Jesus is doing is confronting a behemoth. And he was going face to face with something that had wrapped its fingers around its victims. And this confrontation was not only to be surprising, it would have been deemed to be rather ineffective. And what I want to spend our time this morning considering is what all of this meant. There’s this strange combining of two stories — the fig tree and the Temple. But they are integrally interrelated, which we’ll get to. Because what I hope that we get out of this sermon today is that there are manmade fabrications that look thriving and alive, but in actuality, are dead and lifeless. And it takes one to dive into the investigation, to go inside and dig up the evidences, where it’s indisputable to us after the fact, that it was all a sham. And through it all, I hope we get to see that Jesus is not only loving enough to tell us the truth, but he’s loving enough to dive deep into and get tangled up in the lies — lies that will lead to his death, to his sacrifice, to the climax of the story he scripted and entered into, in order that we might be spared from the hypocrisy of false religiosity.

Now, if you looked into this passage during our Community Groups this past week, you would know that this is something that commentators refer to as a Markan (KEY WORD) sandwich, this literary method known to us more broadly as a chiasm. But Mark has a particular way of using this chiastic structure. He uses stories rather than phrases in these chiastic structures. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with what a chiasm is, my favorite illustration of the chiastic structure, this sandwich is an In-N-Out burger. And what is it about the In-N-Out burger that makes it so special? It’s one cohesive sandwich. You don’t eat it in pieces, you don’t break it apart. It’s one cohesive sandwich. And while it’s one cohesive sandwich, it points to the main part. The cheese, the buns, the grilled onions — all of it — directs us to the meat in the middle. And that’s the point of the chiasm. Because while the point of a chiasm and the sandwich is to point to the middle, the meat, the surrounding parts make it one cohesive literary meal. You’re not thinking just about what the buns are or what the meat is. But you’re looking at the details, and you start to understand that this one cohesive story even with the different parts.

And this is what we have with this Markan sandwich from verses 12-25. That on the other buns, you have Jesus’interactions with the fig tree in verses 12-14 and in verses 20-25. That these outer buns are deeply connected to the story of Jesus in the Temple right in the middle, in verses 15-19. Because you look at Jesus’ interaction with the fig tree, and it seems overly dramatic. And you look at Jesus’ actions in the Temple, and you might say it seems overly dramatic. There’s a consistency in how outrageous these incidents might have seemed, because once again, this is one cohesive story, and they explain one another. And cursing this fig tree might seem offensive to the environmentalistsamong us. But here’s the thing about this fig tree. It had the semblance of life, but in actuality, it wasn’t bearing any fruit. And thus, this tree, while externally seeming to be alive, had no source of life. And when Jesus is cursing it to the point of it withering, it’s not that Jesus was doing anything to the tree that wasn’t true of it internally already. Commentators here note that the details that are used to describe this tree show that it’s either already dead inside or was severely diseased. And thus, what Jesus was really doing was showing it to be its true condition.

Because the story that Jesus is showing is that the fig tree is representative of the spiritual vitality of the Temple. This was ultimately an indictment on the religiosity of the Temple and its systemic corruption that brought about false promises and false hopes to people who were starving for genuine worship. And you consider our context here. Jesusdidn’t pick an arbitrary day to come into the Temple. This is the busiest week of the year. By all means, it must have seemed that the Temple was brimming with life. It was busy, there were a lot of people, there was much happening. And it had all the semblances of an institution full of life. And here’s Jesus, amidst 255,000 lambs in the city. And as the lamb of God, who would be slain, it’s his voice, his sacrifice, his cry above any other that would rise and be remembered. And that’s the thing they were missing — they were missing the focal point. The lamb of God who was slain, who was bloodied and mangled on the cross.

I remember this conversation with a friend and fellow pastor about this church that I’ll leave nameless. He had served on staff with another at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan during the prime years of Tim Keller. And this friend of his was heading west, and she was interviewing for a position at a church that seemed to resemble Redeemer New York in a number of ways. They seemed to model their church right after Redeemer New York. My friend asked this colleague of his right after how the interview and everything went. And the haunting words she shared — It was eery. Everything about the church was so familiar and looked just like Redeemer New York. But it’s like the Holy Spirit wasn’t there. And sure enough, within a matter of months, the lead pastor was deposed, and the church became a shell of what it once was — almost like a withered fig tree. Because they lost sight of the true lamb.

And you think about the meaning of all of this, with the cursing of the fig tree. Because we noted that for an institution as big as the Temple and all of its religiosity, it wouldn’t just take examination from the outside but it would take the work of one from deeply invested inside. And who else than the one who once called the Temple his Father’s house, and in this story, calls the Temple his house? He’d grown up here, and he had fond memories here. But he sees what it had become, and it had become a withered tree because their religiosity and false external semblances didn’t hide the fact that it remained cursed and condemned and ultimately lifeless. And if all of this just seems bleak and without hope, here is where the trajectory changes. Because Jesus could have just left this place and the people there to remain in the curse. But no, he enters in. Into the Temple, filled with a history of false religiosity and idolatry. Just as Josiah had, just as Hezekiah had, Jesus goes in, digs deep, and cleanses the temple from all of its idolatry, religiosity, hypocrisy. But here’s where Jesus is different. Because for Hezekiah and for Josiah, when they cleansed the Temple, they took what was in the Temple, and they cast these things out to be burned. But when Jesus commits to entering into the Temple, he’s not just taking things out, he’s inserting himself into the fire.

Because for those of us who think that Jesus just kind of strolled into town and just started putting curses on everything, I want us to consider the words of Galatians 3:13. Because there, we’re told of another tree that was cursed. The apostle Paul, borrowing these words from Deuteronomy, calls it the cursed tree — specifically, that cursed is he who is hung upon a tree. And here, you have one who had called himself the living water. And as the source of life and washing and quenching and blooming and flourishing, when hanging on the cross, the cursed tree, he cried out in one of his last sayings — I thirst. For he had become the curse, he had become the withered tree. Because as the ultimate insider, he had to be put outside of his Father’s love in order to restore idolaters and sinners back into his house.

For here was the place of not meaningless sacrifices — 255,000 meaningless sacrifices. But here was the place of genuine sacrifice, where the innocent died for the sake of the guilty. And why? To liberate us to genuine worship. Because you think about the origin story of fig leaves. It takes us all the way back to the Garden, to when Adam and Eve had first sinned, and they were hiding. And what were they covering up their nakedness, their sin, their shame with? It was with fig leaves. And I don’t think that’s accidental when Jesus uses a fig tree to describe the false religiosity of the Temple. Whether it’s just coming to run through the motions, performing to look good on the outside, following traditions for the sake of it. The church or any religious organization is no different if you put the spotlight on a different lamb. Whether it’s through looking presentable or hiding imperfections or using your performance as works righteousness, these are all false covers. We look to the lamb of God who died for our sins. We look to the lamb of Godwho was innocently slain. Just as God removes the fig leaves that Adam and Eve were using to cover their shame with loincloths, he does likewise with us. Because loincloths entail sacrifice, and our truest cover is only met with genuine and deepest sacrifice. Every other religion will demand that you sacrifice for it. In Christianity, we have centerpiece of our story around a God who said he would sacrifice for us. Because we are all tangled up in the weeds of false promisesand hypocrisy and lies from religiosity — these fig leaves that give us false cover. But it would take one to unrobe himself, to bear our shame of nakedness, to give us his robe of righteousness to show us that it’s not about what we have done or what we have left to do. Our hope lies solely in what he has already done, and what he says to and for those who place our trust in him. That on the cross, he became sin in order that we might become his righteousness. So that he might not only be just but the justifier of all who put our faith in him. Put your faith, your trust in Jesus this morning. Bring your shame and allow him to bear it for you. Nothing else in this world can give you that kind of cover.