Mark 11:21

The power of Jesus to judge the fig tree showed his authority to bring the judgment on Jerusalem that he had already foretold. If the first people hearing Mark’s Gospel received it in the late AD 60s, they would have known that Roman armies were already carrying out this prophetic judgment against Jerusalem.

• In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem as the Messiah is closely associated with the cleansing of the temple (see 11:15–17; compare Matthew 21:1–17; Luke 19:28–48). In John's Gospel, the cleansing of the temple occurs early in the ministry of Jesus (John 2:13–22).

  It is uncertain whether there were two separate cleansings of the temple (an early event recorded in John and this later event recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke) or just one cleansing recorded at different times by John and the other gospel writers.

• In Mark’s Gospel, the story of the cursed fig tree (Mark 11:12–14, 20–25) surrounds the story of Jesus cleansing the temple (11:15–19). This literary pattern, called an inclusio (a structure that places one story around another like bookends), shows that the cleansing of the temple should be understood as an act of judgment, not simply an attempt to reform the temple.

• This section focuses on the relationship between Jesus and the temple in Jerusalem. In Mark’s Gospel, all the events and teachings connected with Jerusalem are gathered in 11:1–16:8.

• The section ends with the second long teaching discourse of Jesus (13:1–37) (see 4:1–34). In this discourse, Jesus speaks about the destruction of the temple and the coming of the Son of Man. This teaching is the high point of many warnings in 11:1–13:37 about God’s coming judgment on Jerusalem and the temple (see especially 11:12–25 and 12:1–12).