Moving Mountains - Mark 11:20-24 Series

Mark 11:20 In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig-tree withered from the roots. 21 Peter remembered and said to Jesus, "Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!" 22 "Have faith in God," Jesus answered. 23 "I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. 24 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. 25 And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.

Introduction

For me, verses 22-25 are the most difficult verses to interpret that I’ve encountered in the book of Mark so far. They raise so many questions. We didn’t have time to go through them all last time, so I limited my comments just to what I believe is the main thrust of the verses, namely, to deal with the quesiton of how prayers are going to be answered once the Temple is gone. It used to be that God said, “If you come to my Temple and pray, I’ll answer your prayers.” Now it’s simply, “If you have faith, I will answer your prayers.” I think that’s the main purpose. But there’s a lot more to this passage than that. Let’s start with verse 23.

23 "I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.

When I was in elementary school, I walked to school and back every day (thankfully, it was only uphill in one direction). We lived about a mile from the school, and most of that mile was one, long straight shot on Darley Avenue. We lived at the foot of the flatirons in Boulder, which, when you look at them straight on, don’t look like foothills. They look like a massive, steep mountain-especially to a little first grader. So for about a half an hour every afternoon, walking home from school, I had nothing to look at but a giant mountain in front of me. And I knew that Jesus said if I had faith I could move a mountain. I wanted to make sure that I had genuine faith, so very often, as I walked home from school, I would ask God to move that mountain. I would try my hardest to convince myself that it really was going to happen, then I would watch to see if it would budge or twitch or move in any way. To my knowledge, it never worked a single time much to my dismay. Finally, after countless failed attempts, I gave up. I finally decided, if the requirement is that I have to be convinced it will for sure happen, after so many failed attempts, I would never be able to convince myself of that, so I gave up. I haven’t prayed for a literal mountain to be moved in over 45 years.

Is that bad? Should I have kept trying? Does God want us to ask him to move literal mountains? And if not, then what are we supposed to do with this passage? If it’s some kind of figurative mountain, what does that mean?

I think we can safely say that Jesus’ purpose here was not to get us to be constantly reshuffling the mountians. I say that because when you see the outworking of the Apostles living out what Jesus taught in the book of Acts, they do a lot of amazing miracles, but they never move a mountain. Nor was it done in the OT. Moses, Elisha, Elisha—none of them moved a mountain. Not even Jesus moved one. It would have been an impressive way to prove his deity, but not even Jesus did that.

Not only that, but in 1 Corinthians 13 Paul puts mountain moving faith in the category of the most farfetched things possible.

1 Corinthians 13:2 If I … know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

No one but Jesus has all knowledge or understands all mysteries. Paul is just coming up with the most extreme language possible to make the point that no amount of giftedness means anything without love. And in that list, he mentions having so much faith that you could move mountains.

Jesus says with even a mustard seed’s worth of faith anyone could move a mountain, and Paul speaks of it as a farfetched, ridiculous extreme. The only way that makes sense is if Jesus is speaking metaphorically, and Paul is talking about moving literal mountains.