Welcome back to a special Holy Week or Passion Week edition of a joint broadcast or podcast of the Cultural Hall and the podcast, The Scriptures Are Real. I'm Carrie Mielstein, the Scriptures are Real host, and I have with me, Dr. Andrew Skinner, who is helping me as we do these short episodes to help people celebrate Holy Week or Passion Week.

Thank you and welcome, Dr. Skinner.

Thank you so much. It's just a privilege to be with you.

Well, today we are talking about Holy Monday, or the Monday the last week of the Savior's life. And if you haven't heard

our first episode, we'd encourage you to do that where we set up the idea of Passion Week

or the Holy Week and celebrating it and so on, as we as members of the Church of Jesus Christ,

of Latterty Saints, try to, maybe we could say level up our worship on this Easter season.

So, Dr. Skinner, why don't you take us through a little bit Holy Monday?

Well, thank you. This is day two of Holy Week.

It begins early in the morning. After Jesus's participation or activities on Palm Sunday,

he goes back to Bethany, and there he lodges for the evening with one assumes his apostles,

because early Monday morning they are returning to the city of Jerusalem.

And Matthew chapter 21 verse 18 tells us that as they're traveling, Jesus was hungry.

And so they, somewhere on the Mount of Olives, they come to a fig tree.

And of course, this is, this, what I'm trying to say, this fits well with what we know about the

the geography of the area because the

place where Jesus mounted the donkey colt, the previous day is called Beth Fage or Bait Faget

Fagé, House of Figs. And you can kind of see the resemblance in the word faget to the English word fig.

And so they come to this fig tree and they find that it has no fruit.

It has leaves, but it doesn't have the purpose for which it was created to produce fruit.

And so Jesus curses the fig tree.

And this is a powerful lesson, both to the apostles of ancient times and to us today, because it's one

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