But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.
But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses. This is repeated from the Sermon on the Mount (see the notes at Matthew 6:14-15); to remind them that if this was necessary to the acceptableness of all prayer, much more when great things were to be asked and confidently expected. [Tischendorf excludes Mark 11:26 from his text, on what appears to us very insufficient evidence. He thinks it borrowed from Matthew 6:15. Tregelles also excludes it; but Lachmann retains it. Of critical commentators, though Fritzsche brackets it and inclines against it, Meyer and Alford defend it, and DeWette is in favour of it.]
Remarks:
(1) Needless difficulties have been raised, and indifferent solutions of them offered, on the subject of our Lord's expecting fruit from the fig tree when He must have known there was none. But the same difficulty may be raised about the structure of the parable of the Barren Fig Tree, in which it is said that the great Husbandman "came and sought fruit thereon, and found none" (Luke 13:6). The same difficulty may be raised about almost every human thought, feeling, and action of our Lord-that if He possessed divine knowledge and infinite power, such thoughts, feelings, and actions could not have been real. Nay, such difficulties may be raised about the reality of human freedom and responsibility, if it be true that everything is under the supreme direction of the Lord of all. Let us have done with such vain speculations, which every well-regulated mind sees to involve no difficulty at all, though the principle which lies at the bottom of them is beyond the reach of the human mind at present-possibly beyond all finite comprehension.
(2) Was there not another fig tree to which Christ came-not once only, but "lo, those three years-seeking fruit and finding none"? (See the notes at Luke 13:6-9.) How really, how continuously, how keenly, He hungered for that fruit, is best understood by His lamentation over it - "How often would I have gathered thee, and ye would not!" (Matthew 23:37). And is not this repeated from age to age? Well, just as the fig tree which Christ cursed was dried up from the roots long before it was pulled up by the roots, so was it with Israel, of whom Jesus said, while He was yet alive, "but now the things that belong to thy peace are hid from thine eyes;" and yet it was long after that before "the wrath came upon them to the uttermost." And so it is to be feared that many are blighted before they are cut down and cast into the fire, and that there may be a definite time when the curse is pronounced, when the transition takes place, and when the withering process begins, never to be arrested. (See Ezekiel 17:24.) O that men were wise, that they understood these things, that they would consider their latter end!
(3) What glorious encouragement to evangelistic and missionary effort is here held forth! And has not the promise of Mark 11:23 been so abundantly fulfilled in past history as to put to flight all our fears about the future? Certainly when one thinks of the "mountains" that have already been "removed and cast into the sea" by the victorious faith of Christ's disciples-the towering paganisms of the old world which have fallen before the Church of Christ-we may well exclaim of the gigantic Indian superstitions, with the hoar of entire millenniums upon them, and of all other obstacles whatever to the triumphs of the Cross, "Who art thou, O great mountain! Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain" (Zechariah 4:7).