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March 12 - April 19, 2022
The movie had an additional effect. It reinforced a widespread but much too narrow understanding of the “passion” of Jesus. Mel Gibson called his film The Passion of the Christ and based his screenplay on Anne Catherine Emmerich’s The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Both authors understood the term “passion” in the context of its traditional Roman Catholic and broader Christian background. “Passion” is from the Latin noun passio, meaning “suffering.”
We intend a much simpler task: to tell and explain, against the background of Jewish high-priestly collaboration with Roman imperial control, the last week of Jesus’s life on earth as given in the Gospel According to Mark.
Both of us have spent our professional lives focused on the historical Jesus, but we work together here on this humbler task: to retell a story everyone thinks they know too well and most do not seem to know at all.
Scholarship of the past two hundred years has reached a fairly massive consensus not only that Mark was the first of the four New Testament gospels, but also that Matthew and Luke used it as their major source and that, quite probably, John used those earlier versions as his major source.
Pilate’s military procession was a demonstration of both Roman imperial power and Roman imperial theology. Though unfamiliar to most people today, the imperial procession was well known in the Jewish homeland in the first century. Mark and the community for which he wrote would have known about it, for it was the standard practice of the Roman governors of Judea to be in Jerusalem for the major Jewish festivals.
His successors continued to bear divine titles, including Tiberius, emperor from 14 to 37 CE and thus emperor during the time of Jesus’s public activity. For Rome’s Jewish subjects, Pilate’s procession embodied not only a rival social order, but also a rival theology.
Jesus rides the colt down the Mount of Olives to the city surrounded by a crowd of enthusiastic followers and sympathizers, who spread their cloaks, strew leafy branches on the road, and shout, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” As one of our professors in graduate school said about forty years ago, this looks like a planned political demonstration.1
The temple mediated not only God’s presence, but also God’s forgiveness. In was the only place of sacrifice, and sacrifice was the means of forgiveness. According to temple theology, some sins could be forgiven and some kinds of impurities could be dealt with only through temple sacrifice. As the mediator of forgiveness and purification, the temple mediated access to God. To stand in the temple, purified and forgiven, was to stand in the presence of God. The temple was thus a center of devotion and the destination of pilgrimage.
The negative associations of Jerusalem are especially strong in the prophets of ancient Israel, whose words by the time of Jesus were part of the Jewish Bible. As the home of the monarchy and aristocracy, of wealth and power, Jerusalem became the center of injustice and of betrayal of God’s covenant. God’s passion for justice had been replaced by human injustice.
This state of affairs continued into the second century BCE, when the Jewish people gained their independence from the Hellenistic empire of Antiochus Epiphanes around 164 BCE. The successful revolt was led by a Jewish family known as the Maccabees. Also known as the Hasmoneans, they ruled the Jewish homeland from Jerusalem for about a hundred years, until it fell under the control of Rome in 63 BCE. After abolishing the Jewish monarchy, Rome initially ruled through the high priest, the temple, and a local aristocracy centered in the temple.
After Jerusalem was retaken, the Romans crucified two thousand of its defenders en masse. The suppression of the revolts of 4 BCE was the first direct Jewish experience of Roman military power in several decades.
Wealth poured into the city for yet another reason. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims visited the city each year. Though population estimates for cities in the ancient world are difficult, Jerusalem probably had around forty thousand inhabitants in the first century. But for a major festival like Passover, two hundred thousand pilgrims or more would come to the city. Moreover, non-Jewish travelers were also attracted to Jerusalem, commonly described as one of the most beautiful cities in the ancient Near East.
In the gospels, the movements of both John the Baptizer and Jesus had an anti-temple dimension. John’s baptism was for the “forgiveness of sins.” But forgiveness was a function that temple theology claimed for itself, mediated by sacrifice in the temple. For John to proclaim forgiveness apart from the temple was to deny the temple’s role as the essential mediator of forgiveness and access to God.
The gospel of Mark was written very near the time of the temple’s destruction. Mainline scholars date it no earlier than 65, and most say “around 70,” a range from a few years before the temple’s destruction to a few years after. In either case, Jerusalem was very much “in the news” when Mark wrote. Mark is, as one of our colleagues puts it, “a wartime gospel.”8
“Kingdom of God” is a political as well as religious metaphor. Religiously, it is the kingdom of God; politically, it is the kingdom of God. In the first century, “kingdom” was a political term. Jesus’s hearers (and Mark’s community) knew of and lived under kingdoms:
In Mark (and the other gospels), Jesus never goes to a city (except Jerusalem, of course). Though the first half of Mark is set in Galilee, Mark does not report that Jesus went to its largest cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias, even though the first is only four miles from Nazareth and the second is on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, the area of most of Jesus’s activity. Instead, Jesus speaks in the countryside and in small towns like Capernaum. Why? The most compelling answer is that Jesus saw his message as to and for peasants.
34). In first-century Christianity, the cross had a twofold meaning. On the one hand, it represented execution by the empire; only the empire crucified, and then for only one crime: denial of imperial authority. The
On the other hand, the cross by the time of Mark’s gospel had also become a symbol for the “way” or the “path” of death and resurrection, of entering new life by dying to an old life.
Thus we have the twofold theme that leads to Palm Sunday. Genuine discipleship, following Jesus, means following him to Jerusalem, the place of (1) confrontation with the domination system and (2) death and resurrection. These are the two themes of the week that follows, Holy Week. Indeed, these are the two themes of Lent and of the Christian life.
It was not Jesus against Judaism. Much of the scholarship of the last half century, especially the last twenty years, has rightly emphasized that we must understand Jesus within Judaism, not against Judaism. Jesus was a part of Judaism, not apart from Judaism.
Two processions entered Jerusalem on that day. The same question, the same alternative, faces those who would be faithful to Jesus today. Which procession are we in? Which procession do we want to be in? This is the question of Palm Sunday and of the week that is about to unfold.
But what we often call Jesus’s triumphal entry was actually an anti-imperial, anti-triumphal one, a deliberate lampoon of the conquering emperor entering a city on horseback through gates opened in abject submission.
Mark, in other words, wants hearers or readers to consider those two incidents together, so that what happened to the fig tree and what happened in the temple interpret each other.
Blood sacrifice should never be confused with or collapsed into either suffering or substitution, let alone substitutionary suffering. We may or may not like ancient blood sacrifice, but we should neither caricature nor libel it.
over his shoulder at a governor is a recipe for misrule. But Caiaphas, son-in-law of Annas, was high priest from 18 to 36 CE, eighteen years in a century when four years was about average. Pilate was Roman governor of Judea from 26 to 36 CE. We must presume that the Romans and Caiaphas worked well together. It is not necessary to demonize either Caiaphas or Pilate, but it would seem that, even from the viewpoint of Roman imperial rule, they collaborated not wisely but too well. When Pilate was recalled to Rome, Caiaphas was deposed and Jonathan appointed in his place.
Jeremiah, of course, is not inventing anything new with that indictment. There was an ancient prophetic tradition in which God insisted not just on justice and worship, but on justice over worship. God had repeatedly said, “I reject your worship because of your lack of justice,” but never, ever, ever, “I reject your justice because of your lack of worship.”
What does it mean that Jesus has interrupted the temple’s perfectly legitimate sacrificial and fiscal activities? It means that Jesus has shut down the temple. But it is a symbolic rather than a literal “shutdown.” It is a prophetic action that intends in macrocosm what it effects in microcosm. It is the same as pouring blood on draft files in one single office during the Vietnam War. The Pentagon is not “shut down” literally, but it is “shut down” symbolically.
Because of the long Christian tradition that “the Jews” rejected Jesus, Christians have often surmised that the wicked and greedy tenants are the Jewish people as a whole. We emphasize, however, that the identification of the tenants with the Jewish people is both profoundly and wickedly wrong. The tenants are not “Israel,” not “the Jews.” Rather, the vineyard is Israel—both the land and its people. And the vineyard belongs to God, not to the greedy tenants—the powerful and wealthy at the top of the local domination system—who want its produce for themselves.
“some Herodians” are sent to Jesus by the authorities. The Pharisees were a Jewish movement committed to an intensification of traditional religious practices, including sabbath observance and purity laws. Not only were these part of the covenant with God given to Moses at Mt. Sinai, but they were a form of resistance to assimilation to Hellenistic and Roman cultural imperialism.
Jesus’s strategy has led his questioners to disclose to the crowd that they have a coin with Caesar’s image on it. In this moment, they are discredited. Why? In the Jewish homeland in the first century, there were two types of coins. One type, because of the Jewish prohibition of graven images, had no human or animal images. The
Mark tells us in 12:18–27 that some Sadducees come to Jesus. The Sadducees were part of the aristocracy. Wealthy and powerful, they included high-priestly families as well as lay nobility. As a group, they overlap but are not identical to the “chief priests, elders, and scribes” who have been central to Tuesday’s stories thus far.
Their nonacceptance of the prophets reflected their position in society, for the books of the prophets emphasize God’s justice over against the human injustice of social systems dominated by the wealthy and powerful. Second, as Mark’s story tells us, the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife.
But the Sadducees did not. Their privileged place in society meant that they had little or no awareness of any serious injustice that needed to be rectified. As one of our graduate school professors put it, “If you’re rich and powerful, who needs an afterlife?”
And perhaps there is a bit more as well. Jesus’s concluding words, “God is God not of the dead, but of the living,” are tantalizingly evocative. His words suggest that God’s concern is the living and not the dead. To think that Jesus’s message and passion were about what happens to the dead, and to ask questions about the fate of the dead, is to miss the point. For Jesus, the kingdom of God is not primarily about the dead, but about the living, not primarily about life after death, but about life in this world.
Gentile asked two of the best-known Pharisaic teachers in the first century, Shammai and Hillel, to teach him the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot. Shammai drove him away with a stick, because, he said, the Torah cannot be crystallized. But Hillel responded, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary thereon; go and learn it” (b. Sabbat 31a).
This is radical monotheism: if God is Lord, then the lords of this world—Caesar and his incarnations throughout history—are not. And to love one’s neighbor as one’s self means to refuse to accept the divisions rendered by the normalcy of civilization, those divisions between the respected and the marginalized, righteous and sinners, rich and poor, friends and enemies, Jews and Gentiles.
The theme of conflict resumes in 12:35–44, even as the format changes. Thus far Jesus’s interrogators have set the topics; they have questioned Jesus about his authority, taxes to Caesar, resurrection, and the greatest commandment. Now Jesus takes the initiative.
Another possibility is that “son of David” is a messianic category here, not a biological one. Some of Jesus’s contemporaries expected that the Messiah would be “son of David” in the sense of being a king like David—a warrior who presided over Israel in the time of its greatest power and glory. This seems more likely. The message here then is that the Messiah will not be a king like David, not “son of David” in this sense. Rather, the Messiah will be the kind of king symbolized by Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of the final week.
The exclamation is warranted. Josephus reports that the largest stones measured 68 feet long, 9 feet high, and 8 feet wide. Historians have noted that Josephus often inflates his numbers, but in this case archaeological excavation confirms that the stones used in the construction of the temple’s walls were huge. The largest one found so far is 40 feet long, 10 feet high, and 14 feet wide, with an estimated weight of 500 tons. One might
And, it is important to remind ourselves, the judgment against the temple is not a judgment against Judaism or against ritual, but against the temple as “a den of robbers.”
These correlations between Mark 13 and the great war are the primary reason for dating Mark around the year 70, whether shortly before the destruction of the temple or shortly afterward. The flames of the great war cast shadows on Mark even as they illuminate Mark.
imperatives are consistent with the nonviolence of Jesus and early Christianity. Importantly, it was not nonviolence as a passive withdrawal from the world, not nonviolence as nonresistance to evil, but nonviolence as a way of resisting evil. These early Christians were both anti-imperial and nonviolent.
Why, if the Jewish crowd was so against Jesus, was it necessary to arrest him in the darkness of night with the help of a traitor from among Jesus’s followers? Why not arrest him in broad daylight? And why do they need Judas?
For us Lent is a transformative journey in time from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. For Mark, “Lent” was a transformative journey in space from Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem.
We emphasize and cannot emphasize enough one point about this very, very prominent theme in Mark. His story of failed discipleship is his warning gift to all who ever hear or read his narrative. We must think of Lent today as a penitential season because we know that, like those first disciples, we would like to avoid the implications of this journey with Jesus.
Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” (9:33–35) Even as Jesus is announcing his death by execution, they are debating precedence among themselves. Here Mark is not only criticizing the disciples; he is almost lampooning them. And, as we see in the next instance, they completely ignore Jesus’s admonition about
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is probably fair to say that substitutionary atonement is the only way that many or even most contemporary Christians understand faith in the sacrificial and salvific death of Jesus. That theological interpretation asserts that: (1) God has been deeply offended and dishonored by human sin; but (2) no amount of finite human punishment can atone for that infinite divine offense; so (3) God sent his own Divine Son to accept death as punishment for our sins in our place; and therefore (4) God’s forgiveness is now freely available for all repentant sinners. It is not just that Jesus offered his
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But wait a minute. What about that climactic conclusion in Mark 10:45, which states that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many”? Does that metaphor of “ransom,” or redemption, not indicate substitutionary atonement? Possibly, if taken as an isolated saying, but certainly not in its Markan context of the journey from Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem.
Furthermore, her action was a graphic demonstration of the paradoxical leadership cited by Jesus for himself and all his followers on the model of child, servant, and slave. Recall those parallel texts from Jesus’s second and third responses given above. They serve as preparation for this scene. The unnamed woman is not only the first believer; she is also the model leader. Jesus has been telling the Twelve what leadership entails from Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem and has gotten nowhere with them.
Mark gives absolutely no hint of Judas’s motive in betraying Jesus. He simply records it along with this response from the chief priests: “When they heard it, they were greatly pleased, and promised to give him money” (14:11). Mark, by the way, does not say that Judas did it for money, simply that they promised him some.
