The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem

by Marcus J. Borg

Mark (followed by Matthew and Luke), the meal Jesus shares with his disciples is a Passover meal. In John, it is not. Rather, Thursday is the day before Passover, and the lambs to be eaten at the Passover meal on Friday evening will be killed on Friday afternoon, at about the same hour that Jesus dies on the cross. The reason for John’s dating seems to be theological: Jesus is the new Passover lamb.

Jesus’s meal practice was about inclusion in a society with sharp social boundaries. It had both religious and political significance: religious because it was done in the name of the kingdom of God; political because it affirmed a very different vision of society. An analogy close to our own time would be a religious leader in the American South prior to the antisegregation legislation of the 1960s holding public integrated meals and declaring, “This is the kingdom of God—and the divided world that you see around you is not.”

As Mark narrates what Jesus did at the Last Supper, he uses four verbs: took, blessed, broke, and gave. These four key words refer us back to an earlier scene concerning food in Mark, in which Jesus feeds five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, Jesus looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all” (6:41). Why this cross-reference from the Last Supper back to the loaves-and-fishes meal?

Mark’s emphasis on a just distribution of what does not belong to us in the incident of the loaves and fishes links, therefore, to the emphasis on the “loaf of bread” and the “cup of wine” that are shared among all at the New Passover meal. Once again, Jesus distributes food already present to “all” who are there. A shared meal of what is already there among all those present becomes both the great sacramental symbol and the primary practical program of the kingdom movement.

The different versions indicate a degree of fluidity in how the Last Supper was remembered and celebrated. What they all have in common, however, is an emphasis on body and blood, bread and wine. Whatever connections Mark intended from the loaves-and-fishes meal to this bread-and-wine meal, there was nothing in that earlier meal that spoke of body-and-blood symbolism. What, then, is Mark adding here that was not present before?

If, as God asserts in Leviticus 25:23, “The land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants,” then of course the food the land produces belongs likewise to God. If we are all tenant farmers and resident aliens on an earth not our own, then we are also invitees and guests at a table not our own.

Finally, Jesus does not merely speak of bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood. Rather, he has all of the Twelve (including Judas!) actually partake of the food and drink—they all participate in the bread-as-body and blood-as-wine. It is, as it were, a final attempt to bring all of them with him through execution to resurrection, through death to new life. It is, once again, about participation in Christ and not substitution by Christ.

The “crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders” refers to a group of temple police or temple soldiers. As local collaborators, the temple authorities were permitted by the Romans to have a small military force, more than a police force but less than an army.

Judas identifies Jesus with a kiss. Readers of the gospels have sometimes wondered why this was necessary. Surely the authorities knew who Jesus was? But it is not the interrogators from earlier in the week, the chief priests and scribes, who come out to arrest him, but temple soldiers sent by them. It is easy to imagine that they would not have known which one Jesus was.

We conclude this section with the role of the disciples. We have already mentioned how central the theme of failed discipleship is to Mark’s gospel and to Thursday in particular. Judas

In other words, all is not future, but is rather a passage from present into future. Jesus, the Son of Man, the Human One, has already been given the kingdom of God and, even though it will be consummated in the future, it is already present on earth. That kingdom has yet to be revealed in power and glory, but it is already here in humility and service.

First, those who imitated Jesus rather than Peter are applauded for their courage. Second, even those who imitated Peter rather than Jesus are consoled with the hope of repentance and forgiveness. Mark says that, after his denials, “Peter remembered that Jesus had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ And he broke down and wept” (14:72). Third, neither denials nor even betrayals are the worst sin against Jesus or God. The worst sin is despair—loss of faith that repentance will always, always obtain forgiveness. Had Judas broken down, wept, and repented, he too would have been forgiven. But although Peter reappears in 16:7, Judas never reappears in Mark’s story.

The day of Jesus’s crucifixion is the most solemn day of the Christian year. In Greek Christianity it is called “the Holy and Great Friday,” in Romance languages, “Holy Friday,” and in German, “Sorrowful Friday.” In the English-speaking world, it is, of course “Good Friday.”

Though the designation of this dreadful day as “good” should strike us as incongruous, for most Christians it does not. One reason is habit, the sheer familiarity of the language. Another reason is that Christians for centuries have affirmed that on this day, despite its horror, the redemption of the world was accomplished.

Our liturgies for the Eucharist—the Mass, Communion, the Lord’s Supper—commonly use the language of substitutionary sacrifice. Thus it is not surprising that many Christians think this is the “real” reason for Jesus’s death, the orthodox and “official” understanding. So do many who have difficulty with this notion, whether they remain within the church or are outside of it. The position is defended by many and viewed with skepticism, even ridiculed, by many others.

Thus, as we approach Mark’s story of Friday, we need to be aware of the way in which our preunderstandings can get in the way of seeing what Mark is saying. In particular, we will argue that the substitutionary sacrificial understanding of Jesus’s death is not there at all in Mark.

we most commonly hear the story of Jesus’s death as a composite of the gospels and the New Testament as a whole. We do the same with the Christmas stories, the stories of Jesus’s birth. From Matthew, we get the guiding star and the wise men; from Luke, we get the journey to Bethlehem, where there is no room in the inn and the shepherds are keeping watch over their flocks by night.

Thus it requires significant effort to hear how Mark tells the story without the filters provided by other books of the New Testament and later Christian theology. These filters are not simply wrong or to be dismissed. But we need to set them aside if we are to hear Mark’s story as he tells

the earliest gospel, Mark provides the earliest narrative of the crucifixion. Of course, he is not the first to mention it. That honor belongs to Paul, all of whose genuine letters were written before any of the gospels. Paul refers to the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion many times: he speaks again and again of Jesus’s death, of the cross and Christ crucified.

That Paul, the earliest author in the New Testament, uses multiple interpretations leads to an important point: there is no uninterpreted account of the death of Jesus in the New Testament.

refuse to respond to authority reflects both courage and contempt. Authorities do not like it. Pilate is amazed. Indeed, Jesus does not speak again in Mark’s story until his final cry from the cross later in the day: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34).

Then follows the puzzling episode of Pilate offering to release any prisoner the crowd wished, puzzling because it is difficult to imagine that such a practice existed in a troublesome province like Judea. As

Prisoners condemned to death by crucifixion were normally required to carry the horizontal bar of the cross to the place of execution, where the vertical bar was a post permanently positioned in the ground. But Mark tells us that the soldiers compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, to carry Jesus’s cross. Though Mark does not say why, presumably it was not an act of kindness toward Jesus, but because Jesus had become too weak to carry the wooden beam himself.

Mark tells us that Jesus was crucified between two “bandits.” The Greek word translated “bandits” is commonly used for guerilla fighters against Rome, who were either “terrorists” or “freedom fighters,” depending upon one’s point of view. Their presence in the story reminds us that crucifixion was used specifically for people who systematically refused to accept Roman imperial authority. Ordinary criminals were not crucified. Jesus is executed as a rebel against Rome between two other rebels against Rome.

The common impression that they were “robbers” rather than insurrectionists is based upon Luke’s story of the dialogue between Jesus and “the repentant thief,” which ends with Jesus saying, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (23:39–43). But in Mark there is no such dialogue. Indeed, we are told that “those who were crucified with him also taunted him” (15:32)

say, as Mark does, that the curtain was torn in two has a twofold meaning. On the one hand, it is a judgment upon the temple and the temple authorities, the local authorities who colluded with imperial Rome to condemn Jesus to death. On the other hand, it is an affirmation. To say that the curtain, the veil, has been torn is to affirm that the execution of Jesus means that access to the presence of God is now open.

Within the common Christian framework of prediction and fulfillment, the psalm is understood as if it contained predictions of details of Jesus’s death. Within the framework of “prophecy historicized,” they are seen as the product of Mark’s use of the psalm as a way of interpreting the death of Jesus. Whether the psalm is generating some of the details of the story or whether it is being used to comment

retrospective retrojection of purpose into the story does not require that we think of it as God’s will or that it had to happen this way. Rather, the story affirms that even the evil deed of selling a brother into slavery was used by God for a providential purpose. Applying this story of Joseph, how might we see the story of Good Friday? Was the death of Jesus the will of God? No. It is never the will of God that a righteous man be crucified. Did it have to happen? It might have turned out differently. Judas might not have betrayed Jesus. The temple authorities might have decided on a course of action other than recommending execution. Pilate might have let Jesus go or decided on a punishment other than death. But it did happen this way.

began. Did Good Friday have to happen? As divine necessity? No. As human inevitability? Virtually. Good Friday is the result of the collision between the passion of Jesus and the domination systems of his time. It is important to realize that what killed Jesus was nothing unusual. We have no reason to think that the temple authorities were wicked people. Moreover, as empires go, Rome was better than most. There was nothing exceptional or abnormal about it; this is simply the way domination systems behave. So common is this dynamic that, as we suggested early in this book, it can also be called the normalcy of civilization. At a broad level of generalization, Good Friday was the result of the collision between the passion of Jesus and the normalcy of civilization.

The event—“he descended into hell”—mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed but omitted in the Nicene Creed is known as the “descent into hell” or the “harrowing of hell.” “Harrowing” is an Old English word for “robbing,” and “hell” is not the later Christian place of eternal punishment, but the Jewish Sheol or the Greek Hades, the afterlife place of nonexistence. Think of it as the Grave writ large.

is standard in the iconography of Greek Orthodox Christianity to depict the resurrection of Jesus not as that of an isolated individual but as that of a group in which Jesus is the liberator and leader of the holy ones who slept in Hades awaiting his advent. Once

Without Easter, we wouldn’t know about Jesus. If his story had ended with his crucifixion, he most likely would have been forgotten—another Jew crucified by the Roman Empire in a bloody century that witnessed thousands of such executions. Perhaps a trace or two about him would have shown up in Josephus or in Jewish rabbinic sources, but that would have been all. Indeed, without Easter, we wouldn’t even have “Good Friday,” for there would have been no abiding community to remember and give meaning to his death.

Usually formed in childhood, this preunderstanding is the product of combining Easter stories from all the gospels into a composite and then seeing the whole through the filter of Christian preaching and teaching, hymns and liturgy. We bring this preunderstanding of what Easter is about to the gospel stories.

The hard form, affirmed by Christians committed to biblical inerrancy, sees every detail as factually, literally, and infallibly true.14 Many other Christians affirm a softer form. Aware of differences in the stories, they do not insist on the factual exactitude of every detail. They know that witnesses to an event can differ on details (think of diverging testimonies about an auto accident), but still be reliable witnesses to the basic factuality of the event (the accident really happened).

The obvious insight is that parables can be true—truthful and truth-filled—independently of their factuality. Because of the importance of this insight, we state it again in only slightly different language: the truth of a parable—of a parabolic narrative—is not dependent on its factuality. And an additional obvious insight is that to worry or argue about the factual truth of a parable misses its point. Its point is its meaning. And “getting a parable” is getting its meaning—and often there’s more than one.

What it does insist upon is that the importance of these stories lies in their meanings, to say something that sounds almost redundant. But we risk redundancy because of the importance of the statement.

Importantly, parable and parabolic language can make truth claims.

one should not think of history as “true” and parable as “fiction” (and therefore not nearly as important). Only since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century have many people thought this way, for in the Enlightenment Western culture began to identify truth with “factuality.”

Mark provides us with the first story, the first narrative, of Easter. For more than one reason, his story should surprise us: It is very brief, only eight verses. To compare the other gospels, Matthew’s Easter narrative has twenty verses; Luke’s, fifty-three verses; and John’s, fifty-six verses divided into two chapters. Mark does not report an appearance of the risen Jesus. Appearance stories are found only in the other gospels. Mark’s Easter story ends very abruptly.

Then Mark’s story abruptly ends: “So the women went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8). The ending is not only abrupt, but puzzling. According to Mark, the women don’t tell anybody. End of gospel. Full stop. The ending was deemed unsatisfactory as early as the second century, when a longer ending was added to Mark (16:9–20).20

They are to teach them “to obey everything I have commanded you.” What is required is obedience, not belief. “I am with you always.” The words echo a theme announced in the story of Jesus’s birth in Matthew, where he identifies Jesus with “Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.” Now

Thomas has been treated quite negatively in much of Christian preaching and teaching. He is often held up as a negative role model. Indeed, while we were growing up, the only thing worse than being a “doubting Thomas” was to be a “Judas.” But there is no condemnation of Thomas in the story. Thomas desires his own firsthand experience of the risen Jesus; he is unwilling to accept the secondhand testimony of others. And his desire is granted: Jesus appears to him. Unless they are inflected in an accusing way, the closing words of Jesus do not need to be read as a condemnation: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” They simply affirm that those who believe without firsthand experience of the risen Jesus are also blessed.

Easter completes the archetypal pattern at the center of the Christian life: death and resurrection, crucifixion and vindication. Both parts of the pattern are essential: death and resurrection, crucifixion and vindication. When one is emphasized over the other, distortion is the result. The two must be affirmed equally.

Easter without Good Friday risks sentimentality and vacuity. It becomes an affirmation that spring follows winter, life follows death, flowers will bloom again, and it is time for bonnets and bunnies. But Easter as the reversal of Good Friday means God’s vindication of Jesus’s passion for the kingdom of God, for God’s justice, and God’s “no” to the powers who killed him, powers still very much active in our world. Easter is about God even as it is about Jesus. Easter discloses the character of God. Easter means God’s Great Cleanup of the world has begun—but it will not happen without us.