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

by Marcus J. Borg

The first passion of Jesus was the kingdom of God, namely, to incarnate the justice of God by demanding for all a fair share of a world belonging to and ruled by the covenantal God of Israel. It was that first passion for God’s distributive justice that led inevitably to the second passion by Pilate’s punitive justice.

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.

I had never thought of this, but it makes a whole lot of sense!

But the ancient meaning of the word “believe” has much more to do with trust and commitment. “To believe in the good news,” as Mark puts it, means to trust in the news that the kingdom of God is near and to commit to that kingdom.