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.

second passion by Pilate’s punitive justice.

Pilate’s procession displayed not only imperial power, but also Roman imperial theology. According to this theology, the emperor was not simply the ruler of Rome, but the Son of God.

For Rome’s Jewish subjects, Pilate’s procession embodied not only a rival social order, but also a rival theology.

As one of our professors in graduate school said about forty years ago, this looks like a planned political demonstration.

Jesus’s procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate’s procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus’s procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God. This contrast—between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar—is central not only to the gospel of Mark, but to the story of Jesus and early Christianity.

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 point, rather, is that the Messiah is David’s Lord—that is, greater than David, more than David, different from David. So also the kingdom of which Jesus speaks is greater than David’s, more than David’s, different from David’s.

Rather than representing the Jewish people, they were, as local collaborators with imperial authority, the oppressors of the vast majority of the Jewish people. They did not represent the Jewish people any more than the collaborationist governments of Europe during World War II or during the time of the Soviet Union represented their people.