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

by Marcus J. Borg

The roots of the Greek word for “repent” mean “to go beyond the mind that you have.” To repent is to embark upon a way that goes beyond the mind that you have.

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 cross had not yet become a generalized symbol for suffering as it sometimes is today, when one’s illness or other hardship can be spoken of as “the cross I’ve been given to bear.” Rather, it meant risking imperial retribution.

we want to guard against some possible misunderstandings of the conflict that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. 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. The conflict is also not about priests and sacrifice, as if Jesus’s primary passion was a protest against the role of priestly mediators or against animal sacrifice. Rather, his protest was against a domination system legitimated in the name of God, a domination system radically different from what the already present and coming kingdom of God, the dream of God, would be like. It was not Jesus against Judaism, or Judaism against Jesus. Rather, his was a Jewish voice, one of several first-century Jewish voices, about what loyalty to the God of Judaism meant. And for Christians, he is the decisive Jewish voice.

That understanding of sacrifice clarifies the etymology of the term. It derives from the Latin sacrum facere, “to make” ( facere) “sacred” (sacrum). In a sacrifice the animal is made sacred and is given to God as a sacred gift or returned to the offerer as a sacred meal. That sense of sacrifice should never be confused with either suffering or substitution.

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.

think about our ordinary use of that term “sacrifice” even today. A building is on fire and a child is trapped upstairs; a firefighter rushes in to get him and manages to drop him safely to the net below before the roof caves in and kills her. The next day the local paper headlines “Firefighter Sacrifices Her Life.” We are not ancients, but moderns, and yet that is still an absolutely acceptable statement. On the one hand, all human life and all human death are sacred. On the other, that firefighter has made her own death peculiarly, especially, emphatically sacred by giving it up to save the life of another. So far, so good. Now imagine if somebody confused sacrifice with suffering and denied it was a sacrifice because the firefighter died instantly and without intolerable suffering. Or imagine if somebody confused sacrifice with substitution, saying that God wanted somebody dead that day and accepted the firefighter in lieu of the child. And worst of all, imagine that somebody brought together sacrifice, suffering, and substitution by claiming that the firefighter had to die in agony as atonement for the sins of the child’s parents. That theology would be a crime against divinity.

there is no uninterpreted account of the death of Jesus in the New Testament.

The role of women in Mark’s story of Good Friday raises an interesting question. Why would first-century Jewish women (and slightly later, gentile women) be attracted to Jesus? For the same reasons that first-century men were, yes. But in addition it seems clear that Jesus and earliest Christianity gave to women an identity and status that they did not experience within the conventional wisdom of the time. Women in both Jewish and gentile cultures were subordinated in many ways. Jesus and the early Christian movement subverted the conventional wisdom about women among both Jews and gentiles. The subversion has been denied by much of Christian history, but it is right here, in a prominent place in the story of the climactic events of Jesus’s life: Good Friday and Easter.

Mark does not understand the death of Jesus as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin. Claims to the contrary can only point to a mistaken reading of the single passage we have just explored. How then does Mark understand Jesus’s death? As his story of Good Friday reports, he sees Jesus’s death as an execution by the authorities because of his challenge to the domination system. The decision of the temple authorities to take action against him was made after his disruptive act in the temple. These local collaborators handed him over to imperial authority, which then crucified him on a charge that was simultaneously and indissolubly political and religious: “King of the Jews.” As such, Mark understands Jesus’s death as a judgment on the authorities and the temple. The “chief priests, elders, and scribes” have killed him, just as Jesus said they would. Judgment is indicated by the fact that, as Jesus dies, darkness comes over the city and land, and the great curtain in the temple is torn in two. And a Roman centurion pronounces judgment against his own empire, which has just killed Jesus: “Truly this man—and not the emperor—is God’s Son.”

According to Mark, Jesus did not die for the sins of the world. The language of substitutionary sacrifice for sin is absent from his story. But in an important sense, he was killed because of the sin of the world. It was the injustice of domination systems that killed him, injustice so routine that it is part of the normalcy of civilization. Though sin means more than this, it includes this. And thus Jesus was crucified because of the sin of the world.

As Mark tells the story, was Jesus guilty of nonviolent resistance to imperial Roman oppression and local Jewish collaboration? Oh, yes. Mark’s story of Jesus’s final week is a sequence of public demonstrations against and confrontations with the domination system. And, as all know, it killed him.

So central is the historical factuality of the Easter stories for many Christians that, if they didn’t happen this way, the foundation and truth of Christianity disappear. To underline this claim, a verse from Paul is often quoted: “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). We agree with this statement, even as we do not think that it intrinsically points to the historical factuality of an empty tomb.16 But we are convinced that an emphasis on the historical factuality of the Easter stories, as if they were reporting events that could have been photographed, gets in the way of understanding them. On the one hand, it is a stumbling block for people who have difficulty believing that these stories are factual. If these think that believing these stories to be historically factual is essential to being Christian, they think they can’t be Christian.17 The issue is not simply whether “things like this” ever happen. Rather, the issue is generated by the stories themselves: their differences are difficult to reconcile, and their language often seems to be other than the language of historical reporting.18 Moreover, focusing on the factuality of these stories often misses their more-than-factual meanings. When treated as if they are primarily about an utterly unique spectacular event, we often do not get beyond the question, “Did they happen or not?” to the question, “What do they mean?”

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.

Seeing the Easter stories as parable, as parabolic narratives, affirms, “Believe whatever you want about whether the stories happened this way—now let’s talk about what they mean.” If you believe the tomb was empty, fine; now, what does this story mean? If you believe that Jesus’s appearances could have been videotaped, fine; now, what do these stories mean? And if you’re not sure about that, or even if you are quite sure it didn’t happen this way, fine; now, what do these stories mean?

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.” Indeed, this identification is one of the central characteristics of modern Western culture. Both biblical literalists and people who reject the Bible completely do this: the former insist that the truth of the Bible depends on its literal factuality, and the latter see that the Bible cannot be literally and factually true and therefore don’t think it is true at all.

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.

Egoism is not a biblical word, but it names a central theme of Christian thought about the human condition, shaped by a reading of the Bible and reflection about human experience. Egoism means being centered in the self and its anxieties and preoccupations, what is sometimes called the “small self.” Egoism is centering in the anxious and fearful self and its concerns and desires. Alternatively, it is centering in the accomplished self, the successful self, and its achievements. Importantly, the problem is not that being a self is bad, as if the solution is ceasing to be a self. Rather, the issue is the kind of self that I am, that you are, that we are.

Seeing the political meaning of Good Friday and Easter can help us to recover the political meaning of Jesus and the Bible as a whole, a meaning muted in much of Christian preaching and teaching.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her best-selling book about the working class in the United States, provides a striking example. She goes to a revival meeting attended primarily by poor people at which the preacher emphasizes going to heaven by believing in the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. She comments: It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. She concludes: “I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher’s metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there is the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole.”26