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

by Marcus J. Borg

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