The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus\'s Final Days in Jerusalem This was a timely book for me to pick up at Border’s, which had strategically put copies out just in time for Holy Week. I’m often an impulse-buyer when it comes to books, but anything by Marcus Borg is going to be insightful, and likely to be challenging both intellectually and emotionally.  I’ve encountered John Crossan as part of the “Living the Questions” adult education series we did at church last year, so I was excited to find this book, which traces in depth Mark’s account of Jesus’ last week from Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday.
I saved it up for a week or so, and tried to read along day by day as Borg and Crossan do an extended midrash on the themes and issues undergirding Mark’s account of the events Holy Week.  This book primarily concerns itself with the political and social dimensions of Jesus’ ministry, and is less focused with the spiritual.  This is an excellent academic re-reading of Mark, but as I progressed throughout the week with the book, I found myself becoming uneasy with it, and put off reading the final Easter Sunday chapter until well after Easter itself.  Borg and Crossan are controversial in their own right, and here they take on some of the most central questions of Christian thought:  what was Jesus’ purpose in his ministry, what did the say about himself, what was God’s purpose behind his execution, and what happened on Easter Sunday?

There are some really insightful moments for me in the early part of the book, such as the comparison of Jesus’ Palm Sunday procession with Pilate’s Imperial procession entering Jerusalem before Passover, and an excellent deconstruction of the issues involved with sacrifice and temple politics.  Their main point is to emphasize that Jesus’ Passion should be understood to include what Jesus was passionate about, namely the living out in human lives of the love and justice that God intends for humankind, and confronting the systems of domination and oppression that were a central reality in Jesus’ day and our own.

And while I certainly do not count myself among the tribe of Biblical literalists (as the old saw goes “I don’t take the Bible literally, I take it seriously”), Borg and Crossan put forth some pretty challenging ideas about the parable nature of the resurrection accounts that I have a hard time accepting.  I find it difficult to accept the whole notion of the “Christian project” as completely valid without the reality of a supernaturally-resurrected Jesus.  I suppose what has resonated for me for a long time is C.S. Lewis’ notion that Jesus’ resurrection represents the historical incarnation of what had previously been a mythical story:  Jesus wasn’t some guy who lived in the mythic past, but a flesh-and-blood person in a specific time and place, and his resurrection is the historical acting out by God of a central human hope.  As one commentator has said “Something happened”, and that something radically transformed that small community of friends into a force that has reshaped history.

This book is troubling, but I think in a good way, and it challenges the reader in ways large and small.