The Kingdom

I've just completed reading The Gospel of Mark by Marcus Borg. The book is one in a series of books called Conversations With Scripture created by The Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. The book comes with a built in study guide for individual or group use. I recommend it.

But this isn't a review of the book. I'm doing that later for someone else. Borg reminded me that if we take this Gospel seriously we have to conclude that Jesus was calling people to follow him. More than that, his calls to follow him seem really to be about following him to his inevitable conclusion: entering Jerusalem and all that represented. Borg reminds us that in the early decades after Jesus', his followers were even described as followers of the Way.

When Jesus enters Jerusalem, he does so on the same day that Pilate enters, but probably through a different gate. Pilate would have been coming because Jerusalem needed additional troops during Passover when the population likely tripled to something like 150,000 to 200,000 and feeling against the Roman oppressors ran high and hot.

Pilate makes a grand entrance with his troops to establish again the power of Rome over this city and the world. Jesus makes a grand entrance riding on a donkey colt, but wildly celebrated by the people. Why? At some level they understood his arrival as an announcement about the beginning of the end of Roman occupation.

Jesus had been preaching all along about the coming Kingdom, calling people to prepare for that Kingdom. It was a Kingdom not like Rome's, but a Kingdom brought in by God in order to restore justice and peace and to relieve the suffering of the poor--most people at that time.

Along the way, Christians have watered down Jesus' message and/or replaced it with believing the right things. But it would seem that Mark was saying what needed to be believed was the Jesus was God's son and was the embodiment of God's action in the world. God will bring the Kingdom in God's own time, and in the meanwhile, because we believe who Jesus is, we will act as if the Kingdom is here now. We will see that justice is done--that is, that oppressive and dysfunctional systems are replaced. We will attend to the poor while we change the systems that keep them poor. Jesus had little apparent concern, according to Mark, about our "going to heaven." The focus seems to need to be here and now.

As I teach the history of the Church in the first few centuries after Jesus, I can tell you that we went off the track early and radically. Now's the time to fix that.

Peace,

Jerry+