Are you reading a book right now that you’re really enjoying?  Is it inspiring you or prompting questions?.  A lot of church groups are reading and studying The Last Week by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan during the season of Lent

Lent is a period of forty days, not including Sundays, beginning with Ash Wednesday and moving toward the intensity of Holy Week, the poignancy of Good Friday, and the celebration of Easter Sunday.  Good Friday is the remembrance and reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion on a Roman crossroads almost 2,000 years ago.

The Last Week is a fascinating examination of the events of Holy Week as told in the Gospel of Mark.  Mark is almost certainly the earliest of the four New Testament gospels to be written.  It also serves as the basis for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  Virtually everything in Mark is also in Matthew and Luke.  But Mark’s Gospel does not include everything that is in Matthew and Luke.

The most intense issue around the death of Jesus is called atonement.  The Christian promise is that, through Jesus, God and humanity are reconciled, brought together.  Atonement is the process of being reconciled often by making amends.  (Webster’s Dictionary)  Literally it means at-one-ment – being at one with God.  One of the biggest and most divisive questions within Christianity is “how did this happen?”  Theologies of atonement seek to explain how Jesus’ death brought together heaven and earth.  For at least the last 1000 years, the dominant theological belief in this area has been substitutionary atonement –  that Jesus took our place to meet God’s requirement for an innocent and faultless sacrificial victim to pay the price for the sin of all people.

Borg and Crossan say that this idea of substitutionary atonement is just not present in the Gospel of Mark.  What is present is that Jesus invited the disciples to go to Jerusalem with him, challenge the powers of Rome and the Temple with him, and face death with him.  Jesus invited all who followed him then and all who follow now to walk that road with him.  Crossan and Borg call this participatory atonement.

I am convinced that God, however we conceive of God, calls each of us to walk the way of Jesus, the way of the cross.  That’s why Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”  God calls all people to walk this way.  This means to live according to your deepest passions and principles.  This means to work for justice and peace by challenging the systemic evils present in our world today -- to do this work with compassion and also to confess how religions, including Christianity, have often participated in that evil.  This means to give ourselves as fully as we possibly can to the Kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of Rome or any power that stands in the place of Rome today. 

This is an inspiring and frightening challenge whether you are a follower of Jesus or not.  This is the way Jesus walked no one can follow him, or emulate him, along any other way.  None of us is able to find life that is abundant and meaningful, in any ultimate or lasting sense, without following our deepest passions and values even when they lead straight toward a cross – or whatever the equivalent might be today.  To live this way takes faith and courage, an ability to forgive ourselves and each other, and a community of people to support, encourage, and remind us just how important life is.

Thanks for continuing to bless me as we journey together.
  
Jack Price

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