Christianity

Jesus Christ taught that God our father loves us unconditionally(parable of the Prodigal Son), and we are all destined to a life of eternal joy as adopted brothers and sisters of Jesus in the Trinity family (Gospel of John 1:12-13, 17:20-23 and the Letters of St. Paul).

He also taught that the greatest commandments of Judaism were:

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, [...] and your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:30-31)

To achieve this, Jesus taught people should strive to transform themselves and society as follows:

1. Personal Transformation through "Service to Others".- The Gospels recount how Jesus taught how God is our Father and we, as his children, must lead a life of "service to others" (Mark 10:35-45 reports that Jesus said "...Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant;..." Matthew 10:20-28 and Luke 22:24-27 report exactly the same words of Jesus. John 13:3-16 writes an equivalent lesson: "...If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet. I have given you a model to follow...").
2. Societal Transformation through "Intolerance of Injustice".- Jesus' most central teaching was given in Jerusalem when he disrupted the operation of the Temple for some time while accusing the Temple Priests of robbing his beloved peasants. He did this by quoting Jeremiah's Prophecy of 7:9-11 which had accused the priests of Jeremiah's time of robbing the people and hiding in the Temple making it a "den of thieves." This attack of the Temple Priests guaranteed he would be killed. Clearly, Jesus wanted to show that the government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich against the oppressed people was to be denounced even at the cost of one's life. (The details of this most significant act of Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark are presented below).

Discovering the gospel of Mark

I had always been fascinated by how Gandhi fought unjust laws. He would disobey the law and turn himself in. Then when the media asked him about it he would explain that people could not be expected to comply with these unjust laws.

He called this strategy satyagraha or " truth-force." He taught that people have a conscience that allows them to recognize the injustice. In Christianity, Jesus taught the same when he said that the Holy Spirit, internally, constantly teaches us the truth.

India's independence was achieved in part by people disobeying unjust laws and then suffering the brutality of British police. As the media reported these cases, British public opinion felt the shame of what their government was doing in their name and began to support Gandhi's India independence movement. Gandhi felt that exposing injustice by offering oneself to suffer under it, was the quickest way to eliminate it. And he was ready to go as far as giving his life in this process.

Martin Luther King copied Gandhi's strategy when he confronted police brutality in the 1960's Civil Rights fight. He also felt that eradicating injustice was worth sacrificing one's life.

Jesus, was using that same strategy against injustice and the gospel of Mark tells that story. Unfortunately, what was clear for any Jew of the first century in Mark's story, because they heard the prophecies in the Torah read and explained in the temples, requires some additional background for modern man to understand.

The Political atmosphere in Judea in Jesus' time

It is good to ask oneself why the gospels kept referring to tax collectors as the bad guys. Jesus ministered to Jewish peasants. Extortion of those peasants by tax collectors was rampant at the time. Who were these tax collectors?

In the earlier part of the first century, Rome had entrusted the collection of its tribute to the Jewish government, a church-state partnership of priests and elders of the wealthiest families of Jerusalem (the Gospel of Mark referred to its ruling council as the Sanhedrin in Mk 14:55). They controlled everything from the temple. The tribute to Rome took 1/5 of the yearly crop. People barely survived under this heavy burden and as a result they hated both the Romans and the collaborating Jewish rulers who collected the taxes for the Romans.

Knowing this background we can better understand why Jesus final act was to protest this injustice against the peasants he loved. And we can also understand why Mark presents it as one of Jesus' most important lessons.

In his gospel Mark describes the two models that Jesus left for us, one for Personal and the second for Societal Transformation.

Personal Transformation

As a Jew, Jesus' central teaching was the summary of the law and the prophets: Love God above all and your neighbor as yourself.

Being a servant to others, Jesus' 11th commandment.- Jesus mentioned directly in all four gospels what he thought "loving your neighbor as yourself" meant. He called it "Being a servant to others" as we saw in the quotes above from all four gospels. It was such a clear teaching from Jesus that we could call it his 11th commandment.

Jesus also gave us by example a very clear model for societal transformation. The gospel of Mark is carefully constructed to teach us that model in the story of the last week of the life of Jesus and we now turn to examine that model.

Societal Transformation

Mark tells the story in the figure of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to the seat of power of the chief priests and elders, where Jesus was planning to confront the authorities about their injustices.

During their last walk to Jerusalem for Passover, Jesus discloses to his disciples his expectation that he is about to be killed for what he is about to do, even though he does not tell them the details of what he is planning (Mark 10:39).

The gospel of Luke mentions that Jesus looking over Jerusalem before he prophesied its upcoming destruction said: "If this day you only knew what makes for peace - but now it is hidden from your eyes..." He might have been referring to justice, a central element of peace: if people do not experience equal justice there will be no peace.

Later on in the gospel, Mark tells how Jesus staged His challenge to the powers that be in two consecutive days of his last week in Jerusalem

1st Challenge to the Romans: Palm Sunday

Mark describes how Jesus carefully prepared his entrance to Jerusalem on Sunday, the first day of the week. "When they drew near to Jerusalem, ..., he sent two of his disciples and said to them, 'Go into the village opposite you, and immediately on entering it, you will find a colt tethered on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone should say to you, 'Why are you doing this?" reply, 'The Master has need of it and will send it back here at once.' "

For the Jews of the first century, for a teacher to ride a donkey colt into the city was a very clear reference to Zechariah's Messianic prophecy which gave oppressed people hope that the Messiah, would save them from the Romans and their puppet priests. The following is a quote of Zechariah 9:9:

" Restoration under the Messiah.-
Rejoice heartily, O daughter Zion, shout for joy, O daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king shall come to you;
a just savior is he, Meek, and riding on an ass,
on a colt, the foal of an ass." (Zech 9:9)

There is a second part to the prophecy in Zechariah 9:10 referring to the "other" procession that traditionally took place on that Sunday, as the Roman legions led by Pilate entered from the other side of Jerusalem, from the sea, to reinforce the garrison in Jerusalem for the dangerous days of Passover week, when there was high risk of Jewish revolts.

"He shall banish the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem; The warrior's bow shall be banished, and he shall proclaim peace to the nations, His dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth." (Zech 9:10)

For modern non-Jewish readers of the gospels, the meaning that Mark is trying to convey might be lost. But for Jews acquainted with the Torah, Jesus' careful staging of Zechariah's prophecies, was claiming the status of Messiah in bringing peace to his people and in the following verse prophesying God's destruction of the foreign occupier.

This challenge would have deeply disturbed Jewish Temple priests who as collaborators of the Romans had a vested interest in preventing any revolts against their government.

Mark's narration of Jesus entry into Jerusalem alerted his readers, through Zechariah's well known Messianic prophecy, of how Jesus was clearly challenging the government of the ruling class chief priests and of their partners the Romans.

2nd Challenge to the chief priests on Monday the next day

According to Mark, on the second day of the week, on Monday, Jesus blocked the business of the temple for a significant time to protest their usurius taxation of the people. The chief priests could not imprison him because he was surrounded by a crowd that hated the priests:

Mark writes: "He did not permit anyone to carry anything through the temple area. Then he taught them saying, "Is it not written: 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples'? But you have made it a den of thieves.' (Mark 11:16-17)"

In the way Mark retells this episode, Jesus' reference to the "den of thieves," signifies that the chief priests were using the temple as a hiding place after robbing the people. The meaning was clear in the prophecy from Jeremiah 7:9-11 which goes:

"Are you to steal and murder, ..., and yet come to stand before me in this house which bears my name, and say: 'We are safe; we can commit all these abominations again"? Has this house which bears my name become in your eyes a den of thieves?'"

For Jews of that time this was a clear indictment of the chief priests for robbing the people and hiding themselves in the temple, thus using God's temple as their own "den of thieves".

Again Mark mentions in the next verse how the chief priests did not dare put him in prison because of fear of the people who were against them:

"The chief priests and the scribes came to hear of it and were seeking a way to put him to death, yet they feared him because the whole crowd was astonished at his teaching." (Mark 11:18)

These then were the two challenges against the legitimacy of the temple authorities and Mark clearly lets us know that they implied a death sentence. When you put them together they were sufficient to have Jesus crucified as a political revolutionary (as Jesus had prophesied to his disciples on the way to Jerusalem).
But the authorities could not capture him while he was surrounded by the sympathetic crowd. This made it essential to have the traitor Judas reveal where Jesus' and his followers were hiding so he could be captured while he was away from the crowd.

This clear sequence of events from the gospel of Mark makes the passion and crucifixion of Jesus understandable. We are also now clear about the two models of transformation that Jesus left for us:
1.Personal Transformation through service to others
2.Societal Transformation by denouncing injustices.

According to the gospels, Jesus tried to teach his disciples these two models of behavior. But the disciples were not yet ready in that last week of Jesus' life to follow his example for Societal Transformation into martyrdom. It was only much later, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that they were able to follow that Way of Jesus into martyrdom.

St Anselm's Medieval wrong turn: Jesus paid for our sins with his death

In the 11th century an influential book interpreting the idea that Jesus' death was a sacrifice for our sins was published by St. Anselm of Canterbury. He based his interpretation on Medieval Feudal Law of his time and concluded that the offence we caused to God by our sins, was unpardonable, unless, as was the medieval custom, a hostage of greater station than us would pay our ransom. According to Anselm's interpretation, God accepted Jesus' death on the cross, as adequate repayment to cleanse us of our sins.

This theory became very popular in Medieval times because people used to think this way. Many Protestant Reformers 300 years later, also found it provided an impressive image for preaching the fear of God. Gradually it became a dominant popular belief of Christianity.

The problem is it implied a somewhat disturbing image of God, a Father ready to kill his own son to satisfy his honor. This was not the loving Abba that Jesus had preached.

In our days, famous theologian Joseph Ratzinger, denounced this idea in the strongest of terms in his Introduction to Christianity:

" To many Christians, and especially to those who only know the faith from a fair distance, it looks as if the cross is to be understood as part of a mechanism of injured and restored right. [...]This picture is as false as it is widespread." Quote from Ratzinger

 

References.- All scriptural quotes are from the Catholic Bible 1995. Historical background: The Last Week by Borg and Crossan.