Lenten Reflections on Jesus' Last Week 1

Why do we need Good Friday?  Can’t we just have Easter?  During Lent we will look at the last days of Jesus life on earth, what led to the cross and how we can bear our crosses and get to Easter.  These reflections rely on the work of Marcus Borg and John Crosson, The Last Week as well as Ched Myers Binding the Strong Man.

 Week One:  Palm Sunday  Mark 11:1-25

Whenever you pray, forgive so that God might also forgive you.



Marching into Jerusalem on a donkey, cursing a fig tree, overturning tables in the temple, moving mountains.  What was Jesus doing?

The people who first lived and heard these stories knew their Hebrew scriptures much better than most of us.  Our scholars remind us that others over the centuries had staged marches into Jerusalem both in triumph and in rebellion.  Mark’s first readers lived when the temple was about to be (or just had been) destroyed.  The temple was on THE mountain.  The fig tree was a symbol for Israel and/or its leaders.  Its fruitfulness dependent on the faithfulness of the people and the blessing of God.  The temple and its cult were an economic system intended to care for the poor and honour God.  When it became corrupt it was condemned by the prophets and its destruction predicted.  Keeping all these references in mind, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, his actions in the temple and his cursing of the fig tree can be seen as a challenge to the people of his time and ours to make a choice.  

Will you continue to prop up a failed and corrupt system that oppresses many and makes a few rich and powerful (and destroys the planet) or will you have the courage to imagine that a better world order is possible and work to make it happen?  


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