Adult Education Series
The Last Week – The Gospels of Mark
Our Adult Education classes are starting a new study for Lent. We are reading the book The Last Week by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Each week we will step one day from Palm Sunday through Easter, looking at the events, the history, and the meaning revealed in Mark’s gospel stories. Come join us in the Lounge Sunday mornings at 9:00 am or Wednesday evenings at 7:00 pm (except for next Wed 2/26 when we have the Ash Wednesday service at 7:00). Any questions, please contact Mark Hackler at hackler@optonline.net. We hope to see you there!
Cover image and synopsis © Amazon.com
Our journey through the Dark Wood invites us to the gift of emptiness. Many of us sometimes feel empty inside and we fear that there is nothing there of worth. But what if we let go of our obsession with worthiness and released into the idea that if we want to be filled-to find God-getting empty is the best way. God will find us! In our journey this Lent toward the cross, we know even Jesus felt empty despair… and it was at this moment that God’s possibility of life beyond that pain was revealed.
Top Jesus scholars Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan join together to reveal a radical and little-known Jesus. As both authors reacted to and responded to questions about Mel Gibson’s blockbuster The Passion of the Christ, they discovered that many Christians are unclear on the details of events during the week leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion.
Using the gospel of Mark as their guide, Borg and Crossan present a day-by-day account of Jesus’s final week of life. They begin their story on Palm Sunday with two triumphal entries into Jerusalem. The first entry, that of Roman governor Pontius Pilate leading Roman soldiers into the city, symbolized military strength. The second heralded a new kind of moral hero who was praised by the people as he rode in on a humble donkey. The Jesus introduced by Borg and Crossan is this new moral hero, a more dangerous Jesus than the one enshrined in the church’s traditional teachings.
The Last Week depicts Jesus giving up his life to protest power without justice and to condemn the rich who lack concern for the poor. In this vein, at the end of the week Jesus marches up Calvary, offering himself as a model for others to do the same when they are confronted by similar issues. Informed, challenged, and inspired, we not only meet the historical Jesus, but meet a new Jesus who engages us and invites us to follow him.