The Myth of the Apolitical Church
The tradition I was formed in had a very specific Jesus. He was personal, and spiritual, and focused almost entirely on where you go when you die and what you believe in your heart while you’re still alive. That Jesus was mostly unconcerned with saving souls.
It wasn’t until I read Marcus Borg’s The Last Week that a whole new world cracked open for me.
I don’t remember exactly when I read it. It was somewhere in the long stretch of years when I was pastoring and questioning and slowly becoming a different kind of Christian than I started out as, but I remember the feeling of reading the pages and thinking that I had been looking at something my whole life without actually seeing it.
The book is brilliant and illustrates an image I can’t shake.
On Palm Sunday morning, two processions entered Jerusalem from opposite sides of the city. From the west, Pontius Pilate rode in with the Roman cavalry with horses, armor, standards, the full machinery of impe…