Book #15: The Last Week

I'm only a week late finishing this book, which was one of the Revgals' book discussion books. I had read bits of it last year, but not the whole thing. I'm glad I did.

I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. I have read other things by both Borg and Crossan (my husband is a Crossan fan, actually more than I am). So I thought the book would be treading old ground for me. There was a little of that, but I found some really insightful discussions. The chapter on Holy Saturday and the "harrowing of hell" was especially intriguing to me.

One of my favorite quotations, from the chapter, "Thursday": "the point of Jesus meals -- from the loaves-and-fishes ones to the bread-and-wine one -- is to insist on shared meals as the mandate of divine justice in a world not our own. if, as God asserts in Levitucus 25:23, "The land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants," then or course the food the land produces belongs likewise to God. If we are all tenant farmers and resident aliens on an earth not our own, then we are also invitees and guests at a table not our own." (p. 118.)

As for me, Jesus is more than a personal Savior, but also more than a political Messsiah to me. Neither the therapeutic model or the political model of Jesus' salvation quite does it.

I'm also trying to figure out how a passion for God's justice fits together with a passion for and a recognition of the need for overflowing, abundant mercy.