Marcus J. Borg Quote

[I]n addition to being a Spirit person, healer, and wisdom teacher, Jesus was a social prophet. There was passion in his language. Many of his sayings (as well as actions) challenged the domination system of his day. They take on pointed meaning when we see them in the context of social criticism of a peasant society. His criticisms of the wealthy were an indictment of the social class at the top of the domination system. His prophetic threats against Jerusalem and the temple were not because they were the center of an old religion (Judaism) soon to be replaced by a new religion (Christianity) but because they were the center of the domination system. His criticism of lawyers, scribes, and Pharisees was not because they were unvirtuous individuals but because commitment to the elites led them to see the social order through elite lenses.Jesus rejected the sharp social boundaries of the established social order and challenged the institutions that legitimated it. In his teaching, he subverted distinctions between righteous and sinner, rich and poor, men and women, Pharisee and outcasts. In his healings and behavior, he crossed social boundaries of purity, gender, and class. In his meal practice, central to what he was about, he embodied a boundary-subverting inclusiveness.In his itinerancy he rejected the notion of a brokered kingdom of God and enacted the immediacy of access to God apart from institutional mediation. His prophetic act against the money changers in the temple at the center of the domination system was, in the judgment of most scholars, the trigger leading to his arrest and execution.