Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on Palm/Passion Sunday, March 24, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.Matthew 26:36-27:5, 11-17, 21b-54 His blood be on us and on our children!
-Matthew 27:25
Chilling declaration, isn't it? Are we all clear about what that expression means, "His blood be on us?" It means, "We take responsibility for the spilling of this man's blood. We are responsible for his death. We're willing to be blamed for it. We're even willing to have our children blamed for it."
Imagine yourself shouting such a thing. Imagine what your state of mind must be in order to make it possible for a decent, reasonable person like you shout such a thing.
You'd have to be in such a state of bloodthirsty rage, and I mean literally bloodthirsty, that you just don't care about a human life. Blood-lust. What monster or what monstrosity could put you into a state like that? September 11 or Osama bin Laden, maybe? It would be a lot easier if you were in the midst of a whole crowd of people who felt the same way, wouldn't it?
Or else you'd have to believe that the person's life and death were utterly insignificant, nothing precious involved, nothing that you value or ought to value. "His blood be on us and on our children" is no big deal if you're talking about a mosquito. But this is no mosquito. This is a human being.
"His blood be on us and on our children." Who is this us? Matthew says it was the people as a whole who said it. What people? You remember: it was the people who were watching as Pilate washed his hands and said, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves.” Pilate passing the buck. They were willing, they were downright eager, to be the place where that buck stopped.
This washing of one's hands to proclaim one's blamelessness was actually a Jewish custom, not a Roman one. Pilate the imperial governor is taking the trouble to express himself in the vernacular of his colonial audience, and they understand him very well, don't they?
We can dance around the point all we want, and we do want to dance around it quite a bit, but in the end there's no doubt about what whoever wrote Matthew's Gospel is doing here. He's saying that it was the Jewish people, the Jewish people as a whole, who killed the Messiah. He's letting Pilate, the big Roman, and all his little helpers off the hook by nailing him instead for the lesser crimes of cowardice and hypocrisy — acting virtuous while caving in to the mob. And he's proclaiming that that blame is passed down willingly, voluntarily, gleefully, from parents to children, which means, if it is true, that the same blood-guilt hangs like a rotting albatross around the necks of Jews whom we know.
I'm appalled to hear myself say those words in a Christian pulpit, even though I know perfectly well that you don't think the charge is true and you don't think I think so either.
That charge is known to Jews as the Blood Libel — their eloquent terminology for two thousand years of Christian slander against the Jewish people. And the elaborations and permutations of it over the years have been stunning, such as the persistent rumor that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to make matzos for Passover. That one was repeated not two weeks ago in an Arabic newspaper. And before you write that off to Arab attitudes, you should know that it was alive and well in the minds, mouths and powerful arms of the mayor, police and citizenry of a small city in upstate New York in the 20th century.
But things have been changing. Nowadays you don't have to be Jewish to call it a libel and a slander. Christians can call it that too. In fact we must. It's our Christian duty. That buck stops right here.
But then what do we do with our Scriptures? This is the New Testament we're talking about; this is the Bible, this is the Word of God! And it's not just Matthew, it's all the Gospels, especially John. Not to mention the letters of Paul.
We know something of those times and those people apart from the New Testament. The fact is that there was practically nothing in Jesus' teachings that would offend the scribes and Pharisees. He was very like them. The fact is that crucifixion was a Roman practice, not a Jewish one. The fact is that it was Pilate's decision to make, and the fact is that Pilate was not the reasonable but cowardly man
The reason it's in there isn't hard to find, once you work up the courage to look for it. It has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus. Jesus was born, lived, ministered, preached, taught, healed, confronted, was killed, rose from the dead, said his goodbyes and handed the faith over to his disciples twenty or thirty or forty or fifty or more years before the words were written down that we call the New Testament.
There was no Jewish-Christian tension for Jesus and his disciples. All of them were Jews! They had no thought or intention of being anything else. The whole idea of a Messiah, a Christ, is a Jewish idea. The Jesus movement was a Jewish movement. And that didn't change until years after the Crucifixion. Most Jews took a look at Jesus and decided it was premature to proclaim him the Messiah. I can see their point. The world was still a pretty sorry mess, after all, and getting worse: There was a Jewish rebellion against the Empire, for instance, and the Romans put it down like the brutes they were and in the process destroyed the Holy of Holies, the Temple in Jerusalem. And the Jews asked the Christians, where was the Messiah when that was happening?
But everybody else in the Empire, pagans and heathens and idolaters and people who had worshiped whole platoons of petty little gods and goddesses, were swarming to Jesus like flies to flypaper. And they and the Jewish Christians who recruited them couldn't figure out what to make of all those other Jews who weren't getting on board. They resented it, and it didn't make sense to them. So you have this developing rivalry and animosity between the Jews and the Christians. And over it all was the Empire, ready to squash anyone who wasn't sufficiently reverent about the glories of Rome, and the rival Jews and Christians were only too ready to take advantage of that by ratting each other out to the authorities while currying favor for themselves. And this is the situation that produced the Gospel according to Matthew from which we just read the Passion story.
Does that shock you — that what we call the Word of God is so tainted with ungodly jealousies and hatreds and selfishness and worst of all, politics? But what did we expect? These were humans no better than ourselves. They met God. They argued with God. They lived with God. They did not become God. They told their story about God from a human point of view.
The Blood Libel is not the Word of God, it's just another instance of the very human blame game that we are pretty good at ourselves. The Word of God, for me at least, is not a pile of words at all, it's the person of the Crucified One: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and lived among us. And that incarnate Word is the lens through which we are to read all the other words, and judge them, whether or not they are true or not, and judge ourselves too, whether we are true or not.
It's time to stop wondering who was more responsible, Pilate or Caiaphas, Romans or Jews. Whenever we feel the urge to blame somebody else for what's wrong in the world, it's time to see if we can look in the mirror without flinching. That’s the truth of the Passion story that I hope we all take home with us and carry through this Holy Week, through Easter, and through the rest of our lives.
Amen