On the eastern wall of St Peter’s is a mosaic depiction of the Transfiguration of Christ, installed by my nineteenth century predecessor George Howard Wilkinson. It survives to this day in what is now the sacristy, and I see it whenever I vest for the Eucharist. In it, Christ, arms outstretched, resplendent in glorious gold and white, hovers a few feet above the holy mountain-top. The scene is suffused with divine light. It is an arresting image.
Its didactic purpose is clear. Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God. He has a human nature, evident in his human form; and he has a divine nature, evident in the glory that emanates from him. The glorious transfigured Christ of the mosaic foreshadows the glorious risen Christ of this morning. He is a human being, and is recognizable as such. Yet he is a human being who is unconfined by the limits of time and space.
But there is a difference between the glorious transfigured Jesus and the glorious risen Jesus. It is that the outstretched hands of the mosaic are whole and unblemished, whereas the hands that are proffered to us this morning are not. They bear the marks of the nails which pinned him to the cross. The risen Jesus is wounded.
Why? If Jesus is as our creeds proclaim him to be; if he is as the mosaic depicts; if he is the human face of almighty God, who was revealed in glory on the mountain top then why does he submit to the nails? Why the wounds?
All the classic theologies of the cross answer this by making a link between the wounds of Jesus and the sin of humanity. At one extreme the wounds are seen as a necessary price. Our sin merits death; Christ dies in our place; Christ’s wounds are the cost of our redemption. At the other extreme the wounds are said to work upon our consciences. They call to us, compelling us to repent of the sin that has inflicted them upon him. Both extremes, and all the variations in between, reveal an understanding of the human condition – of human
nature – as essentially sinful. It is our sinfulness that is addressed by the cross of Christ.
I would like to suggest another understanding of the human condition, another understanding of human nature. This not to supplant the understanding that we term original sin, but to offer an alternative to it. We might call it ‘original woundedness’. The wounds of Christ are linked to the wounds of humanity; it is our woundedness that is addressed by the cross of Christ. Before we learn to be sinful men and women we are wounded men and women; often grievously wounded.
I probably need to stop right there. Wounded? Us? It hardly seems likely. We inhabit one of the greatest cities on God’s earth at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era. Compared with the generation which fashioned the mosaic on the east wall we enjoy lives of remarkable ease and simplicity. We are a confident generation, an articulate generation. In what conceivable sense are we wounded? Sinful we can admit to; sin we understand; sin we can deal with; because, to some extent, sin we’re in control of. We commit it, we identify it, we repent of it.
But wounds are different. Wounds we do not control; wounds we do not choose; for wounds have been inflicted upon us. Perhaps in our tenderest years, perhaps much later; perhaps through neglect, perhaps because of tragedy, perhaps as a result of experiential poverty of a thousand different kinds. Perhaps we are not believed in, we are unsupported, we are rarely heard, or scarcely known. Perhaps our wounds assert themselves in unhappy relationships and in unrealized ambitions, in addiction and in fear, in disappointment and in loss. From our wounds flow the sins of rage and lust, of envy and of hatred. For what does a wound do? It disfigures our beauty; it causes us pain; and from it flows our lifeblood. If I am right; if we are essentially wounded, then our loveliness is hidden, our pain is desperate, and our life – our real life, not the one we build to conceal the wounds, our eternal life – is ebbing away from us.
The twentieth century priest and prophet Henri Nouwen wrote these words: ‘the great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there’. So to wounded humanity comes a wounded leader. The Christ of the mountain top, trailing clouds of glory, shares little with wounded men and women. His feet don’t even touch the ground - quite literally, in the St Peter’s mosaic. The Christ of the cross shares everything with wounded men and women. Like us, his beauty is disfigured; like us, he is in pain; and, like us, the life flows out of him as surely as does the blood.
This sharing is reassuring. We are not alone. Our wounds are known and understood. But this sharing cannot be the end of the story. For sharing is a Good Friday experience. This is Easter Day, and he is risen.
He is risen indeed, but he is wounded. Still his body bears the marks. A wounded leader comes to us, but he does not come to wipe away every last trace of our wounds. He comes to redeem them. He comes to show us that they are an inexorable part of our humanity. He comes to show us that concealing them, ignoring them, running away from them, will only lead us deeper into them and deeper into their consequences. He comes to show us a different path: the path of resurrection, the via vitae. He comes to show us that our woundedness can make us a source of life and love for others. He comes to show us that our woundedness can turn us towards our brothers and sisters. He comes to show us that our woundedness can open our hearts to them in compassion. He comes to show us that our woundedness can enlarge our empathy and equip us to attend to others. He comes to show us that in our woundedness lies our resurrection.
He comes so that our scars might blaze with beauty, so that our pain might be changed to salvific love, so that the flow of life from us might be staunched, and so that we might begin to live as he lives.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrestled with the wounds of isolation, fatigue and depression in his last, Dublin, years: yet, contemplating the resurrection of his wounded Lord, he could write these lines:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
He is risen; we are risen. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
The Innocent Blood: Three Addresses for Holy Week, 18, 19 and 20 April 2011
The Innocent Blood: 1
In these addresses for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week I will pursue our Lenten theme of the Way of the Cross, and our Lenten emphasis on the Gospel of Matthew, and will reflect each night on a feature of the Passion narrative that is unique to that Gospel. The theme that unites these three addresses is the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes: hence I have entitled the series ‘The Innocent Blood’.
Tonight we consider Judas Iscariot, and these remarkable verses which are Matthew’s alone:
When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.’ But they said, ‘What is that to us? See to it yourself.’ Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. (Matthew 27: 3-5).
Matthew inserts these verses into the Passion narrative after the trial before the high priest. This has concluded in agreement that Jesus deserves to die, and he is bound and led away to face Pilate. The tide is running against him. His own people have resolved to destroy him, and they are handing him over to the Imperial authority which has the power to realize their resolution.
According to Matthew, Judas sees this and reacts. He returns to the chief priests and elders. He confesses that he has sinned. He acknowledges that Jesus is innocent. He flings down the silver coins that he has received. And he goes and hangs himself.
How are we to understand this reaction? There’s some controversy about the verb that Matthew uses to describe it. He uses , which the New Revised Standard Version translates as ‘repents’. The verb more commonly used for repentance is different: . It’s this that John the Baptist cries when he cries to Israel to repent because the kingdom of heaven is at handIt seems that Matthew interprets Judas’s reaction and Judas’s repentance rather differently.
Judas certainly has a change of heart. He is seized with remorse and acts upon it, declaring his guilt publicly, and giving up the benefit he has accrued. He then commits suicide. This is not an action that Jewish scripture or tradition condemned - think of Samson the judge at the Philistines’ feast or Saul the King after his defeat. In his suicide we perhaps see his atonement, or his attempted atonement, for his sin.
But what Judas does not do is repent with any hope or expectation that he can or will be forgiven. His repentance is despairing. Confronted by innocent blood he declares his past fault. Confronted by innocent blood he cannot glimpse any future. If the kingdom is coming then it holds no place for him, and its king, whose blood is on his hands, will not look mercifully upon him. Judas dies, hating himself, hating what he has become.
That is the first response to the innocent blood that Matthew describes: repentance leading to despair. The repentance to which we are called by the innocent blood of Jesus is of a different character. It leads to life. It is to repent - - because the kingdom of heaven is coming. It is not just an acknowledgement of our sin, but an acknowledgement of our need of forgiveness and an acceptance of the forgiveness we are offered through the innocent blood of Jesus. It is to death that we are called, certainly, but it is also to resurrection.
It’s hard to believe that any good comes out of Judas’s despair, and over the generations the Church has tended to prefer Luke’s dramatic and gory account of an unrepentant death. But Matthew adds these lines:
But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, ‘It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.’ After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, ‘And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.’ (Matthew 27: 6-10)
Matthew’s is a Gospel written for a Jewish audience; his Jesus describes himself as sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So we cannot leave this passage without acknowledging that one of the fruits of Judas’s despair is that Gentiles are given a resting place in the City of David. Confronted by innocent blood, even out of despair there comes hope, if not for Judas, then for us.
The Innocent Blood: 2
In these three addresses for Holy Week I am reflecting on three features of the Passion narrative that are unique to Matthew’s Gospel. The theme that unites the three addresses is the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes. The first considered the despair and death of Judas Iscariot. The second is introduced by the enigmatic figure of Pilate’s wife, who is given a cameo role lasting only one verse:
While he was sitting on the judgement seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.’ (Matthew 27:19)
Dreams have a special place in Matthew’s Gospel. They pepper the famous stories that we tell and re-tell at Christmas-time. Joseph is told in a dream that he should marry Mary; he is told in a dream that he should take his young family to safety in Egypt; he is told in a dream that Herod has died and that it is safe to return to Nazareth. In dreams, God speaks. For Matthew, dreams are a means of divine self-revelation. And in this most Jewish of Gospels God does not confine his self-revelation to the Jews. The wise men, representatives of all the nations of the earth, are told in a dream that they should return to their own country by a different route. So we, Matthew’s audience, can be under no illusion. In Pilate’s wife’s dream God has spoken. God has communicated directly with Gentile power at the very end of Jesus’s life, as he did at its beginning.
The tradition has named her Procla, but in reality we know no more about Pilate’s wife than Matthew tells us in that one verse, and that is not very much. The content of her dream seems clear, though. Jesus is innocent. To shed Jesus’s blood will be to shed innocent blood. The revelation that only dawned on Judas once he had seen his master led away in chains comes to Pilate from God himself through the medium of his wife’s dream. How does Pilate respond when confronted with innocent blood? Matthew tells us:
Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed. The governor again said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release for you?’ And they said, ‘Barabbas.’ Pilate said to them, ‘Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?’ All of them said, ‘Let him be crucified!’ Then he asked, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Let him be crucified!’
So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’ (Matthew 27: 20-24)
There is an ironic parallel between this scene and the scene I considered yesterday. When the desperate Judas returns to the chief priests and elders and confesses “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” they respond with contempt “What is that to us? See to it yourself”. Now Pilate declares himself innocent of Jesus’s blood and flings their contempt back at them. “See to it yourselves”.
“See to it yourselves”. The remark is surely bravado, the arrogance of the tyrant, the petty haughtiness of the Imperial bureaucrat. Pilate does not, cannot leave the matter to the crowd. What he actually does when confronted with innocent blood is to reach for a basin and wash his hands. Where Judas repents in despair, Pilate steps to one side.
How are we to understand his response? What he wants to do is publicly rid himself of any trace of guilt. Yet it is Pilate who releases Barabbas; it is Pilate who has Jesus flogged; it is Pilate who hands Jesus over to be crucified. Does he not wash his blood-stained hands in vain?
“What, will these hands ne’er be clean? Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand…”
Perhaps Shakespeare had Pilate and his wife in mind when he wrote those lines for the wife of another autocratic ruler.
The innocent blood of Jesus calls Pilate to a decision that is personal, and it calls us to a decision that is personal. Judas chose despair and death instead of forgiveness and hope; Pilate chose injustice and security instead of risk and righteousness. Choosing is a bit uncomfortable for Christians of a tradition which has valued the common life of word, prayer and sacrament. But this is Holy Week and the innocent blood of Jesus confronts us. A compromise, or the Christ? Choose we must.
Under the dark trees, there he stands,
there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes?
I thought I knew a little
how he compels, beyond all things, but now
he stands there in the shadows. It will be
Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning,
when I wake to see him
as he is.
The Innocent Blood: 3
This is the last of three addresses for Holy Week in which I reflect on three features of the Passion narrative that are unique to Matthew’s Gospel, the theme uniting the three addresses being the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes. The first address considered the despair and death of Judas Iscariot. The second considered the evasiveness of Pontius Pilate, who ignored the divine prompting of his wife’s dream and washed his hands of Jesus’s blood. This evening I consider the response of the people, the response recorded by Matthew in some of the most notorious words in the Bible.
Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’(Matthew 27: 25)
A bitter history of Christian anti-Semitism has drawn its inspiration from these words, a bitter history whose protagonists have heard in them an everlasting curse upon the whole Jewish race. This history has chosen to treat the blood of Jesus in the same way that the Hebrew Scriptures treat the blood of Abel. You will recall that according to the book Genesis Abel’s is the first innocent blood to be spilt upon the earth. He is struck down in the fields by his jealous older brother, Cain, to whom God speaks these words:
‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.’ (Genesis 4: 10)
‘Abel’s blood for vengeance pleaded to the skies’, we sing: Abel’s innocent blood calls down recrimination upon the one who has shed it. Ye those Christians (and I use the term loosely) who have over the generations interpreted Jesus’s blood as having the same effect misread the verse itself and neglect the resurrection faith which is our hope.
As to the verse itself, Matthew makes it very clear that the crowd was being stirred up by the Jerusalem hierarchy of chief priests and elders. This hierarchy has sought Jesus’s destruction and is instrumental in its achievement. If the verse is a curse then the hierarchy is the principal candidate for the role of victim. Even if the curse extends to the crowd, the crowd is only a tiny proportion of the Jewish race. And to extend it any farther defies the plain sense of the text. Matthew, writing as he was in the aftermath of the cataclysmic destruction of the Temple in AD 70, no doubt saw in that event the final, desolating outcome of the Temple’s rejection of the Messiah. The curse, if a curse it was, had done its work.
But that is a limited, historical understanding of Matthew’s infamous verse. It can, indeed it must, also be read with the eyes of resurrection faith, and such a reading opens up a different interpretation altogether.
Let us begin by recalling that the blood of the innocent does not always condemn. God’s covenant with the children of Israel is forged on Mount Sinai. At its foot Moses builds an altar, with twelve pillars to represent the twelve tribes. He offers burnt offerings and sacrifices oxen. Half the blood is dashed against the altar; half is dashed on the people. The blood of the innocent victim falls on them not to curse and condemn but to sanction and seal the covenant, to actualize the faithful love of God for his people.
Now, in Pilate’s judgement hall, the children of Israel are once more confronted with innocent blood. It plunges Judas into despair, because he cannot conceive of forgiveness or hope. It prompts Pilate into twisting and turning away from the demands of justice. But the people call for the blood to fall on them. It has perhaps the greatest integrity of the three responses we’ve considered. But what is it that they seek?
In his most recent book Pope Benedict has offered an answer. The eyes of resurrection faith, he writes, allow us to understand that the blood of Jesus is not poured out against anyone; it is poured out for many, for all. Those who call down the blood of Jesus upon themselves immerse themselves in the new covenant that the blood sanctions and seals. But this time the blood is not that of an ox; it is the blood, the life, the love ,of God. These words are not a curse, writes Pope Benedict, but rather redemption, salvation.
He is called Rose of Sharon, for his skin
is clear, his skin is flushed with blood,
his body lovely and exact; how he compels
beyond ten thousand rivals. There he stands,
my friend, the friend of guilt and helplessness,
to steer my hollow body
over the sea.
His blood be on us…
In these addresses for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week I will pursue our Lenten theme of the Way of the Cross, and our Lenten emphasis on the Gospel of Matthew, and will reflect each night on a feature of the Passion narrative that is unique to that Gospel. The theme that unites these three addresses is the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes: hence I have entitled the series ‘The Innocent Blood’.
Tonight we consider Judas Iscariot, and these remarkable verses which are Matthew’s alone:
When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.’ But they said, ‘What is that to us? See to it yourself.’ Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. (Matthew 27: 3-5).
Matthew inserts these verses into the Passion narrative after the trial before the high priest. This has concluded in agreement that Jesus deserves to die, and he is bound and led away to face Pilate. The tide is running against him. His own people have resolved to destroy him, and they are handing him over to the Imperial authority which has the power to realize their resolution.
According to Matthew, Judas sees this and reacts. He returns to the chief priests and elders. He confesses that he has sinned. He acknowledges that Jesus is innocent. He flings down the silver coins that he has received. And he goes and hangs himself.
How are we to understand this reaction? There’s some controversy about the verb that Matthew uses to describe it. He uses , which the New Revised Standard Version translates as ‘repents’. The verb more commonly used for repentance is different: . It’s this that John the Baptist cries when he cries to Israel to repent because the kingdom of heaven is at handIt seems that Matthew interprets Judas’s reaction and Judas’s repentance rather differently.
Judas certainly has a change of heart. He is seized with remorse and acts upon it, declaring his guilt publicly, and giving up the benefit he has accrued. He then commits suicide. This is not an action that Jewish scripture or tradition condemned - think of Samson the judge at the Philistines’ feast or Saul the King after his defeat. In his suicide we perhaps see his atonement, or his attempted atonement, for his sin.
But what Judas does not do is repent with any hope or expectation that he can or will be forgiven. His repentance is despairing. Confronted by innocent blood he declares his past fault. Confronted by innocent blood he cannot glimpse any future. If the kingdom is coming then it holds no place for him, and its king, whose blood is on his hands, will not look mercifully upon him. Judas dies, hating himself, hating what he has become.
That is the first response to the innocent blood that Matthew describes: repentance leading to despair. The repentance to which we are called by the innocent blood of Jesus is of a different character. It leads to life. It is to repent - - because the kingdom of heaven is coming. It is not just an acknowledgement of our sin, but an acknowledgement of our need of forgiveness and an acceptance of the forgiveness we are offered through the innocent blood of Jesus. It is to death that we are called, certainly, but it is also to resurrection.
It’s hard to believe that any good comes out of Judas’s despair, and over the generations the Church has tended to prefer Luke’s dramatic and gory account of an unrepentant death. But Matthew adds these lines:
But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, ‘It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.’ After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, ‘And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.’ (Matthew 27: 6-10)
Matthew’s is a Gospel written for a Jewish audience; his Jesus describes himself as sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So we cannot leave this passage without acknowledging that one of the fruits of Judas’s despair is that Gentiles are given a resting place in the City of David. Confronted by innocent blood, even out of despair there comes hope, if not for Judas, then for us.
The Innocent Blood: 2
In these three addresses for Holy Week I am reflecting on three features of the Passion narrative that are unique to Matthew’s Gospel. The theme that unites the three addresses is the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes. The first considered the despair and death of Judas Iscariot. The second is introduced by the enigmatic figure of Pilate’s wife, who is given a cameo role lasting only one verse:
While he was sitting on the judgement seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.’ (Matthew 27:19)
Dreams have a special place in Matthew’s Gospel. They pepper the famous stories that we tell and re-tell at Christmas-time. Joseph is told in a dream that he should marry Mary; he is told in a dream that he should take his young family to safety in Egypt; he is told in a dream that Herod has died and that it is safe to return to Nazareth. In dreams, God speaks. For Matthew, dreams are a means of divine self-revelation. And in this most Jewish of Gospels God does not confine his self-revelation to the Jews. The wise men, representatives of all the nations of the earth, are told in a dream that they should return to their own country by a different route. So we, Matthew’s audience, can be under no illusion. In Pilate’s wife’s dream God has spoken. God has communicated directly with Gentile power at the very end of Jesus’s life, as he did at its beginning.
The tradition has named her Procla, but in reality we know no more about Pilate’s wife than Matthew tells us in that one verse, and that is not very much. The content of her dream seems clear, though. Jesus is innocent. To shed Jesus’s blood will be to shed innocent blood. The revelation that only dawned on Judas once he had seen his master led away in chains comes to Pilate from God himself through the medium of his wife’s dream. How does Pilate respond when confronted with innocent blood? Matthew tells us:
Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed. The governor again said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release for you?’ And they said, ‘Barabbas.’ Pilate said to them, ‘Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?’ All of them said, ‘Let him be crucified!’ Then he asked, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Let him be crucified!’
So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’ (Matthew 27: 20-24)
There is an ironic parallel between this scene and the scene I considered yesterday. When the desperate Judas returns to the chief priests and elders and confesses “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” they respond with contempt “What is that to us? See to it yourself”. Now Pilate declares himself innocent of Jesus’s blood and flings their contempt back at them. “See to it yourselves”.
“See to it yourselves”. The remark is surely bravado, the arrogance of the tyrant, the petty haughtiness of the Imperial bureaucrat. Pilate does not, cannot leave the matter to the crowd. What he actually does when confronted with innocent blood is to reach for a basin and wash his hands. Where Judas repents in despair, Pilate steps to one side.
How are we to understand his response? What he wants to do is publicly rid himself of any trace of guilt. Yet it is Pilate who releases Barabbas; it is Pilate who has Jesus flogged; it is Pilate who hands Jesus over to be crucified. Does he not wash his blood-stained hands in vain?
“What, will these hands ne’er be clean? Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand…”
Perhaps Shakespeare had Pilate and his wife in mind when he wrote those lines for the wife of another autocratic ruler.
The innocent blood of Jesus calls Pilate to a decision that is personal, and it calls us to a decision that is personal. Judas chose despair and death instead of forgiveness and hope; Pilate chose injustice and security instead of risk and righteousness. Choosing is a bit uncomfortable for Christians of a tradition which has valued the common life of word, prayer and sacrament. But this is Holy Week and the innocent blood of Jesus confronts us. A compromise, or the Christ? Choose we must.
Under the dark trees, there he stands,
there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes?
I thought I knew a little
how he compels, beyond all things, but now
he stands there in the shadows. It will be
Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning,
when I wake to see him
as he is.
The Innocent Blood: 3
This is the last of three addresses for Holy Week in which I reflect on three features of the Passion narrative that are unique to Matthew’s Gospel, the theme uniting the three addresses being the blood of Jesus and the response that it evokes. The first address considered the despair and death of Judas Iscariot. The second considered the evasiveness of Pontius Pilate, who ignored the divine prompting of his wife’s dream and washed his hands of Jesus’s blood. This evening I consider the response of the people, the response recorded by Matthew in some of the most notorious words in the Bible.
Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’(Matthew 27: 25)
A bitter history of Christian anti-Semitism has drawn its inspiration from these words, a bitter history whose protagonists have heard in them an everlasting curse upon the whole Jewish race. This history has chosen to treat the blood of Jesus in the same way that the Hebrew Scriptures treat the blood of Abel. You will recall that according to the book Genesis Abel’s is the first innocent blood to be spilt upon the earth. He is struck down in the fields by his jealous older brother, Cain, to whom God speaks these words:
‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.’ (Genesis 4: 10)
‘Abel’s blood for vengeance pleaded to the skies’, we sing: Abel’s innocent blood calls down recrimination upon the one who has shed it. Ye those Christians (and I use the term loosely) who have over the generations interpreted Jesus’s blood as having the same effect misread the verse itself and neglect the resurrection faith which is our hope.
As to the verse itself, Matthew makes it very clear that the crowd was being stirred up by the Jerusalem hierarchy of chief priests and elders. This hierarchy has sought Jesus’s destruction and is instrumental in its achievement. If the verse is a curse then the hierarchy is the principal candidate for the role of victim. Even if the curse extends to the crowd, the crowd is only a tiny proportion of the Jewish race. And to extend it any farther defies the plain sense of the text. Matthew, writing as he was in the aftermath of the cataclysmic destruction of the Temple in AD 70, no doubt saw in that event the final, desolating outcome of the Temple’s rejection of the Messiah. The curse, if a curse it was, had done its work.
But that is a limited, historical understanding of Matthew’s infamous verse. It can, indeed it must, also be read with the eyes of resurrection faith, and such a reading opens up a different interpretation altogether.
Let us begin by recalling that the blood of the innocent does not always condemn. God’s covenant with the children of Israel is forged on Mount Sinai. At its foot Moses builds an altar, with twelve pillars to represent the twelve tribes. He offers burnt offerings and sacrifices oxen. Half the blood is dashed against the altar; half is dashed on the people. The blood of the innocent victim falls on them not to curse and condemn but to sanction and seal the covenant, to actualize the faithful love of God for his people.
Now, in Pilate’s judgement hall, the children of Israel are once more confronted with innocent blood. It plunges Judas into despair, because he cannot conceive of forgiveness or hope. It prompts Pilate into twisting and turning away from the demands of justice. But the people call for the blood to fall on them. It has perhaps the greatest integrity of the three responses we’ve considered. But what is it that they seek?
In his most recent book Pope Benedict has offered an answer. The eyes of resurrection faith, he writes, allow us to understand that the blood of Jesus is not poured out against anyone; it is poured out for many, for all. Those who call down the blood of Jesus upon themselves immerse themselves in the new covenant that the blood sanctions and seals. But this time the blood is not that of an ox; it is the blood, the life, the love ,of God. These words are not a curse, writes Pope Benedict, but rather redemption, salvation.
He is called Rose of Sharon, for his skin
is clear, his skin is flushed with blood,
his body lovely and exact; how he compels
beyond ten thousand rivals. There he stands,
my friend, the friend of guilt and helplessness,
to steer my hollow body
over the sea.
His blood be on us…
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