“Let his blood be on us”: Violence and the Passion of Christ

Though it was Palm Sunday, I went to church yesterday prepared to preach on the passion. This was so because it has been my observation over time that our small, Pentecostal church does not necessarily utilize the passion-Easter narrative on Easter, let alone any other stories specific to the times of the church year. And, because we would not be with them for Easter, I wanted to ensure that the people would hear something from the passion this Holy Week.

It happened that my re-reading of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ last week coincided with a grisly murder last week in the Mandela Park community in which our congregation is located. Just before the sermon, our pastor brought the event up for prayer, as “the church in the community is compelled to pray for the community.” This, then, is what happened: the widow of a pastor had been murdered by disgruntled congregants. The church of the deceased had been in his home, and the widow no longer wanted the church around in the same place where she lived and raised her children. According to our pastor, the widow also disagreed with the orientation of the church, whose pastor practiced healing through “holy water” rather than “through Jesus.” All that aside, the murder had taken place in front of the children, now orphans. “Imagine how traumatized they must be”, our pastor said.

Matthew’s narrative, it turns out, also includes a reference to children within a story of violence. In calling for the death of Jesus, “the crowd” before Pilate says, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Mt 27:25). The verse ranks among the most controversial in the New Testament; within the history of Christian biblical interpretation, it has served as a justification for the total depravity of the Jewish people and a legitimation of violence against them. Regardless of how Christians have interpreted it, in Matthew’s story it seems to be simply the final flank in a united effort to eliminate Jesus. That is, rather than a simple condemnation of Jews, Matthew’s report serves to demonstrate that the “crowd” simply completed what both its “chief priests and elders” and the Gentile rulers (Pilate himself) had already begun—the condemnation of Jesus, “the King of the Jews” (Mt 27:11, 37). Matthew’s point, I dare to say, is not the condemnation of one people for the condemnation of Jesus, but that the whole of the human society to which he came found Jesus threatening to its way of life. The story, to pick up Girardian language, exposes the violence of human society more than the violence of a particular people (see Rene Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986.))

That “the crowd” should be seen as no more or less guilty for the death of Jesus than either its Jewish leaders or the Gentile rulers of first-century Palestine is justifiable from the evidence of the text. For example, it is sometimes assumed that Matthew is sympathetic to Pilate, that Pilate was forced against his will by the crowd to condemn Jesus. In Matthew’s narrative, however, Pilate is explicitly compared to “the chief priests and elders”—the Jewish leaders—in his role in the death of Jesus. For earlier, after “Judas the betrayer” has “repented” by bringing back “the thirty pieces of silver” which he took for handing Jesus over, the “chief priests and elders” say to him, “What is that to us? See to it yourself” (Mt 27:4). The same phrase, curiously, is used of Pilate as he prods the crowd to explain its choice to condemn Jesus instead of Barabbas. Pilate, that is, says, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves” (Mt 27:24). “See to it yourself(-selves)” unites Pilate and the chief priests and elders in a most devious injustice: transferring responsibility or guilt for the death of, in the admittance of Pilate’s own wife, an “innocent” man, Jesus, even as they themselves send him to his death. Indeed, though they both absolve themselves of responsibility, first “the chief priests and elders of the people conferred together against Jesus in order to bring about his death” and “bound him, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate the governor”, then Pilate, “after flogging Jesus . . . handed him over to be crucified” (Mt 27:1-2, 26).

Moreover, continuing a prominent theme in his gospel as a whole, Matthew records both the chief priests and elders and Pilate engaging in religious rituals/formalism as a replacement for the simple doing of justice, as though each could maintain each’s righteousness before the divine by fulfilling religious law. The irony is indeed bitter: the chief priests and elders are concerned only that “it is not lawful” that the “blood money” that Judas has returned not go “into the treasury” of the temple—not that they have transgressed the righteousness of God by putting to death the righteous/lawful one; Pilate brings out a basin of water before the crowd in order to “wash his hands” of “this man’s blood” even as he spills it (Mt 27:6, 24). 

If therefore, on the evidence of the narrative, we should see Pilate and the chief priest and elders as one in violence, so too might we see as one those others with whom they conspire against Jesus. In other words, it was “Judas” whom “the chief priests and elders” chided with “see to it yourself”, and “the crowd” whom Pilate goaded with the same. Consequently, Judas, consistently referred to as “one of the twelve”, one of Jesus’ inner circle/closest friends, is one with the generic “crowd” in the violence against Jesus—no more nor less responsible/guilty for the death of an innocent man (Mt 26:14, 47; cf. 26:20-25).

What this all adds up to, therefore, is a society, often divided against itself, strangely united in its quest to eliminate Jesus. In spite of their differences, real or perceived, that which makes all people the same—and guilty before God—is their violence, their hostility and their rebellion from the way of God. Unity in violence destroys, but the One who was destroyed—but raised beyond the violence committed against him—brings unity “in the bond of peace” to the divided ones through the blood of his forgiveness of their sins (Eph 4:3). Thus, at the Last Supper, in the very setting of betrayal, of handing over to a violent death, Jesus proclaims that the cup is “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt 26: 28). The blood which all people thought they were taking from Jesus so as to bring about his death was the blood that he was giving in love for their lives.

It is in that same context, also, that we should read the crowd’s response, “Let his blood be on us, and on our children” (Mt 27:25). Though the crowd meant one thing by the statement, reality was quite another. The blood shed in violence, craved by the crowd, “washed off” by Pilate, “bought” by the chief priests and elders, handed over by “one of the twelve”, is the blood—the life and the love—Jesus did not withhold from his enemies, though an army of “more than twelve legions of angels” was his to defend him from death (Mt 26:53).

“Let his blood be on us and on our children”—this is the summary statement, in the voice of “the crowd” because it constitutes the largest grouping of humanity, of the human violence shared from Judas to the chief priests to Pilate. The violence against Jesus rises from its particularity in Judas, the priests, and Pilate to its universality in “the crowd”; all have “conspired”, “taken counsel together against the LORD and his anointed” (Ps 2:1-2).

Therefore, because the violence belongs not to one but to all—because of its universality—the story belongs in 21st-century South Africa as much as first-century Palestine. Wherever violence crescendos out of control, there the passion of Jesus still “speaks a better word” (Heb 12:24). Just as the blood of Jesus was on the crowd and its children not for condemnation but for forgiveness of sins, so it can cover the violent ones in Mandela Park—and the children terrorized by their violence. But in order for that blood to speak a better, more powerful word than the blood of hostility, it will need the old, old story, and those willing to proclaim it.

-Joe