One of the unique qualities of the Christian story is that the heart of it—the accounts of Jesus’s life and death—is presented in the voices of four different witnesses. During the season of Lent, it is compelling to look specifically at the different tellings of the events that led Jesus to the cross. The differences in each testimony offer an interesting glimpse of how personalities differ in their observing and experience of the world, as well as a potent reminder that the story of Jesus is not a flat and static conveying of information, but a story as alive as the one who was tortured at the hands of the powers of this world.
For instance, as one theologian observes, Matthew’s crucifixion narrative and greater gospel emphasizes “the way of the humiliated Christ.”(1) In my reading of Matthew, I am always struck by the interplay between power and control, an interesting dynamic on which the writer has chosen to focus. Over and above the motif shared with Mark, Matthew seems to add a dimension of inquiry about power itself, and along with it, the hint that all is not as it seems: Who wants control? Who thinks they’re in control? Who is really in control? Theologian Roy Harrisville compares it to the paradox and reversal at the heart of Jesus’s ministry, the passion of Christ itself enacting “truths earlier hidden in the predictions and parables.”(2)
Thus, where Mark’s decisive crowd before Pilate yells, “Crucify him” (15:13 and again in 14b) and Luke’s crowd similarly, if more emphatically in the Greek, yells, “Crucify, crucify him!” (23:21), Matthew’s crowd twice yells, “Let him be crucified” (27:22b and 23b). There is a hint of a distancing of responsibility. The crowds indeed want the crucifying done, but done to him by someone else. Luke seems to further draw the distinction of choice and control, adding of his crowd, “And they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed” (23:23).
Matthew’s account seems at first passive in the “who” of the act of crucifying, a crowd calling for death at a distance. Later Pilate, too, wants to distance himself from this responsibility, adding a hand-washing scene unique to Matthew’s narrative. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” says Pilate, “see to it yourselves” (27:24). The people, preferring control over the risk of release, answer, “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25).
Now phrased in terms of blood, Matthew’s interplay of power and control is made all the more potent. Like Jesus’s many parables with their jarring sense of mysterion (mystery that is not hidden, but revealed), Matthew seems to suggest there is one in control indeed, but it is not the one who seems to be holding the power. The image of Christ’s blood upon this blind—though professing to see—crowd and their children is chilling. For unknowingly, they have declared the very thing that the humiliated servant has set out to do: His blood be on us and on our children.
Harrisville illustrates this all the more profoundly in his analysis of Matthew’s narrating of the Last Supper and the curious words of Jesus about the “blood of the covenant,” now explained in this passion narrative before us:
“The statement about the ‘blood of the covenant’ (26:28) will have its explanation in subsequent events, in Judas’s confession (‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood’ [27:24]), in Pilate’s avowal of innocence (‘I am innocent of this man’s blood’ [27:4]), and in the people’s accepting responsibility for Jesus’s death (‘his blood be on us and on our children!’ [27:25]). All these will be the ‘many’ for whose forgiveness the blood of the covenant is poured out.“(3)
The story of Jesus as he moves toward the cross, told through eyes that remind us he has come for a world of unique individuals, is a story of power and weakness that turns our common assumptions and experience on its head. Like the parables, the way of the humiliated Christ confounds those who consider it, approaching in power, though hidden in the unlikely gift of a servant.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Roy Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 147.
(2) Ibid., 158.
(3) Ibid., 159.
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