Readings: 2 Samuel 15:13-14, 30-31; Matthew 26:30-27:66

Tonight we come to Matthew’s version of the last day of Jesus’ life.  And Matthew starts off with Jesus and the disciples going to the Mount of Olives.  He’s very specific about that, and for good reason. The Old Testament prophet Zechariah predicted that God would come back and judge the world, and that would take place on the Mount of Olives.  Also, in the verses from 2 Samuel that we just heard, King David is on the run from his son, Absalom, and he has just realized that he’s been betrayed by his trusted advisor, Ahitophel.  He goes to the Mount of Olives to weep, so it makes sense that Matthew would stress that this is where Jesus also went to be betrayed by someone He trusted.  Later we learn that Ahitophel hanged himself, just as Judas would.

It’s very interesting, too, to look at Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives.  He refers to God as “my father.”  He tells the disciples to “pray that you may not enter into temptation.”  And, ultimately, He says, “Your will be done.” These are the same expressions we know so well from the Lord’s Prayer.  Even in His darkest hour, Jesus is still faithful to the Father.

Then Judas arrives, but instead of saying nothing (as in Mark) or asking Judas if he’s going to betray Him with a kiss (as in Luke) or asking all the soldiers who they’re looking for (as in John), in Matthew Jesus speaks tenderly to Judas.  “Friend, why are you here?” He asks.  Jesus uses a tender term of companionship, even for the person who is about to betray Him. And maybe He’s giving Judas one last chance to turn back, a last way out.  Perhaps the memories of David’s sorrow in that same place are in all their minds, and Jesus is doing everything He can to avoid a repetition of history.

Then Jesus is taken before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council.  As we heard last night in Mark, the council sought false testimony against Him, but the witnesses couldn’t get their lies straight. Then the high priest asks Jesus straight up: “Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.”  Up until this point Jesus hadn’t made a big secret of this: Peter had proclaimed that He was the Christ, and Jesus hadn’t ordered His followers to keep quiet about it, as He did in Mark.  But before the Council He’s a bit cryptic, and when He responds to the high priest He doesn’t come right out and say “I am.”  Instead, He says, “You have said so.”

The reason that Jesus puts it that way is that throughout the book of Matthew people have misunderstood Him.  They’ve used the same words He used, but they meant something different by them.  When James and John asked to sit on His right and left hand in the kingdom, Jesus didn’t answer them “yes” or “no.” Instead, He asked them, “Do you know what you are asking?”  He couldn’t answer them directly because they meant something different by those words – like “kingdom” – than He did. 

Time and again in Matthew Jesus lays out the facts, but the people can’t quite connect the dots.  He speaks of selling all that you have to buy a field like a thousand others, and everyone thought Him crazy.  They couldn’t see the treasure buried beneath the field, which would make everything make sense.  (13:44) In fact, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, once compared the Jesus of Matthew to Sherlock Holmes, with pretty much everybody else playing the role of Dr. Watson.  Everyone is dealing with the same set of facts, but only Jesus can see how it all fits together.  Everyone else misunderstands, and uses terms like “kingdom” and “Christ” and “Son of God” in the wrong way.  In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Dr. Watson laments that he “can see nothing,” to which Holmes replies, “On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything.  You fail, however, to reason from what you see.  You are too timid in drawing your inferences.”[1]  Jesus spent His life drawing the inferences for His disciples – connecting the dots, explaining what things meant – but when confronted with the high priest, He probably realized that He’d never be able to explain it all.  So He simply said, “You say that I am.”

And then we come to the scene before Pontius Pilate, with that infamous verse that the crowd shouts: “His blood be on us and on our children!”  That verse has been responsible for the persecution of countless Jews, and the fact that it only appears in Matthew requires us to take a long, hard look at it tonight.  To understand it, we need to see where Matthew was coming from.

As we said last night, Mark was the first of the gospels written, around 60 AD. Matthew wasn’t written until about twenty years later, and in the meantime – in the year 70 AD – the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans.  After that the Sadducees – the aristocratic class of Jewish leaders – faded from view, and the Pharisees took control.  The Pharisees were legal scholars, and they tried to continue the style of Temple worship.  They instructed Jews to worship in their homes in the same way that they had in the Temple.

Matthew was a Jewish Christian, and so he wanted Jews to follow the teachings of Jesus, not the Pharisees.  So it makes sense that in Matthew Jesus tells His disciples to “call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father – who is in heaven.” (23:9)

So it makes sense that Matthew was none too fond of the Pharisees, and so he portrayed them in a pretty negative light.  But we have to go further than that in understanding these troubling verses that have been the impetus for so much evil.  We need to realize that when the crowd shouts out, “His blood be on us,” the “us” they’re talking about isn’t the Jews in general, or a few Jews in particular, but all of us.  There’s a reason that when we do dramatic readings of the Passion we – the congregation, all of us – shout out, “Crucify him!  Crucify him!”  Because we are responsible – our sins, our fallenness, our hard-heartedness. 

And if we try to shift the blame to someone else, we’re missing the central message of the Passion: that when good came into the world, the world would not tolerate it.  We couldn’t stand the presence of God in our midst.  We didn’t connect the dots; we insisted on understanding His message in our own terms, no matter how warped that might be.  And when we couldn’t make God do what we wanted Him to do – whether that be revolution for the disciples, or appeasement for the authorities – when we God refused to be our idol, we got rid of Him.  We killed Him. 

It’s funny, isn’t it?  The Bible says, “His blood be on us.” We shout out on Palm Sunday: “Crucify Him!”  But when it comes to assessing blame, it’s always their fault, whoever they are. 

If we take a good, long look at Matthew, we’ll realize that they are us. 

[1] Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981): 246; as quoted in Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000): 27.

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