The
Liturgy of the Palms
The
Liturgy of the Word
When
I was a child, the place I went the most, besides home, school, and (possibly)
church, was the county library. It was
an exceptionally fine one, as I came to appreciate later, and at least once a
week in the summertime my mother would drop my brothers and I off for a couple
of hours while she ran her errands and when she came back we’d check out
shopping bags full of books to read until the next time. I recall disappearing into the dark canyons
between the stacks of the children’s section and volumes in series lined up on
the shelves like veins of precious ore: The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, the
Childhoods of Great Americans. And I
also remember a spacious, open area with picture books lying flat on desk-like
shelves, and two of them, in particular, that I was drawn back to look at again
and again.
One
was called “Four Days,” and it was a photojournalistic compilation about the
assassination of President Kennedy, his funeral and burial. I don’t remember the title of the other, but
it was a re-telling, with modern woodcut illustrations, of the story of the
Passion of Jesus. Looking back, it is
not hard to understand what appealed to me so powerfully about those
books. It was partly a child’s
fascination with violence and death, but it was also the drama, the unfolding
of a series of tableaus, each with new characters, adding a new emotional
dimension to the tragedy. The death of
the main figure was the center of the plot, but it was these other participants
who gave each story its richness. I can
still clearly picture in my mind certain iconic images of those characters: the
shocked young woman in the cabin of the Presidential jet, standing by in her
blood-stained coat while her husband’s successor takes the oath of office; the Roman
soldiers, rolling dice for Jesus’ clothing at the foot of the cross.
These
are dramas in which everyone participated.
Entire generations can remember where they were when they heard that JFK
had been shot—it was a trauma that affected the whole nation. And the Passion Gospel makes the claim that
the death of Jesus was like that, too.
So it’s no wonder that we read it in the form of a drama in which the whole
congregation takes part. Because it impacts
all of us, and having seen and heard it, we can’t be in the world in the same
way again.
Of
all the Gospels, the one “according to Matthew,” makes this argument most forcefully. I am thinking in particular of that moment in
the story when Pontius Pilate makes a show of washing his hands and declaring
himself innocent of Jesus’ blood. Up to
this point, Jesus’ actions in Jerusalem have been attended by various
crowds. He rode into the city astride a
donkey and a great crowd spread garments and branches on the road, and went
before him and behind. And when he
taught in the temple and told parables against the chief priests and the scribes,
the crowds were there, listening intently.
When the priests and elders followed Judas out to arrest Jesus in the garden,
a crowd came with them carrying swords and clubs, and again the next morning a
crowd went along when they took him to accuse him before Pilate. But it is never clear exactly who is in these
crowds from one scene to the next, if it’s the same people or different.
But
when Pilate washes his hands, the writer of Matthew makes a sudden and
momentous change in terminology. Instead
of ochlos, meaning a crowd of
indeterminate size and composition, he writes laos, from which comes our word “laity,” meaning the inhabitants of
a city or a nation as a whole. The
result is one of the most infamous lines in the entire Bible: “Then the laos, the people as a whole, answered,
‘His blood be on us and on our children!’”
In time, authoritative teachers of the church would interpret this text
to mean that in that moment the Jewish people willingly incurred perpetual
guilt for Jesus’ crucifixion. This, more
than any other single New Testament passage, would fuel centuries of Christian hatred
of Jews, and barbarous violence, oppression, and cruelty against them.
But
to read these words as Christian anti-Jewish polemic is an anachronistic
error. In the time this Gospel was
written, there was no “Christian religion” separate from Judaism. If those people shouting at Pilate spoke for “the
whole nation,” that, by definition, included the followers of Jesus. Peter and the rest may not have been there, howling
for his blood, but they had deserted him the night before, and surely felt some
share in the guilt for what happened to him.
Not only that, but I think it is
possible to find in these words resonances, with the Hebrew scriptures and within
the Gospel of Matthew itself, that suggest some very different avenues of
meaning.
There
can be no doubt that in the Passion story “blood” is a synonym for
“guilt.” That is certainly how Pilate
uses it. The passage about the death of
Judas does the same, several times. But
we also have to consider the bigger picture.
We have to remember that the backdrop for this entire drama is the
Passover, the great annual festival of remembrance of God’s liberation of the whole
people of Israel from slavery. And like
so many other moments in the Passion gospel, this one may be a symbolic
reference to the Passover story. Chapter
12 of the Book of Exodus tells how, before the Passover night, Moses summoned
“all the elders of Israel” and told them to have each family kill a lamb. And he instructed them to put the blood of
that lamb on the lintel and the doorposts of their homes, as a sign of
protection from the angel of death, so that it would not enter to kill their
first-born, as it would do to the Egyptians. Moses goes on to say, “You shall observe this
rite as an ordinance for you and for your children for ever.”
There
may also be a reference here to the scene at Mt. Sinai, further on in the
Exodus story, where God gave Moses the law.
After Moses came down from the mountain he sacrificed peace offerings of
oxen to the Lord. Then he read God’s covenant aloud to the
people, and they said “All that the Lord
has spoken we will do.” And Moses took
the blood of the sacrifices and threw it on the people, saying, “Behold the
blood of the covenant which the Lord
has made with you.” It would seem like
a stretch to relate this story with the Passion Gospel if Jesus himself hadn’t
made the same connection himself, when he lay down with his disciples for the
Passover meal. He took a cup, and gave
it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the
covenant, which is poured out for many...”
--and here Matthew adds something that is absent in the other accounts
of this moment, in Mark, Luke, and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians—“…for
the forgiveness of sins.”
In older
published versions of today’s dramatic reading, the line “his blood be upon us,
and upon our children” was said by everyone, and I think this was an
appropriate choice. Because it is not
simply the hideous slander it would later become; it’s the ironic key that
unlocks the heart of the Passion Gospel for us.
When we do not try to falsely wash away our own part in shedding the
blood of the innocent, our guilt for the violence, betrayal, and hypocrisy that
stains our whole nation, and calls the survival of our children into question, we
receive the sign of God’s protection, and deliverance from the power of death. We are renewed in God’s covenant of
forgiveness.
When
we hear of the children gassed in Idlib, or blown apart in the mosque in Mosul,
or dead of starvation in Somalia, we know they are not other people’s children. They are our own. They are also our own victims, if only for deserting
them in their hour of need, and stopping short of doing everything in our power
to spare them from the angel of death. But
when we take the blood of lamb upon us, we no longer ask “who is to blame for
their deaths, and whom must we punish to avenge them?” We ask “what would have to happen for all of
us, who are implicated in their suffering, to acknowledge our guilt, and seek
the forgiveness of those we have harmed?”
And, “what amends would have to make, for our victims and their families
to be able to forgive us?” And, “What could
be my part in that drama?”
