Readings:
Matthew 21:1-11
Isaiah 50:4-7
Psalm 22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 23-24
Philippians 2:6-11
Matthew 26:14—27:66
“Let him be crucified!” that’s one of our lines as members of the “crowd” in the Passion narrative from the Gospel of Matthew that begins Holy Week in this year’s liturgical cycle. Depending on the practice of our respective Catholic parishes and communities, an interactive reading of the Gospel on Palm Sunday involves multiple voices, or hands in signed languages. This participation includes the clamor of the assembly as an ad hoc chorus playing the “crowd.”
Over the course of a 3-year lectionary cycle, each synoptic Gospel gets its turn on
Palm Sunday, while the Gospel of John remains the consistent narrative for the Good Friday liturgy. In Matthew, the crowd gets another line, exclusive to this Gospel: “His blood be upon us and upon our children” (27:25).
In our Christian theologies and practices, this brief acclamation has been dangerously misinterpreted for many centuries. At first it fueled anti-Judaism and then helped seed an antisemitism that mars our human relationships to this day. Sadly, sixty years after Vatican II promulgated Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, the signs of our times indicate a disturbing rise in antisemitism nationally and globally.
The root of the problem lies with misinterpreting certain Gospel texts, especially out of context. In this case, Matthew 27:25 is misconstrued as an admission by the Jewish crowd of collusion in deicide, and as an acknowledgment of the consequence—an eternal transgenerational curse.
In context, the author of Matthew is trying to make sense of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, with a fractured Jewish community a generation or more removed from the death of Jesus. Struggling among themselves as Jews, some of whom identified as Jesus-followers, the profound loss of the Temple to Roman imperialism cried out for meaning, and perhaps sanitizing Pilate was a survival strategy. Pilate was a representative of the Roman empire, who was removed at some point for cruelty. Caiphas, the high priest, was a tool of Pilate owing his position and authority to the governor. Crucifixion was a peculiarly Roman form of capital punishment, an effective means of quashing potential insurrection.
The misuse of Matthew 27:25 gave rise to what can be described as a conspiracy theory born of fake news. The prevailing interpretation held that the Jewish people as a whole bore the collective burden for the death of Jesus and thus they would have to pay the price throughout history. Persecution, in so many forms, from social exclusion and discrimination through expulsions, pogroms and even the Holocaust were malevolently regarded as justifiable and were used to dehumanize Jewish people, deploy them as scapegoats for socio-economic problems, and seize their assets.
What is a well-trained tongue to do when confronted with the Passion narrative in the Gospel of Matthew in the context of our own troubled times? Currently, with the rise of Christian nationalism and neo-Crusaderism in the USA, as well as internationally, antisemitic tropes have been steadily creeping back into our daily vocabularies, evident in cultural constructions of a romanticized “Western Civilization,” public prayers, political speech, militarized rhetoric, online memes, and even body art. Violent actions and verbal assaults targeting Jewish people and communities create climates of anxiety, distrust, vigilance, and fear.
On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, Pope Leo XIV confirmed that he stands with his predecessors in asserting that the Church “does not tolerate anti-Semitism and fights against it, on the basis of the Gospel itself.” In this general audience dedicated to interreligious dialogue, he called all, together, to “be vigilant against the abuse of the name of God, of religion, and of dialogue itself, as well as against the dangers posed by religious fundamentalism and extremism.”
Isaiah reminds possessors of well-trained tongues of their obligation to rouse the weary and Paul draws attention to the dynamic process of kenosis, self-emptying. These exhausting times of ours challenge us as teachers, preachers, activists, religious leaders, ministers, influencers, the faithful and the seekers, to empty ourselves of harmful misinterpretations. Such baggage has tarnished the transmission of our faith, especially in relation to what Pope John XXIII understood as our original relationship with the Jewish people with whom we share a spiritual patrimony. To rouse the weary, we must first rouse and resource ourselves. Grappling with the fraught legacy of Matthew 27:25 takes on a new urgency in an age of unmitigated hate. It becomes a sacred obligation.
Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández is professor of Hispanic theology and ministry and director of the Hispanic Theology and Ministry Program at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
Catholic Resources:
Catholic Biblical Association of America, “Fact Sheet on the Death of Jesus,” https://assets.noviams.com/novi-file-uploads/cba/PDFs/Resources/CBA_Fact_Sheet_on_the_Death_of_Jesus-c1e9c535.pdf.
Catholic Biblical Association of America, Addressing Representations of Jews and Judaism in Catholic Exegesis, Homiletics, and Catechesis, https://mjhnyc.org/antisemitism/.