Lent V Sermon Year A 2014 “Why I Can No Longer Recite Matthew 27:25” Sunday, April 6, 2014 The Rev. Peter Faass, Rector Christ Church, Shaker Heights Next week is Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week, the most sacred time of year for Christians. As has been our practice at Christ Church, we will conclude the Palm Sunday service with the reading of the Passion narrative by several people from the laity. Because it is Year A in the lectionary cycle, the Passion will be from Matthew’s Gospel. Next Sunday we will read Matthew’s version of Jesus’ final hours but with one notable omission. And that omission is verse 25 from chapter 27. This omitted verse is contained within the portion of the story telling of Jesus’ trial before Pontius Pilate. Pilate is befuddled by the apparent innocence of the man Jesus standing before him and yet also frightened that a riot will break out among the angry mob outside his door that want Jesus crucified and are awaiting Pilate’ s verdict. Not sure of what to do, he decides to remove himself from any culpability. Pilate takes a bowl of water used for purification before meals, washes his hands and then proclaims, “I am innocent of this man’s blood. See to it yourselves.” [Matthew 27:24] At this point the text tells us, “Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’” That is verse 25: “His blood be on us and on our children.” It can be argued that Matthew 27:25 stands out as one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted passages in all of Holy Scripture and trust me it has some good competition. What has prevailed ever since those words were penned into the text is the anti-Jewish interpretation, which is the oldest and most frequently cited in the history of the Church to justify Christian, and eventually secular, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. This one short verse of scripture – misinterpreted and taken out of context- has been used to convict the Jewish people of being permanently guilty and condemned in the eyes of God for their alleged murder of Jesus Christ. As such, the cry of “His blood be on us and on our children” means that the Jewish crowd in Jerusalem admitted full guilt for the killing of Jesus Christ and thereby invoked God’s curse upon themselves and their descendants until the end of time. For the past two millennia this interpretation has been the warrant that Christians have used to exact hideous and often deathly vengeance upon the Jews for this crime. This interpretation first surfaced in the writings of the early church fathers in the second century CE. It became universally accepted by the Middle Ages. The result, among other things, was the slanderous accusation that Jews were “Christ killers” and “murderers of God.” Sadly, this is still a widespread belief in much of the Church today. 1 The anti-Jewish interpretation of Matthew 27:25 provided a convenient excuse for outright persecution and slaughter of the Jewish people and the unwarranted replacement of Israel in God’s plan with the Church by Replacement Theology. Jewish historian Haim Cohen painfully observes the terrible judgment wrongly made against the Jews because of the prevalence of the anti-Jewish interpretation of Matthew 27:25. He writes: “None of the many charges leveled at the Jews… has held so obdurately against them as unassailable proof of guilt and responsibility for the crucifixion as has this exclamation of their, “His blood be on us and on our children.” (The Trial and Death of Jesus of Nazareth, p. 171) When I told Fr. Jim Greer about my topic for today’s sermon he succinctly stated, “We Christians stole the God of the Jews, told them that God doesn’t love them anymore and then said ‘the hell with you.’” If the church is honest with itself it will admit that this observation by Jim is absolutely true. Yet nothing could be further from the message of scripture or the life of Jesus who, I will remind you was a Jew himself. If anything makes Jesus weep – and he’s got a lot of material to weep over – it is how we who call him Prince of Peace and Savior have used his name to kill the people who were his own. Nine words. Nine words that have wrought such devastation: the pogroms which preceded the First Crusade, the expulsion from England, the Blood Libel of the Middle Ages, the massacres of Spanish Jews, the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain, Cossack massacres in Ukraine, various pogroms in Imperial Russia, the Dreyfus affair in France, the publication of the specious book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in 1903. These and other events all then culminated in the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe that took the lives of six million Jewish people, among them one million children. In Hebrew the Holocaust is known as the Shoah, which translates as the Catastrophe. Nine words. Two thousand years of catastrophe. This is why I can no longer in good conscience have us recite the words of Matthew 27:25 in the Palm Sunday Passion narrative. And we will not. What we will do is endeavor to teach the Biblical scholarship that refutes this anti-Jewish interpretation. We will remind ourselves and others that in his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul stated that “glory and honor and peace [are] for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the [Gentile]. For God shows no partiality.” (Rom. 2:10) We will point to Jesus’ own words in John’s Gospel where when he encounters the Samaritan Woman at the well, he states, “for salvation is from the Jews.” And we will work toward modeling our lives after that of Jesus, which are embodied in our Diocesan bumper sticker that proclaims, “God loves you. No exceptions.” 2 Ultimately we will do whatever we can to make sure that the misinterpretation of Matthew 27:25, or any other part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, never again leads humanity to commit any more catastrophe. To that end we Christians must repent and ask for forgiveness from the Jewish community for the long historical mistreatment of the Jews done in the name of Jesus Christ. We can begin this process of repentance by rejecting any theological understanding that perpetuates the reckless anti-Jewish meaning of Matthew 27:25 and that continues to condemn and labels all Jews with the infamous stigma of “Christ killers.” And we begin that process by rooting out that lingering theology in our own minds. Equally as important in this process of forgiveness is remembering and honoring those who have suffered the consequences of this tragic history between the Jews and the nations. Last year in 2013, which is the year 5773 in the Hebrew calendar, a book was published titled, And Every Single One Was Someone. The book does not have an author but rather someone who conceived its concept. His name is Phil Chernofsky. The cover page of the book says this: “Six million. 6,000,000 This number is permanently etched into the mind of the Jewish consciousness. Say the number to anyone and the immediate association will be: the Holocaust. Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. There are museums like Yad Vashem. There are days like Yom HaSho’a. There are special programs, lectures, films, pictures. Sometimes we need to focus our thoughts. This entire book contains only one word: Jew. It appears in 40 columns on 120 lines on every one of 625 sheets (1250 pages). Each page has 4800 Jews on it. There are six million Jews in this book. Flip through the pages. Choose one at random. Hold the book at arm’s length. Notice how the words and the columns seem to look like nothing. More like a design. 3 Then look closer. Focus on one Jew. Think of that word as one actual Jew. A relative, perhaps, or a friend. Maybe even yourself. A living, breathing person. Murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Now choose a row at random. A whole family. Parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins. All gone. Look at another row. Maybe they represent your class at school. Or a circle of friends and neighbors. A whole page might represent a beautiful Jewish community somewhere in Europe – wiped out. This book contains the word Jew 6,000,000 times. And every single one was someone. Men, women, children. They are gone. But we remember them.” Nine little words: Never again a catastrophe. Amen. 4