Lent: Story of Power and Control

One of my enjoyments, each liturgical calendar year, began this past Wednesday.  A bit early this year but what mental and soul pleasure I am, once again, experiencing reading this story presented in the four different witnesses.  During the next forty five days of Lent it is going to be interesting to look specifically at the different tellings of the events and reviewing the main characters leading up to the eternal rewarding of Jesus dying on the cross. How there are the differences in each testimony offering 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.

This year, I’ve downloaded Roy Harrisville’s, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers and found his observation that Matthew’s crucifixion narrative and greater gospel emphasizes “the way of the humiliated Christ.” In my reading of Matthew, I am always struck by the interplay between power and control, an interesting dynamic on which he chose to focus on. Over and above the motif (new use of word) shared with Mark, Matthew seems to add a dimension of inquiry about power, and along with it, the hint that all is not as it seems.  So I’m asking, who wants control? Who thinks they’re in control? Who is really in control? 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.”

 So, 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 ( my made up word ), 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 sends a chill through my spirit. 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: 

“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.“

Father, God, thank You for the part of Your story that moves You Son Jesus toward the cross and told through eyes that remind me He has come for a world of unique individuals.  Thank You that I am finding in it a story of power and weakness that is turning some of my long held common assumptions and experience on their head.  Like in the parables, Jesus gave, the way of the way of the humiliated Christ confounds me, approaching in power, though hidden in the unlikely gift of a servant.  Amen