April 17, 2011
Matt 26: 14--27: 66
Willow Towers, New Rochelle
NYLT, Durland Scout Res., Putnam Valley
Pilate uses a powerful symbolic action to disclaim any personal responsibility for what he sees is the unjust condemnation of Jesus.
But there are a couple of problems with Pilate’s action. The 1st is that such an action usually implies guilt and responsibility. You’ve no doubt noticed that at every Mass the priest washes his hands before we all begin to pray the Eucharistic Prayer, to offer the great sacrifice of the body and blood of Jesus to the Father. This is a ritual cleansing. As he washes his hands, the priest prays quietly, “Lord, wash away my iniquity; cleanse me from my sin.” Before offering sacrifice, before touching the Lord’s body, much less consuming it, the priest prays for moral purity. In 1 Corinthians St. Paul advises all of us not to come to the Eucharist unaware of what we’re doing, unworthily, lest we eat and drink sacrilegiously and incur our own condemnation (11:27-29).
Some of you may have read Macbeth in school, or perhaps seen it on stage. As you know, Lady Macbeth provokes her husband to 2 murders. In Act V, scene 1, we find her sleepwalking and repeatedly making the motions of washing her hands: “Look how she rubs her hands,” one observer remarks. One of the ladies in waiting responds, “It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.” At that point, Lady Macbeth speaks: “Yet here’s a spot. Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” And she makes references to the murder of Banquo, followed by, “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? What, will these hand ne’er be clean? Here’s the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” The stains upon her hands that won’t come off are, of course, the stains of her guilt, which no physical washing can cleanse.
The 2d problem with Pilate’s action is that he’s the man in charge. He just doesn’t have the courage to do what’s right. He can’t really duck the responsibility for condemning an innocent man. President Harry Truman famously said, “The buck stops here,” at his desk. Pilate is just as guilty as “the chief priests and elders” who are lusting for Jesus’ blood and stirring up the crowd to scream, “Let him be crucified!”
So Pilate’s little ritual of washing his hands doesn’t really indicate innocence. Those who need to wash themselves have dirt to remove. We Christians seek a sacramental washing in Baptism, which removes our sins, and usually when we come to church we use holy water to make the sign of the cross and remind ourselves of our Baptism and the sanctifying power of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.
The people in Pilate’s courtyard, however, don’t care about his conscience. They’re more than ready to call the blood of Jesus down upon themselves, and upon their children as well.
The 1st meaning of having Jesus’ blood upon them is responsibility. They’re admitting that they desire Jesus’ death and don’t care whether he’s innocent or guilty. When we say that someone has blood on his hands, we mean he’s guilty of someone’s unjust death. Just on Friday, a Salesian priest serving in Ivory Coast remarked of the civil war there, “In these months there have been massacres on both sides, and no one’s hands are clean.” Pilate may think he can duck responsibility for the guilt of murder; the chief priests, the elders, and the crowd openly embrace it.
One unfortunate strand of Christian tradition has maintained that the guilt of murdering Jesus belongs strictly to the Jewish people, summed up in a phrase like, “The Jews killed Jesus Christ.” Certainly some specific individuals were responsible for that, but not the entire nation, not even the entire city of Jerusalem, and not generation after generation of Jews.
A more reliable strand of Christian tradition maintains that “the people” who cause Jesus’ death, who have his blood on their hands, is all of us. The people in Pilate’s courtyard speak for every human being. All of us who are sinners are responsible for Jesus’ death on the cross. All of us who’ve ever done anything unjust to another person have screamed, “Crucify him!” It’s entirely true that Jesus died for our sins.
The 2d meaning of having Jesus’ blood upon us is redemption. In the OT animal sacrifices were offered to God in atonement for personal sins and for the sins of the whole people. Thruout the letters of the NT and the Book of Revelation we find references to our having been washed clean of our sins by his blood. E.g., St. Peter writes: “Realize that you were ransomed…not by any diminishable sum of silver or gold, but by Christ’s blood beyond all price: the blood of a spotless, unblemished lamb chosen before the world’s foundation” (1 Pet 1:18-20).
Peter implies that Jesus is the Lamb of God, and both the Gospel of John and Revelation refer explicitly to him as such—the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, the Passover lamb whose blood seals the lips of Christians as the blood of lambs marked the doors of the Hebrews in Egypt so that they would be spared when the angel of death passed over the land; the lamb of sacrifice offered to God on the altar of the cross, as lambs were sacrificed in the Temple.
St. John recounts in his gospel how, to make sure that Jesus was dead upon the cross, “one of the soldiers thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out” (19:34). Whatever the physiological explanation for that, it’s a rich sacramental sign. Blood is a sacramental sign; so is water. Only those cleansed in the waters of Baptism, only those who have been christened, made into images of Jesus by Baptism, may approach the Eucharist, eat his body and drink his blood, the food of our eternal life (John 6). And Baptism has its saving power because of the cross of Christ. As he died in faithfulness to his heavenly Father, and so was raised to new life, so do we die in Baptism, submerging in the waters and emerging with a new spiritual life and the promise of eternal life. The link between the blood and the water that flowed from Christ’s side enable St. John to proclaim in the Book of Revelation that all those who have been saved “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (7:14). Ironic, isn’t it, that blood on our hands is an unwashable stain of guilt, but Christ’s blood washes us clean!
So tightly linked are Christ’s blood and Christian salvation that even pagan persecutors knew the link. There’s a famous account of the martyrs at Carthage—St. Perpetua, St. Felicity, and their companions--early in the 3d century, in 203 specifically, that tells how they were led to wild beasts in the arena. When a leopard took a huge bite into one of them, covering him with blood, the pagan crowd in the arena cried out, “Washed and saved! Washed and saved!” They were mocking Christian faith, but they spoke truly, for the martyrs joined their own blood to Christ’s.* Likewise, the crowd calling for Jesus’ blood in Pilate’s courtyard spoke truly: his blood is upon us, to save us by washing away our sins and making us his own people.
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