Sixth Sunday Of Lent - Palm Sunday
MATTHEW 26:14 – 27:66 (Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians 2:4-7)
Basic to Matthew’s version of the Passion Narrative is Mark’s version. Because there is so much material available in Matthew’s much longer Passion Narrative, it may be best to comment mostly on what Matthew changed when he adapted Mark’s version, what he deleted, and what he added. A foundational principle is the fact that in the Gospel of Mark Jesus is depicted as abandoned by God and by man. Mark wrote about the year 70, soon after a horrendous persecution of Christians in Rome and in view of the impending fall of Jerusalem to the Roman army. Thus in his portrait of an abandoned Jesus he portrays his feelings of abandonment and those of his suffering community of Christians
In both Mark and Matthew, prior to the Last Supper, Judas approached the chief priests with an offer to hand Jesus over to them. Mark: “They promised to give him money.” Matthew: “They paid him thirty pieces of silver.” Matthew is characteristically concerned to find Old Testament passages to “fulfill.” In an allegory about shepherds, the prophet Zechariah, 520-518 B.C., gives Matthew a solid outline for his treatment of the role of Judas in the betrayal of Jesus. The prophet speaks of a shepherd of the flock doomed to be slain….” He speaks of thirty shekels of silver weighed out as wages and cast into the treasury of the temple. Only in Matthew does Judas repent, return his wages to the chief priests, who would not accept them. Then he throws the silver into the temple, 27:3-5.
At the arrest of Jesus all four gospels note that a follower of Jesus draws his sword and cuts off the ear of a slave of the high priest. Matthew alone must find justification for this action in the Scriptures. Therefore the Matthean Jesus replies to the swordsman, “Put your sword away, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” This echoes Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.” Jesus then assures the swordsman that an appeal could be directed to the Father, and the Father would send “more than twelve legions of angels.” Then Matthew adds a principle that governs his whole version of the Passion Narrative, the role of Scripture in determining what was happening to Jesus, “But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” Nothing will stop the process. The Scriptures already determined it.
Matthew deletes Mark’s incident of the young follower of Jesus who wore only a linen cloth wrapped around him. The arrestors grab him. He slips out of his sheet and runs away naked. The best interpretation of the incident is this: the young man represents the disciples who at the beginning left all to follow Jesus. When the crunch comes, they leave all behind, even their clothes, to abandon him. This fits perfectly with Mark’s negative portrayal of both the family and the disciples of Jesus. This excessively negative portrayal is no doubt due to an overarching theme of Mark’s gospel, that Jesus was abandoned both by God and by mankind, as noted above.
There is no report of the death of Judas or its circumstances in Mark nor in the other gospels, but only in Matthew and Acts. Matthew’s version and that of Acts are contradictory. Matthew is driven by his search for justification of the death of Judas through Scriptures. Matthew notes that after Judas threw the silver into the temple, “He went out and hanged himself.” In the Second Book of Samuel, King David’s prime minister, Ahithophel, betrayed David by aligning himself with the rebellion of Absalom against David. When the rebellion was losing to the forces of King David, the betrayer “saddled his ass and went home. He set his affairs in order, and hanged himself.” In Acts of Apostles Judas “falls headlong, bursts open in the middle, and all his bowels gushed out.” Whatever occurred historically is not important for either Matthew or Acts. For Matthew the pattern for the death of Judas was set in the Old Testament . For Acts the pattern was set by a form of literature called “the death of tyrants.” The end is the same.
Only in Matthew “all the people cry out, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children.’”
This unfortunate addition by Matthew became one foundation of the persecution of Jews by Christians since Christianity came to political power in the fourth century. Does it mean that God takes revenge on the Jewish people as a whole and for all time? Vatican II rejected this interpretation. That Matthew’s intention was the worst imaginable is indicated by his cursing denunciation of Jewish leadership in Matthew 23. The Holy Spirit however can turn Matthew’s prejudice into a positive in this sense, that the blood of Jesus is as redemptive for his own people as it is for all people. There is no justification in this curse for the harassment, persecution, and massacre of Jews by Christians. The Scriptures must be understood in the context of the time and the author from which they originate.
Matthew follows Mark’s version of the death of Jesus up to a point. He cannot totally accept Mark’s abandonment of Jesus. In Mark the veil of the temple is torn in two, top to bottom, same in Matthew. Then God intervenes overwhelmingly in Matthew. There is an earthquake, one of four only in Matthew. The “bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep (died) came out of the tombs, and not just the centurion (as in Mark) but all present then make a profession of faith, “This man was surely Son of God!” There was hope after all.
