38. Matthew 27:1-44

Jesus Taken to Pilate (Mt.27:1-2)

Jewish leadership at this time could not enforce capital punishment, so they took Jesus and handed him off to Pilate for execution. This deed itself was testimony against them and their intentions. The Qumran Temple Scroll says, “If there were to be a spy against his people who betrays his people to a foreign nation or causes evil against his people, you shall hang him from a tree and he will die.”[1] Their judgment is coming.

Judas’ Death (Mt.27:3-10)

Judas has watched events unfold and Jesus’ fate sealed. Suddenly the enormity of what he has done clobbers him. He changed his mind (v.3; NRSV has “repented” but this is not the verb Jesus uses to call people into his kingdom), returned the blood money (v.4) he negotiated with the Jewish leaders. And hanged himself (v.5). I quoted N. T. Wright in the last chapter on the difference between Peter’s and Judas’ response to their betrayals. Here a bit more: “But the first (Judas) goes down the hill of anger, recrimination, self-hatred and ultimately self-destruction, the way that leads to death. The second goes down the route Peter took, of tears, shame, and a way back to life.”[2]

Blood, Jesus’ innocent blood, stains everyone in this story. Judas, obviously, but also the Sanhedrin who falsely convicted Jesus and turned him over to Pilate, and the officials who gave Judas the bribe to betray Jesus, and, finally, the temple itself where Judas casts the blood money (v.5), and the chief priests who bought the potter’s field, the “Field of Blood” with it to bury foreigners (v.7). All stand under God’s judgment.

Even these terrible events fall under the sway of God’s control, however, as Matthew’s citation from Jeremiah, er, Zechariah, shows (though it is not exact). Matthew actually does quote the latter here. And beside some shared words - “thirty pieces,” “throw,” “potter” – there doesn’t seem much to tie it to this context. So we have the apparently wrong citation and the connection of the passage cited to the context to consider. Let’s look at each in turn.

-Matthew is following a procedure he uses elsewhere. Leithart explains,

“In Matt. 21:5, Matthew conflates Isa. 62:11 (‘say to daughter Zion’) with Zech. 9:9 (‘your King is coming to you,’ etc.). Matt. 2:5-6 quotes from Micah, but the line ‘who will shepherd my people Israel’ is from 2 Sam.5:2. Yet, Matthew says that this quotation was written by ‘the prophet.’ Here in Matthew 27, Matthew is doing it again. He quotes from Zechariah but evokes passages in Jeremiah at the same time. Several passages in Jeremiah refer to potters and pottery, fields and purchases, and innocent blood (Jer. 18-19; 32:6-15). Whenever Matthew or another New Testament writer gives us these mixed quotations, they want us to consider the passages together.”[3]

-How does this mixed quotation help us understand our passage? In Zechariah 11:12-13 the people are condemned for placing such low value, in fact, the price of a slave (Ex.21:32),[4] on God while the Jeremiah allusions bring in the idea of purchasing the Potter’s field.

Jesus, Pilate, and Barabbas (Mt.27:11-26)

Jesus Before Pilate (vv.11-14)

When asked by the Governor if he is “King of the Jesus,” Jesus replies. “You said it, not me” (my colloquial paraphrase). Even when the Jewish leaders lodge their accusations against him, Jesus does not defend himself to Pilate against them. This astonishes him greatly (v.14).

I take this episode as Matthew’s narrative version of the conversation Jesus and Pilate have in Jn.18 about political authority. There Jesus tells Pilate he would have no authority over him unless Jesus gave it to him and that his kingdom is of another order than Pilate’s altogether. Here, he simply remains silent. A sovereign silence. He neither owes nor proffers the governor an explanation even though he holds Jesus’ life in his hands. No wonder Pilate is astonished.

Pilate and Barabbas (Mt.27:15-26)

“Roman law recognized two kinds of amnesty: acquittal before the trial and pardon of the condemned; this is the latter. Pilate was not required by law to cooperate, but he had severely irritated the priestly aristocracy and Jerusalemites at the beginning of his tenure and may have wished to avoid further problems.”[5] For whatever reason, though, Pilate knowing the jealousy that drove the Jews to bring Jesus Messiah to him for execution (v.19) and having witnessed first-hand the integrity and courage of this Jesus and hearing off his wife’s dream of Jesus’ innocence and advice to have nothing to do with him[6] takes advantage of this custom to put the decision about him off on others.

“Jesus Barrabas (a notorious thief) or Jesus Messiah – which one should I release?” Pilate asks the gathered crowd. They choose the former. “What about Jesus Messiah then?” “Crucify him!” the crowd insists. “For what reason?” the governor asks. No answer is given him. Only a rising crescendo of “Let him be crucified!” (v.23).

Pilate takes no chances at any misunderstanding in this increasingly emotional and dangerous situation (v.24). He washes his hands of Jesus (literally and figuratively), declaring “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it (his crucifixion) yourselves” (v.24). So Barrabas was released and Jesus flogged and bound over for execution.

In the mysterious providence of God this “tale of two Jesuses” sets out ahead of time a tableau of what is about to happen. Wright explains:

“It was part of the strange fate of the moment, that there should be, in prison in Jerusalem, a notorious brigand leader who (like several other rebel leaders of the time) bore the common name Jesus. 'Jesus Barabbas', he was called, and Matthew rubs our noses in the fact of Pilate asking the crowd to choose, for their festival celebration, one of these Jesuses to be released. We are, perhaps, not likely to miss the point Matthew wants to make, but he presses on. By the end of the passage it is crystal clear. Barabbas represents all of us. When Jesus dies, the brigand goes free, the sinners go free, we all go free. That, after all, is what a Passover story ought to be about.”[7]

Soldiers Abuse and Manhandle Jesus (Mt.27:27-31)

Israel was called to be a priestly people (Ex.19:5-6), to sacrifice itself on behalf of the world bearing God’s blessing to it (Gen.12:1-3). But Israel has turned its back on that divine mandate and sided with God’s enemies. Their leaders have pronounced Jesus’ guilt and blasphemy. Their people have echoed this judgment and made it dramatic by choosing another Jesus to be released while crying for God’s Jesus to be crucified. Now Pilate has placed the empire on that side of the ledger too. Noe hois soldiers join in the “fun.”

Pilate’s soldiers take Jesus in hand and have a bit of sport with him. They hold a mock coronation of him as “King of the Jews” (v.29) in Pilate’s headquarters. Their “whole cohort” provides the audience who watch while Jesus is robed in scarlet and crowned with a wreath of thorns (vv.28-29) and acclaim him as King. They celebrate his coronation by spitting on him, beating him about the heads with reeds, mocking and stripping him, and re-clothing him in his own clothes. Then off to the actual coronation on Skull Hill. 

The lone faithful Israelite, it’s true prophet, priest, and king, is about to meet his fate.

The Preparation for the Crucifixion/Coronation of Jesus (Mt.27:32-44)

At this highest (or is it the lowest) moment in the drama between God and his world, Matthew spares no effort to remind us that just at this moment above all others God is in full control of this travesty.

-in v.35 Psa.69:21 is alluded to

-the casting of lots for his clothes (also in v.35) alludes to Psa.22:16

-Jesus is crucified among the transgressors (Isa.53:12)

Leithart captures the irony beneath the surface of that soldiers’ actions simply fulfilling scripture. “The irony is deeper. When they fulfill prophecy, they undermine their mockery. Everything the soldiers do proves that Jesus is who He said He is.”[8] Or as A Declaration of Faith puts it: “When he lived as a servant and went humbly to his death the greatness that belongs only to God was manifest.”[9] (There are a number of other allusions to Old Testament passages here that I cannot explore; see Leithart: 4688-4719).

Simon, a man from Cyrene, is at some point along the way made to take the cross from Jesus and bear it the rest of the way to Skull Hill. 

“Cyrene, a large city in what is now Libya in North Africa, had a large Jewish community that no doubt included local converts; ‘Simon’ is a Jewish name. Like multitudes of foreign Jews, he had come to Jerusalem for the feast. Roman soldiers could impress any person into service to carry things for them. The condemned person himself normally had to carry the horizontal beam (Latin patibulum) of the cross out to the site where the upright stake (Latin palus) awaited; but Jesus’ back had been too severely scourged for him to do this.”[10]

As we have come to expect from Matthew his historical notes like these often bear a deeper meaning. I believe that is the case here. Jesus has commanded his followers to take up their cross and follow him (10:38). His closest followers, under the pressure and threat of Rome have failed to do that at crunch time. But here, by narrating the Roman impressment of Simon into such service, we see one bearing up under this pressure and bearing a cross to the bitter end. We don’t know whether Simon was a follower of Jesus or not or just a Jew in town for the festival. But like the Roman centurion and his buddies at the end of the crucifixion story who declare, “Truly this man’s was God’s Son!” (v.54), and about whose true commitment we never learn, these bookends seem to me to serve as placeholders for the Gospel’s outreach to both Jews (Simon) and Gentiles (the centurion).

Earlier in the story James and John wanted to be at Jesus’ left and right hand and Jesus questioned whether they understood, and if they did, did they truly want those positions (Mt.20:20-23). Here we see what that entailed: martyrdom. A witness that ended up with the witness enthroned on a cross surrounded by brigands and traitors.

All this, spiced by peoples’ jibes and taunts, repetition of the false testimony at his trial, and even the thieves’ disrespect on Golgatha, point out the ubiquity of the sinfulness that engulfs Jesus.

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[1] Cited in Wilkins, Matthew: 5716.

[2] Wright, Matthew for Everyone: 174.

[3] Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew: 4418-4424.

[4] Keener, Background Commentary on the New Testament on this verse.

[5] Keener, Background Commentary on the New Testament on vv.15-18.

[6] “Although Roman matrons were ideally quiet, many stories praised aristocratic Roman women who privately influenced their husbands to some noble course of action. Dreams were respected in all Mediterranean cultures as sometimes being revelatory,” Keener, Background Commentary on the New Testament on v.19.

[7] Wright, Matthew for Everyone: 178.

[8] Leihart, The Gospel of Matthew: 4688.

[9] Ch.4 par.3.

[10] Keener, Background Commentary on the New Testament on Mt.27:32.