Matthew 27:32-56

Matthew 27:32-44     Jesus is Crucified

The name Simon was a Jewish name.  Cyrene was a country in Northern Africa.  Simon could well have been a Diaspora Jew home for the feast.  The fact that he was named may have indicated that, later, he became a disciple and was known to the early community.

Normally, criminals carried their own cross beams to the site of the execution.  Jesus may not have been strong enough to carry the beam for himself – due to the prior sadistic manhandling by the whole cohort. 

Wine and bile was understood to be a sedative.  Matthew’s wording echoed a line from Psalm 69.  Determined to retain his mental faculties, Jesus refused the drink.

Matthew gave no details of how Jesus was fixed to the cross.  Some criminals were nailed through their wrists and feet, others were tied with ropes.  Victims died naked – a particularly humiliating experience for any Jew.  Jesus would have been no exception.

Crucified rebels had obviously been sentenced to crucifixion because they were seen as threats to the Empire’s version of law and order.  Earlier in the narrative, James and John had voiced their hopes for places at Jesus’ right and left in his Kingdom [20.21].  They had no idea that Jesus would enter his Kingdom by crucifixion.  Instead, two rebels occupied the places at Jesus’ right and left.  At least, they were men who, like Jesus, rejected some imperial ways; but they had followed the path of violence, an approach clearly contrary to the way of Jesus.

Matthew showed three groups mocking Jesus:

• passers by, of whom there would have been many, since Golgotha was situated close to an important gate into the city.
• the chief priests, scribes and elders,
• and the two rebels.

Without their intending it, the taunt of the chief priests was true: Jesus could not save himself.  Salvation would remain his Father’s prerogative.  The emptiness of their claim that they would believe if he came down from the cross would be exposed when Jesus was raised.  Rather than believe, they would go to extreme ends to cover up the fact of resurrection.  Evidence rarely leads to faith.  Faith is the expression of profound conversion, involving heart and mind and soul.

Matthew 27:45-56     Jesus Dies

Matthew adopted Mark’s apocalyptic description of the last few hours of Jesus’ life.  Darkness was associated in much of the literature of the time with the cosmic signs of the ending of the world.  Its meaning and purpose were theological, not historical.  Jesus’ death would be a symbolic anticipation of the coming of the Son of Man.  Centuries before, the prophet Amos had warned the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel:

The cry, borrowed from Mark’s account, was the opening line of Psalm 22.  The psalm, as a whole, was a prayer of trust, made by a person in distress.  It concluded with the conviction that God looks after the just person.  No doubt, Matthew assumed that his readers were conversant with the psalm and its expression of confidence in God.  However, it was the opening line that issued from the mouth of Jesus: that line expressed the feeling of being totally forsaken, even by his God.

Jesus’ call to God was heard by bystanders as a call to Elijah.   In Jesus’ Galilean dialect, the words sounded similar.  Perhaps the gesture of the bystander, offering Jesus a sponge of the sour wine issued to soldiers, was meant to pacify him.  Others persisted in their sadism, wanting no relief to be offered to the tormented Jesus.  (In Matthew’s theology, Elijah had already returned in the person of John the Baptist [11:14].)

Was Jesus’ shout, once more, the same plea to God which he had made earlier? 

Matthew repeated the apocalyptic images drawn from Mark.  The veil to which Matthew referred was the veil separating the Holy of Holies – the place of God’s presence – from the rest of the temple. 

The observation was theological, not historical.  It made two complementary statements:

• In Jesus, through faith, every disciple now has access to God. (This was clearly Mark’s thought.)
• As a holy place, the temple has become redundant and its replacement has begun.  Matthew may have intended this as an explanatory reference to the destruction of the temple, and, with it, the whole city of Jerusalem, which happened forty years later (and which he interpreted as consequence of the sin of the chief priests and elders, along with the people as a whole, in procuring the death of Jesus).
• According to the priestly mindset, the killing of victims was understood to divert God's punishment for certain sinful activities - as though God somehow required death in order that God's anger be satisfied. That sacrificial mindset disposed the high priestly cast to accept without quibble the death of Jesus. However, their killing of the innocent Jesus exposed their radical misconception of the merciful God. The tearing of the curtain symbolised the revealing to everyone "with eyes to see" of the emptiness of the sacrificial system, and the ultimate demise of the temple and of priesthood.

These lines were Matthew’s own addition.  The earthquake was a further cosmic sign of the apocalyptic end of the age, as were the resuscitated holy ones. 

For Matthew, Jesus’ death and resurrection both constituted the one apocalyptic event.  That explained his awkward statement that, when Jesus died, the holy ones were raised, but did not appear until Jesus was raised.  Somehow, Matthew wanted to make Jesus’ resurrection happen prior to the resurrection of the saints, yet to connect their resurrection to his death.  This same concern to connect the death and resurrection as the one saving event would explain the repetition of his reference to an earthquake when Jesus was raised.

In the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of Man had come in glory.  However, his coming remained anticipatory, and is yet to occur in it fullness.  His disciples still have work to do. 

Time and time again, Matthew insisted that the events of Jesus’ life, and particularly his death and resurrection, fitted closely into God’s eternal plan: Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets.

God did not require, much less demand, the death of Jesus, any more than God demanded the death of the many prophets and righteous persons who preceded Jesus.  In Matthew’s view, it was the religious establishment, in collaboration with the political power, which demanded Jesus’ death.  Theirs was the violent blood lust.  Theirs was the expression of the sin of the world.

God permitted Jesus’ death.  Indeed, God gave Jesus to the world so that the world might be released from its sin. Right from his Infancy Narrative, Matthew emphasised that God had sent Jesus into the world so that he might "save the people from their sins" [1:21].

Matthew did not indicate how Jesus brought that salvation about, though Psalm 40 expressed well both the object of God’s desire and the response of Jesus:

Throughout his passion narrative, Matthew consistently showed Jesus in control of what happened to him.  Jesus voluntarily surrendered himself into the hands of his enemies, who demanded his sacrificial death.  He understood that his decision to act with integrity reflected the loving will of his Father.

At Jesus’ last supper, Matthew identified Jesus’ blood as "blood shed for many", and the purpose or outcome of its shedding was the "forgiveness" of – or release from – sins.  There, in sacrament, Jesus gave himself to his disciples, as later he would give himself, his very life, for the many.

Jesus confronted the world’s violence, and the fiercely destructive power of sin, with non-violence, love and forgiveness.  Sin was unable to suck him into its own vortex of violent retaliation and brutality.  Sin could not overpower Jesus.  Jesus broke its power by the gift of his own life to his murderers.

Matthew expressed this confrontation, right throughout his Gospel, by his contrast between the values of God’s Kingdom and the values of the world’s kingdoms.  This became obvious, particularly, in his account of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion,.

The experience of the Kingdom would be the experience of God’s salvation.  By his faithfulness unto death, Jesus had shown the power of Kingdom values of integrity and love to overwhelm the worst power of sin.  By closely following Jesus, disciples could open themselves to God’s Kingdom and to the experience of God’s saving love.

As they celebrate Eucharist together, that is, as they do what Jesus had anticipated at his last supper, and associate with him by eating his body and drinking his blood, Christian disciples are drawn into the saving action of Christ. Together with Jesus, they give their energies and their lives to others and, in the process, they die to their own self-interest.

The centurion’s ambiguous remark in Mark’s Gospel became a clear affirmation of Christian faith in Matthew’s, made now, not simply by the lone centurion, but also by those who were guarding Jesus.  Matthew was writing for a Christian community that was opening its doors to Gentile members.  He wished to emphasis the Gentiles’ openness to faith in marked contrast to the little faith of the absent disciples, and the total lack of faith of the leaders and crowd.

Not until Jesus was dead did Matthew mention the existence of many women followers of Jesus.  Their presence contrasted poignantly with the absence of the male disciples.  Not only were they disciples, but they also had provided for the needs of Jesus (and of the other disciples?).  Matthew identified three of them without introducing them:

• Mary Magdalene,
• Mary the mother of James and Joseph,
• the mother of the sons of Zebedee.

Was Mary the mother of James and Joseph the mother also of Jesus?  If so, it is strange that the tradition did not identify her as such.  The mother of the sons of Zebedee had appeared earlier in the narrative, asking that her two sons take positions to the left and right of Jesus when he came in glory [20:21].  Her sons were not present for that apocalyptic moment, but she had been.

Next >> Matthew 27:57-66