His Blood Be On Us

Scriptures: The Second Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The High Priest said to St Peter, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this Name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this Man’s blood on us.” Well, yes. I suppose we are.

This accusation—you are determined to bring this Man’s blood on us—echoes another passage from the Passion according to St Matthew. There the Roman governor Pontius Pilate announced to the gathered crowd in Jerusalem, “I am innocent of this Man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”

This verse has become downright chilling in modern times. It has been used to blame one people, the Jewish people, for the unjust death of Jesus Christ. In effect, we have misused the Word of God to blame the people of God for the murder of God. And all too often this has been the passage utilized to justify such injustice: “Let His blood be on us and on our children!” But of course, the Jews did not kill Jesus. We did. All of us together, all of humanity, participated in the Crucifixion. Alas, as we heard in the Solemn Reproaches on Good Friday, we have all too often used Christ’s own people as scapegoats for our own guilt.

The Bible is a Jewish book. Old Testament and New, it is the story of the Jewish people. It was written by more than 50 authors, all of them Jewish. Jesus, Mary, Peter, Paul, James, John, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Samson, Gideon, Moses and Aaron—all the prophets, all the priests, all the kings and judges and Apostles, every one of them, was an Israelite, was a Jew, of the family of Abraham. More than 4,000 years ago, God chose Abraham and Sarah, a couple so old that they were “as good as dead,” to be the parents of a new nation. This nation, God promised, would go on to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. Israel would be God’s special possession, His chosen people, a priestly nation for the world.

The Israelites were chosen not because they were smarter or better or richer than anyone else. Indeed, they were for centuries a nation of slaves. But they were chosen by the grace and mercy and mysterious providence of God, who always keeps His promises even when men and women refuse to keep theirs to Him. And the Bible is the story of God and His people, working together, covenanted to one another, striving through hardship and betrayal and sin towards that day when there would be a New Covenant, a New King, a Messiah who would draw all the world into the people of God. The pagan nations of the Gentiles would be grafted like wild olive shoots onto the cultivated tree of Israel.

Then would God’s Holy Spirit be poured out upon all. Then would a New Israel not replace the old, but remake it, glorify it, universalize it. Then would begin the Resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Then would God set all things right.

When all of this came to pass—when God became Man and walked among us, pouring out His Holy Spirit upon us, dying on the Cross for our sins and rising from the tomb to inaugurate the eternal Kingdom of God—the Church, the New Israel, was born. And the Church was Jewish. It was made entirely of faithful Israelites who understood Jesus as the promised Messiah, the promised King, the promised reconciliation of God and Man.

And so the Apostles went to the people of Israel, and thousands believed, thousands from all the nations of the earth. Then the Spirit led them to the Samaritans, the half-Jews, and the Samaritans too became reconciled to God in Christ. Then the Spirit led the Apostles to the Ethiopians, that ancient kingdom which had been loyal to the God of Israel for a thousand years, ever since the time of King Solomon. And Ethiopia entered the Church. And then, wonder of wonders, the Spirit of God led the Apostles to the Gentiles. To the Greeks. Even to the Romans, the enemies of God’s people. And the Spirit demanded their Baptism, and they became reconciled to God in Christ. The old enemies of Israel were welcomed as children into the New Israel.

So Jewish was the early Church, so seamlessly was it understood to fulfil God’s promises to the family of Abraham, that the great question in those early days was whether anyone could become a Christian without first becoming Jewish. After all, was Christ not God’s fulfilment of the promises given to Abraham? Was He not the Messiah and King of the Chosen People, sent to the lost sheep of Israel? But the Spirit’s leadings were clear: the Gentiles were welcomed as Gentiles. Jewish Christians were not to cease being Jewish, but in Christ the two peoples—Israel and the foreign nations—had become one. For there would be no longer male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, for all are one in Christ Jesus.

As the centuries progressed, things got messy. Jews who believed in Christ clashed with Jews who did not; the Christians were cast out of the synagogue. Without the special legal protections enjoyed by Judaism, the Christians were persecuted by the Roman state. It was not a conflict of Jew vs Gentile, but of those who rejected Christ against those who worshipped Him. There were Jews and Gentiles on both sides of the divide. And there was plenty of guilt on both sides as well.

St Paul was many things. He was a proud Jewish man, a devout Christian, and a Roman citizen. He begged Christians not to be divided along lines of ethnicity or class. And he insisted strongly that those who worship Jesus Christ cannot in any way hate those Israelites, their forebears and their brothers, who rejected Christ. Paul writes clearly in his letter to the Romans: “They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the Law, the worship and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever.” Were it not for God’s people Israel, there would be no Christians, Jewish or otherwise.

And if there are Israelites who reject the Messiah, well, is this not in some strange way a blessing? God has used this rejection to gather in all the peoples of the earth. And the day will come, Paul prophesies, when Israel will be included in full. God never breaks His promises. God never abandons His people—any of His people.

As Christianity grew, we all too often rejected our Jewish heritage. Worse than this, we often denied the Israelites their rightful heritage as God’s chosen people. Christians have done horrible, monstrously unchristian things against Jesus’ own family according to the flesh. We have persecuted and expelled. We have forced baptisms on the unwilling, which is blasphemy outright. And this all came to its awful climax when we abandoned our Jewish-Christian heritage altogether and fell upon our Israelite forebears in the horrors of the Holocaust.

When Jews and Christians hate each other, God’s wrath is upon us both. Yet when we embrace each other with dignity and love, even in disagreement, when we await together the coming of the Messiah and the life of the World to Come, we draw closer to God, closer to the Messiah, closer to Jesus Christ. Many of the Church’s greatest minds in every generation have been Jewish. I always smile when I think of a certain Spanish bishop who would pray for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary as “Mother of God and my blood relative.”

You are trying to bring this Man’s blood upon us, said the High Priest. His blood be on us and on our children, cried the people. But this is no anti-Semitic accusation. Matthew was a Jewish Christian writing to Jewish Christians. Luke was either a Hellenized Jew or a Greek convert to Judaism; Judaism makes no distinction. When these Evangelists wrote about the Blood of Christ falling upon the Jewish people, their people, they were not scapegoating. They were not blaming one people for the sins of all peoples. Rather, theirs is a statement of irony and of love and of divine forgiveness.

For Christ is God’s Passover Lamb, is He not? And it is the Blood of the Lamb that marks us as people of God, forgiven, passed over from death to life. The Jewish High Priest thinks that Peter, a Jew, is blaming other Jews for Christ’s death. But he’s not. You crucified the Messiah, Peter says; His Blood is upon you. And so you are forgiven! So you are truly God’s people! So you have been joined in the great Passover of Our Lord, even unwittingly—which is to say, undeservingly. God’s mercy has come to His people. God’s mercy has come to all His peoples.

So yes, brothers and sisters, let Christ’s Blood be upon us and upon our children. We pray for it. We beg for it. For by the Blood of the Lamb, by God’s self-emptying and self-sacrifice upon the Cross, we are forgiven. We are Resurrected. We are saved. And we are all of us forever the Chosen People of God.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.