peri tou aimatos...

In churches that follow the Revised Common Lectionary, today's reading contained the always uncomfortable 'Let his blood be on us and on our children!' (Matthew 27.25). Most likely, many readers of this site heard this verse, and then replied 'Thanks be to God' when it was announced that this was the word of the Lord.

Also notable: most readers of this site are not anti-semitic, and are in fact particularly sensitive to the problem of anti-semitism.

So I imagine there was, or will be, a fair amount of cringing in the pews today.

Much to the credit of the preacher at St Mary's, he tackled the verse head-on. But his answer is, I think, less than satisfactory. He pointed out that Matthew is (1) the most self-consciously 'Jewish' gospel, and (2) the only gospel to include this verse. He then argued that the Jews in Matthew's community would have an interest in evangelism which would be easier to achieve by blaming the Jews than by blaming the Romans, so Matthew made the 'regrettable error' of inserting this text (which 'likely never occurred, since the other evangelists do not mention it'), a 'mistake' which led, more or less directly, to pogroms and Auschwitz.

Leaving aside the question of whether such arguments or biblical scholarship belong in the pulpit, I think it's a regrettable error to make this particular argument in any context. This for at least three reasons:

(1) On the face of it, it's a willfully disingenuous sort of selective reading, and

(2) I can't imagine it's satisfactory to any offended ear: it fails even in its rhetorical goal, because it's pretty hard to distance oneself from, say, the Holocaust, with a half-hearted 'oops' on the Evangelist's behalf, and

(3) To pretend that this verse leads inevitably to anti-semitism, let alone to the Holocaust, is historically dodgy at best - I'm aware of no Christian author in the first four centuries to use it as such; Augustine, for one, who certainly says plenty of things about the Jews that would be embarrassing for many modern ears, never (again to my knowledge) uses this verse to chide the Jews of Jesus' time, let alone to justify violence against contemporary Jews. I don't deny that the verse has been used in this way, only that the verse only bears this interpretation, such that it's Matthew's fault (and not the reader's) when a reader of this text understands it in this way.

That said - does anybody have any ideas of more fruitful ways to understand this problematic verse? I'm tempted to say that a Eucharistic reading might be a way forward, but haven't given any thought to how that might play out.

...

On a completely and almost offensively unrelated note, whenever Tesco wants to take my beloved Dorset Really Nutty Muesli off of their weekly special, I'll be fine with that decision - this is the second consecutive week I've had to settle for a lesser cereal because the 12 pence reduction in price has apparently convinced everybody in this town to buy it, leaving those of us who have been committed to the Really Nutty cause for a good long time now regrettably Muesliless.