His Blood Be On Us
How the church botched the good news, and how to find it again.
One of the most dramatic moments in Matthew’s gospel is Pilate washing his hands, symbolically declaring himself innocent in the matter of Jesus, King of the Jews. (An unmitigated act of irony if ever there was one.) As Pilate disingenuously offloads culpability for the death of Jesus, the gathered crowd, agitated and urged on by the religious authorities who have decided that Jesus is their enemy and Rome their friend, shouts, “His blood be on us and on our children.”
We read it as a self-accusation, an admission of guilt. An invitation for the weight of this innocent man’s life to be an accusing albatross placed, in perpetuity, on an entire race. This verse has been weaponized for centuries as an excuse for anti-Semitic behavior, scriptural cover for the persecution, harassment, and even the murder of Jewish people throughout history.
To the church’s everlasting shame, there is almost no Christian sect that hasn’t participated in the unjust and demonic assignation of guilt for the crucifixion. From the extravagantly racist passion plays and blood libel of the Middle Ages, to Luther’s irredeemable commentary on Judaism, to the church-sanctioned early 20th century pogroms, expulsions, and other atrocities that paved the way for the Holocaust, ecclesial history is riddled with the disastrous effects of sloppy and unimaginative exegesis.
That sloppiness extends to the predominant way we talk about atonement in the modern western church. The specific words may change, but the framework is always the same: God is angry and won’t be happy until you’re dead. But even your death couldn’t actually be enough to satisfy God’s wrath. So God sent Jesus so he could die and his perfect blood would be enough to meet the demands of justice and slake the wrath that burns furious in the heart of God.
Which is exactly as nonsensical as it sounds. Now put that in the context of perpetual racial guilt and watch the absurdity grow.
The cries of the crowd in Pilate’s courtyard impute the guilt of Jesus’s death to an entire race of people, for all of time, without exception. It’s an unforgivable crime, that somehow also is exactly what God demands in order to forgive the sins of humanity, except of course for that one thing where a particular ethnic group will never be free of the guilt of the crime of executing the one God wanted dead so that God could forgive sins.
But that’s not the only way to understand the cross, and it’s not the oldest way. And, frankly, it’s not the right way. The earliest Christians didn’t ask, “How is God’s justice satisfied?” They asked, “How is broken humanity healed and restored?” The cross isn’t payment. It’s participation. Christ enters fully into human existence, all of it, even death, and transforms it from within.
But when it came to Matthew 27:25, it all went out the window. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, was the first to use the word “deicide” and apply it collectively to Jewish people. His sermons became the theological headwaters for centuries of persecution. The crowd’s shout was read as a self-imposed curse, an inheritance of guilt passed from generation to generation.
It’s baffling. The very theologians who championed this punitive reading had the tools to see it differently. The early church fathers understood the cross not as a transaction but as a rescue mission. Irenaeus taught that Jesus recapitulates the entire human story. Gregory of Nazianzus insisted that what Christ did not assume, he did not redeem, which is to say, he is a full participant in humanity and therefore a universal savior. Origen himself held out hope for the apokatastasis(ἀποκατάστασις), the restoration of all things. And yet when these same theologians arrived at Matthew 27:25, their imaginations failed them. They had a theology capacious enough to envision the redemption of the entire cosmos but somehow still so narrow as to exclude the very group that Paul insists Gentile Christians are grafted into.
It took until 1965, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, for the Roman Catholic Church to formally repudiate the idea of collective Jewish guilt in the declaration Nostra Aetate. That was an important correction. But even Nostra Aetate only got as far as “not guilty.” It stopped the weaponization, but it didn’t complete the reframe. The verse isn’t just not a curse.It’s the gospel. And the key to seeing that is understanding what the blood of Jesus actually is.
I live and work and pastor in East Tennessee, a place steeped in the old-timey gospel song tradition—and it doesn’t get much more blood-soaked than that.
Are you washed in the blood? Have you been plunged in the cleansing flood that flows from Emmanuel’s veins? There’s power in the blood!
His blood be on us and on our children. Praise God! Let it be so!
The blood of Jesus isn’t a symbol of crime and punishment. It’s not a spiritual fire extinguisher that quenches God’s wrath. It isn’t payment. It’s medicine. The blood of Jesus undoes sin, frees us, marks us for eternity, unites us to Jesus. May his blood be on us, and our children, and all the world, because the blood of Jesus is the only thing that can free us from slavery to sin and death.
I’m not the first to read the verse this way. The Catholic writer Randall Smith arrived at a similar place in 2017. When readers across time and denomination start converging on the same reframe independently, it might be a sign the tradition had the raw material all along and kept choosing the wrong reading.