The Passion of Jesus is our founding story.  From the retelling of this story grew our Christian faith – our gospels – and our church.  As Christians we are simply unthinkable without the Passion of Jesus.  It is only right then that we come together to listen again to the story and to reflect on who we are and how we are as a Christian people.

The Passion account from the Gospel of Matthew – intends to focus our reflection.  Of all four gospels Matthew’s account is a story about violence.  That in itself is not surprising.  Jesus’ passion and death were violent – brutally violent.  But Matthew tells the story in terms of the choices made to do the violence – in terms of the deliberate plans worked out to hurt and kill Jesus.

Matthew uses a word over and over again to emphasize to us that the violence done to Jesus came from specific persons making specific decisions to hurt and harm another person.  That word is hand over [paradidonai].  It’s a vivid, graphic word-image:  to hand over.  The Passion tells the story of making the decision to take someone who is in your hands – whose living, warm body you touch and feel – someone who is in your control or your care – and physically handing him over to people and circumstances you know will bring him harm, hurt and death.  Handing over is the management of human affairs in order to wound, injure and kill people.

As the Passion account begins, Judas asks the chief priests what will you give me if I hand him over to you?  And then he looks for the opportunity to hand Jesus over.  In the garden Jesus senses his fate when he tells the sleeping disciples:  “…the hour is at hand when the Son of Man is to be handed over to sinners.”  And Matthew tells us the guards with Judas “laid hands on Jesus”.  They were violent hands.  At the end of the Sanhedrin trial the chief priests and elders bind Jesus, lead him away and hand him over to Pilate.  And Matthew continues that Pilate, knowing that the chief priests and elders had handed Jesus over to him out of envy, finally decides to hand Jesus over to be crucified.

Let Matthew help us to reflect on what happened to Jesus – but also to reflect on our own lives as disciples of Jesus.  In the Passion account the disciples are by no means models of courage.  And they are us.  Like the people waving palms to greet Jesus -- like Peter publicly proclaiming his faith in Jesus – they all finally decide not to get in the way of the violence being done to Jesus.  They capitulate to the handing over.  They become complicit to the violence.

Let this week become for us a holy week.  Let us open ourselves in quiet prayer to God’s transforming Spirit.  We must let God work deep changes in us.  We must let the handing over end with us.