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Catholic Commentary
Barabbas, Pilate's Verdict, and the Condemnation of Jesus (Part 2)
23But the governor said, “Why? What evil has he done?”24So when Pilate saw that nothing was being gained, but rather that a disturbance was starting, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this righteous person. You see to it.”25All the people answered, “May his blood be on us and on our children!”26Then he released Barabbas to them, but Jesus he flogged and delivered to be crucified.
Matthew 27:23–26 describes Pilate's final capitulation to the crowd's demand for Jesus's execution, despite publicly acknowledging Jesus's innocence and attempting to absolve himself through a symbolic handwashing. The passage records the crowd's self-cursing acceptance of responsibility, Barabbas's release, and Jesus's flogging and delivery to crucifixion, establishing the substitutionary pattern central to Matthew's atonement theology.
Pilate's handwashing proves that ritual cannot erase moral responsibility—water cannot wash away the guilt of executing an innocent man you know to be innocent.
Verse 25 — "His blood be upon us and on our children!" This verse has been among the most tragically misused texts in Christian history. A sober Catholic reading requires both exegetical precision and theological charity. The crowd's cry is a formal acceptance of blood-guilt — a legal formula in Jewish idiom (cf. 2 Sam 1:16; Acts 18:6). Matthew records it; he does not endorse its consequences as a perpetual ethnic curse. The Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate (4) directly addressed this: "what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today." The Catechism reinforces this with equal clarity: "The Jews are not collectively responsible for Jesus' death" (CCC 597). Origen, writing in Commentary on Matthew, interpreted the "children" not as biological descendants cursed forever, but as those who would later come to share the crowd's rejection — and equally, those who would repent and find the blood of Christ to be redemptive rather than damning.
There is a profound irony in the text that the Church Fathers exploited: the blood the crowd calls down upon themselves is precisely the blood that, shed freely, redeems them. The haima (blood) of Christ is simultaneously the blood of the slain and the blood of the covenant (26:28). Peter will address this very crowd at Pentecost (Acts 2:14–41), and three thousand will accept the blood they called for — not as condemnation but as baptism and forgiveness.
Verse 26 — Scourging and Deliverance Matthew narrates the scourging (phragellōsas) with stark brevity — a single participle. Roman flagellatio was notoriously brutal, administered with a leather whip embedded with bone or metal. Isaiah 53:5 ("by his stripes we are healed") casts its shadow over this single word. The verb paredōken — "delivered up" — closes the trial sequence. Jesus is now in the hands of the soldiers. The Barabbas exchange is now complete: a guilty man walks free; an innocent man is condemned. This is not narrative accident — it is the grammar of substitutionary atonement, placed by Matthew at the very center of the Passion account.
Catholic tradition sees in these four verses a convergence of several profound theological realities.
The Sinlessness of Christ as Precondition of Redemption. Pilate's repeated declaration of Jesus's innocence is not incidental. The Catechism teaches that "Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father" (CCC 615). For this satisfaction to be infinite and efficacious, the victim must be without blemish — a truth the Letter to the Hebrews insists upon (4:15; 9:14). Pilate, pagus and politician, unwittingly fulfills the role of the high priest Caiaphas (John 11:51): he prophesies what he does not understand. His declaration dikaios ("righteous man") is a forensic corroboration of the Lamb's spotlessness.
Moral Cooperation and the Limits of Ritual. The Church's moral theology distinguishes between formal and material cooperation in evil. Pilate's handwashing is a case study in attempted moral distancing that does not succeed. Veritatis Splendor (13) insists that "it is never lawful... to do evil so that good may come of it." The attempt to separate one's will from one's act by symbolic gesture — while physically executing that act — is a form of self-deception the tradition identifies as moral cowardice. Pilate is not absolved; he is memorialized in the Creed itself: "suffered under Pontius Pilate."
The Blood of the New Covenant. The blood "called down" in verse 25 is interpreted by Origen, John Chrysostom, and later Thomas Aquinas as paradoxically salvific for those who receive it in faith. Aquinas (Summa Theologiae III, q.47, a.6) argues that Christ's Passion was sufficient to redeem the very sins of those who condemned Him — and that Peter's Pentecost preaching to this same Jerusalem crowd demonstrates that the blood of Christ was always intended as an offer of mercy first. The Council of Trent affirmed that Christ's blood was shed "for many" — pro multis — a sufficiency that excludes no sinner, including those present at Calvary.
The Barabbas Exchange as Atonement Typology. The release of Barabbas — whose name in Aramaic means "son of the father" (bar Abba) — and the condemnation of Jesus, the true Son of the Father, is a typological structure of substitution that the Fathers (particularly Origen and Jerome) found irresistible. The guilty goes free; the innocent bears the punishment. This is not merely narrative drama — it is the enacted parable of the entire theology of the Atonement, placed by divine Providence at the very door of Golgotha.
Pilate's handwashing is not an ancient curiosity — it is one of the most recognizable gestures in modern life. Whenever a person in authority says, "I have no choice," or "I'm just following orders," or "I can't be held responsible for what happens next," they are reaching for the basin and the towel. Catholic moral teaching insists that authority carries irreducible personal responsibility; the Catechism's treatment of conscience (CCC 1776–1802) makes clear that performing a known evil while disclaiming its authorship does not sever moral guilt.
For contemporary Catholics, these verses present a searching examination of conscience: Where am I washing my hands of something I know to be wrong? In the workplace, in politics, in family life — the pressure of the crowd, the fear of a "disturbance," the desire to keep one's position, are constant. Pilate had every institutional power to release Jesus and chose institutional safety instead.
Verse 25 also calls Catholics today to reject every form of antisemitism with the full force of the Church's teaching in Nostra Aetate. To read this verse as a license for prejudice is to betray both the text and the Tradition. The blood called for is the same blood offered at every Mass — a perpetual act of reconciliation, not condemnation.
Commentary
Verse 23 — "What evil has he done?" Pilate's question is not merely rhetorical; Matthew presents it as a formal legal declaration. The Greek ti gar kakon epoiēsen ("what evil, for, has he done?") echoes the structure of Roman criminal procedure, where a crimen (charge) had to be established. Pilate cannot name one. This is the third time in Matthew's Passion narrative that the innocence of Jesus is implicitly or explicitly acknowledged by those with authority over His life (cf. Judas's cry in 27:4 and Pilate's wife's warning in 27:19). Matthew is building a deliberate literary dossier: even His enemies attest to His sinlessness. Yet Pilate's question is also tragically hollow — he has already asked it, already known the answer, and is already calculating the political cost of the right response. The question is real; the will to act on its answer is absent.
Verse 24 — The Handwashing The gesture of handwashing to symbolize innocence has deep roots in the Old Testament. In Deuteronomy 21:6–9, the elders of a city wash their hands over an unsolved murder to declare communal non-guilt. Psalm 26:6 ("I wash my hands in innocence") and Psalm 73:13 use the same image. Pilate, almost certainly familiar with Jewish customs after years governing Judea, adopts the ritual in a way his Jewish audience would immediately recognize. But Matthew's Greek is pointed: apenipsato tas cheiras — he "washed off" responsibility, a deliberate, public performance in front of the ochlos (the crowd). The declaration, "I am innocent of the blood of this dikaios (righteous/just) person," is extraordinary. Dikaios is a loaded term in Matthew: it is the adjective applied to Joseph (1:19), to the prophets (13:17), and is the root of dikaiosynē (righteousness), Matthew's great theological keyword. Pilate is, without knowing it, pronouncing a theological verdict.
Yet Catholic tradition has never allowed Pilate's gesture to stand as true exculpation. Water cannot wash away the moral guilt of ordering the death of someone you know to be innocent. Augustine writes that Pilate's handwashing was fraus, non innocentia — a fraud, not innocence (Sermon 201). The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that "all sinners were the authors of Christ's Passion" (CCC 598), and the ritual gesture does nothing to change the moral reality. Pilate is the archetype of the person who knows the good and chooses comfort instead. He hands Jesus over — the Greek paredōken is the same verb used for Judas's betrayal and for the Father's giving of the Son in Romans 8:32, creating a profound theological resonance.