Uncleanliness
“Then the Jewish leaders took Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning, and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness they did not enter the palace, because they wanted to be able to eat the Passover.” (John 18:28)
There appears to be a discrepancy between John and the other gospel writers. While the other accounts make it seem like Jesus eats the Passover meal with His disciples on the evening before His death, John’s timeline puts Passover on Good Friday. John specifically mentions that the religious leaders refuse to go into Pilate’s palace so that they will not become unclean and therefore unable to eat the Passover meal. This detail shows them to be religious in the worst sense. They follow a long list of ceremonial laws in an attempt to please God and look good to other people. Yet, their hearts are so far from God that they don’t even recognize Him standing before them in the flesh.
And talk about ironic. With the Son of God already broken and bloodied by the work of their hands, the religious leaders are somehow still worried about becoming unclean. They are careful to maintain ritual cleanliness laws, even as they arrive with a cold and calculated plan to incite a mob in order to coerce Pilate into sentencing an innocent man to a brutal execution.
It’s chilling.
As is the thought of these people later sitting down to the Passover meal with their families as if nothing unusual had happened. Families who now bear the responsibility of Jesus’s blood. Because, according to Matthew 27:24-25, when Pilate washes his hands in front of the crowd and declares himself to be innocent of Jesus’s blood, the crowd answers, “His blood is on us and on our children!”
Is there any worse uncleanliness?
