The Irony of Condemnation - Reflections on Matthew 27:11-54, Passion Sunday, Year A

by John C. Holbert on Wednesday, January 28, 2026

         The famous text from Matthew 27 is a culmination of a literary technique employed by Matthew throughout his gospel. That technique is dramatic irony. Simply stated, dramatic irony exists whenever certain characters in a drama understand actions and words differently than other characters do, and especially when the reader has information about the drama that those characters do not have. The best biblical example I know is the story of Job. In that brilliant and much misunderstood dramatic poem, we, the readers have information about Job that the so-called friends of the sufferer do not have. We know from the very first verse of the tale that Job is a paragon of ethical virtue, because he is described to us as both “blameless and upright,” terms often used to depict a deeply moral person, and as “one who feared God and turned away from evil.” Therefore, we, the readers, know clearly that the friends’ attempts to prove Job as fully worthy of the suffering he has received at God’s hands, given their view that only evil people receive suffering, is completely false. By their own cankered ideas about the action of God, Job should not receive punishments from God, because he is not an evil person, as the story makes plain. Thus, the reader can see very well that the friends are both cruel and deeply mistaken about Job. We know what they do not, hence the irony is dramatic.

         So it is here in the famous scene of the condemnation of Jesus. The ironies begin immediately. Pilate, Judea’s governor (procurator is the Roman technical term for Pilate’s office) asks Jesus, who has been handed over to Pilate by the “chief priests and elders” (Mt.27:1), “Are you the king of the Jews?” (Mt.27:11), and Jesus replies, “You say.” The readers of the gospel have spent the previous 26 chapters attempting to answer the question about the specific identity of the man from Nazareth, and those answers have been multiple: beloved son at the baptism, prophet, teacher, Christ (Messiah), among others. Pilate’s concern, of course, is a political one: if Jesus claims to be a Jewish king, then he has fallen into the possible accusation of seditious treason against whoever claims kingship in Judea. If he is somehow king of the Jews, he may be able to foment popular uprisings and thus threaten Pilate’s hegemony over Judea. 

         But the infamous answer, “you say,” is neither a clear yes nor a resounding no. It is instead a case of dramatic irony. It could be an affirmation, and given what the reader knows from the gospel, Jesus may well be seen as some sort of king. When Jesus enters Jerusalem on that donkey, Matthew quotes a line from Zechariah 9:9: “behold your king comes to you,” omitting the part of that line that says “righteous and victorious is he,” in order to emphasize the nature of this king as meek and humble (Mt.21:5). Given the information that the reader has, Jesus is a king, but Pilate’s understanding of kingship as well as that of the chief priests and elders, is far different from that assessment; if Jesus is a king, he is a threat, as far as they are concerned. And Jesus’s ambiguous reply also suggests that Pilate has no clue what he is talking about! You may say I am a king, Pilate, but what sort of king I may be you do not know.

         The chief priests and elders make the same accusation of Jesus, but now Jesus says nothing at all (Mt.27:12). By his refusal to reply, Jesus here acts as Isaiah’s servant of God, who announced that “He (the servant) will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the streets” (Is.42:2), and “like a sheep that before its shearers is mute, so he did not open his mouth” (Is.52:15). The careful reader of the Hebrew Bible again has inside information, unknown to the characters in the story, that makes his/her perception of Jesus’ responses acute. After Jesus’s ambiguous reply to Pilate, and his complete silence in the face of the Jewish accusations, Pilate is “much amazed” (Mt.27:14). 

         The ironies continue, as the scene shifts to the traditional act of the release of a prisoner at the request of the crowd. One can imagine that Pilate hopes that the crowd will ask for the release of Jesus, since that act will get the troublesome man out of Pilate’s hair. But since Pilate knew “that they had handed him (Jesus) over out of envy” (Mt.27:18), he was certain that they would demand the death of Jesus. Nevertheless, he asks them the question: “Whom do you wish that I should release to you—Barabbas (Aramaic “Son of the Father”) or Jesus called the Messiah?” (Mt.27:17). The choice ironically is between the “son of the father” and Jesus called Messiah. Jesus, as the reader knows, is both; Pilate says far more than he knows he is saying!

         And Pilate’s distraught wife adds to the irony. She warns her husband while he is sitting on the judgment seat, ready to make his fateful choice, “Have nothing to do with this just man” (Mt.27:19). Pilate is about to execute a just man, making the act a travesty of justice. It could also be said that Matthew’s portrayal of Pilate as a weak and indecisive ruler is itself ironic, because all historical accounts about Pilate describe him as one who clashed repeatedly with his Jewish subjects, bringing military Roman standards that bore the image of the emperor into Jerusalem, and perhaps into the temple itself. Philo, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of the period, says of Pilate that he was “naturally inflexible, a blend of self-will and relentlessness,” hardly the figure we find in the gospel.  As the crowd demands Jesus be given over to death, Matthew’s Pilate shouts out pitifully, “What evil has he done?” (Mt.27:23) The Pilate of history would have cared little for another rabble-rouser, but Matthew’s Pilate seems to want not to be implicated in Jesus’s crucifixion. Hence, he washes his hands—a declaration of innocence in the matter—and declares publicly, “I am innocent of this man’s blood! You see to him” (Mt.27:24). The irony, of course, is that it is Jesus who is innocent, and Pilate who has made his murder possible.

         The innocent and just Jesus is about to be killed in a horrifying Roman way, and his condemnation is the result of a series of dramatic ironies that Matthew has cleverly conceived in ways that have survived the nearly 2000 years since his writing. It is always important to recognize the great literary gifts our gospel writers display, as well as their theological acumen, as they wrote words as alive and moving today as they were all those centuries ago.