The Shadow in No Man’s Land
The Shadow in No Man’s Land
With all of his citations of the Old Testament, Matthew’s is the most Jewish of the four gospels. Sadly, that also made him the most embittered of the four gospellers at most of his people’s refusal to accept Jsus as the Messiah. That, I believe, is what’s behind the people’s acceptance of responsibility for Jesus’s execution, not just for themselves, but for their descendants. When we all say, “His blood be on us and our children,” we canowledge that all of us who clam to be human are complicit in the judicial murder of Jesus. The religious leaders may have wanted Jesus dead, but only the Romans could legally execute someone. And just having just taken our parts in this drama, we acknowledge that had we been there, we would have been complicit in this act of judicial murder. Having just acclaimed him as our King for all time, we now stand in The Shadow of the Galilean.
In that book of “Narrative Theology” by Gerd Theissen, a fictional Jew named Andreas finds himself blackmailed by the Romans into spying on Jesus. He tries to protect Jesus from the Roman suspicion that he is a political threat to them. But on that Friday Andreas stands from a distance peering at those three crosses and says: “We were standing in the shadow of the Galilean … But the sun did not go dark, and the earth remained at rest. It was a normal day and the darkness was only in me. Only in me did the foundations of life shake; only in me did the voices whisper: ‘You’re guilty. You’re guilty.’”
But according to Matthew, it wasn’t just Andreas standing in that symbolic shadow. “When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and what had just happened, they were filled with awe and said, ‘This was certainly God's Son.’” Indeed, however much the so-called rulers of this world blind themselves to it, Jesus the Christ, the Chosen King, persists in turning our world upside down.
Being a king, he had a political agenda, but not a partisan one, because his agenda was so offensive that every political and religious faction of the time wanted him dead. There has never been a more unlikely coalition than the one that condemned Jesus. First to cast their votes were the Sadducees, the thousand-year priestly establishment from the time of King David. The manmade Temple was their crown. And the man who predicted its destruction and offered God’s presence anywhere to all who worshiped in spirit and in truth could not be allowed to threaten their privilege. The next bloc was the Pharisees, the puritan reformers, who could abide no worse a charge from Jesus than hypocrisy.
The rebel Zealots had no use for an idealist who wouldn’t accept the winning of Jewish independence by any means necessary, including violence. For Pontius Pilate, nothing else mattered but the Pax Romana. Even a King of nothing more than an unbowed heart was a threat to their totalitarian power. And one crucified backwoods Nazarene was nothing compared to the wasteland Rome would make of Jerusalem thirty years later and call peace. Finally, there were the poor huddled masses, ready to be led to a land of milk and honey, and quick to turn on anyone who who wouldn’t lead them there right now. What a coalition: the Jew and the Gentile, the privileged and the powerless, the Establishment and the reformers, the rebel and the dictator. It only governed for one day, just long enough for the entire human race to unite with their common slogan, “Away with him, crucify him.”
The fictional spy Andreas sees himself in a kind of no man’s land, caught between the Romans and the zealots and the Pharisees and even Jesus. And eventually he realizes that Jesus himself is in a no man’s land where he can’t be pigeonholed into any human box, familial, cultural, political, theological, et cetera. Near the end of the book, Andreas says:
“I felt that my [personal] life was part of the life that was given. In me lived on something of all men and women, the happy and the unhappy, Jesus who went freely through Galilee and the crucified victim … And if my own life were sacrificed, somewhere in the cellars of the Romans or the terrorists’ caves, wouldn’t it live on in all those who rebelled against the idea that life is possible only at the expense of another life? Wasn’t there deep within me the intimation of a life which could not attain fulfillment by being against others, but only by being alongside them?”
Today we are all in the shadow of the Galilean. This week, come alongside him into No Man’s Land. You won’t be alone.
March 29th, 2026
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
The Rev. David Kendrick