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In today's readings we focus on the passion of Our Lord. The Church has given us this first reading from the prophet Isaiah, a song about God's servant, ignored and even maltreated by others angry at his words. Although it was written 6 centuries before the time of Jesus, this passage is very evocative in the light of the sufferings Jesus had to undergo.

Psalm 21/22 also describes an individual lament of a person who, through his suffering, still trusts in God to save him and calls on others to praise him.

In the Gospel we have the account of the passion and death of Jesus which Matthew has expanded and developed from the account in Mark's Gospel. His particular interests are the messiahship of Jesus, a polemical emphasis in the responsibility of the Jewish leaders and a series of moral examples, primarily that of Jesus but also Peter, the women and the gentile soldiers. We have to be particularly alert to the mention of the Jews in the Passion narrative. When we hear the words "the Jews" it often refers to the Jewish leaders. The tendency in the past has been to impute the death of Jesus to the whole of the Jewish people, instead of to a group of the leaders.