Matthew 27:25

And all the people answered and said, His blood be on us and our children.

This evil prayer was answered; thus people receive what they ask. All the subsequent sorrows that came upon Israel were then and there invoked by a multitude that included the highest official representatives of the nation. Of all rash things, the rashest is a rash prayer; nor was this the first time that Israel had prayed and received the answer of so rash a petition. Their ancestors had cried in the wilderness, "Would God we had died in the wilderness" (Numbers 14:2). Of course, that is exactly what that generation did; they died in the wilderness. A similar thing happened when Rachel prayed, "Give me children, or I die? (Genesis 30:1). She died in childbirth when Benjamin was born. The petition recorded here, "His blood be on us and our children," was also answered in the most dramatic and overwhelming manner when, according to Josephus, 30,000 young Hebrew men were crucified upon the walls of Jerusalem by the soldiers of Titus when the city fell during the summer of A.D. 70; but the full tragedy of that tragic prayer and its tragic aftermath shall never be known until eternity. Through the long centuries, the persecutions, blood-purges, and pogroms directed against Israel must surely be classed among the most astonishing social phenomena ever known; and it is not too much to say that all of them head up to a single fountain in this awful prayer.