Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, just outside the city of Jerusalem. It is the middle of the night. He is in anguish at the prospect of what lies before him (‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’, he says). In great distress he throws himself at God in prayer, ‘Let this pass from me. Yet not my will but yours’, and as he pushes through that he emerges from that inner turmoil and is able to face the coming suffering with extraordinary courage and assurance.
His disciples, on the other hand, have been sleeping, even though Jesus has expressly called them to be on guard against temptation, and to fortify themselves by also praying. Three times Jesus goes to pray. Three times the disciples give in to sleep, over prayer.
The third time, Jesus says to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Here comes my betrayer.’
This might be a poor analogy, but if you have ever played sports, you know that just before the big game, your stomach is in knots, and you are anxious and excited. The coach gives a pep talk and there’s a heightened sense of tension. But there comes a moment, just as you step onto the field or the rink, when you say, ‘All right, here we go”. You take a deep breath and that’s it.
Jesus has prepared himself, and this is the moment where it’s ‘game on’. ‘The hour has come. Here comes my betrayer.’
The disciples are entirely unprepared. They wake up into what feels like a bad dream, and they\ are thrown into the game un-equipped, panicky, and bewildered.
They lurch to their feet, bleary-eyed and shaking off the chill and find themselves surrounded by a torch-bearing detachment of temple guards, armed with swords and clubs. (Imagine waking up to a couple of burglars standing at your bed.) It is surreal. Their minds can hardly grasp what is happening.
Worse, they are stunned to see Judas – ‘one of the twelve’, Mark makes a point of saying – leading the crowd. Earlier Jesus had said, ‘One of you will betray me’. Now he says, ‘Here comes my betrayer”, and there is Judas. For three years they had lived with Judas, slept side by side, shared meals and experiences. In a lot of movies, when you are introduced to Judas at the beginning of the Gospel, he is usually a suspicious, sallow looking character, and you know immediately that he is a bad one. That is nonsense. He was one of them. You see the disciples indignant with James and John, but not with Judas. In fact, they trusted him to keep track of their funds. So when Jesus spoke of his betrayer, they did not think of Judas. Not Judas!
I think they all felt betrayed: like discovering that one of your siblings has stolen from your parents, or a trusted family friend is a pedophile, or a church leader has had a moral failure, when someone close to you, someone you trusted turns out to be…. well, a Judas.
The disciples watch what is happening as if it were in slow motion: Judas crosses the clearing to where Jesus is, and says to him, ‘Rabbi’, and kisses him on the cheek. This is the worst of treachery. The kiss – the usual gesture of respect and friendship – was the signal for the guards to know whom they had to arrest. Remember, Jesus being from Galilee was a relative unknown in Jerusalem, and has been there only a week. Most of the guards have not seen Jesus before, and in the dark of night they had to be sure.
What is Judas feeling? After three years with Jesus, does he sweat and swallow nervously as he betrays him? Is he resolute? Does he feel the eyes of the other disciples on him? The Gospel of John gives us the significant detail that Satan himself had entered Judas. Yet Judas was a willing partner. What does he feel?
People have speculated on Judas’ motives for centuries, but the fact is we just do not know what drove him, except that there were spiritual forces at play. But Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss and in that single moment becomes one of history’s most infamous villains.
With that kiss, it as as if the slow motion kicks off and the disciples suddenly wake up and realize what is going on. There is a flurry of panicked activity. One of them yanks out his sword and hacks out at the nearest person, the servant of the high priest, and with more adrenaline than aim, slices his ear off.
There is a brief instant where everything freezes – maybe in shock. These aren’t soldiers. They are the temple guards. They did security. Suddenly one of their number is nearly decapitated. They freeze. That kind of thing hadn’t been ‘covered in the manual’. Into that shocked silence, Jesus speaks, and calmly but with a note of scorn, points out the underhandedness of this arrest: ‘Am I leading a rebellion that you come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I was with you in the temple courts and you did not arrest me.’ In other words: ‘Why so sneaky? Surely it is obvious to you that this is a farce.’
Then he says one of the most remarkable things in all of Scripture, something that has the power to radically change how we look at our own lives. He says, ‘But the Scripture had to be fulfilled.’
‘The Scripture had to be fulfilled.’ If ever there was a moment in history where evil was carrying the day, it is here: Satan himself is present in Judas, and the eternal Son of God is betrayed into the hands of the forces of darkness. They stand against him with swords and clubs. The enemies of God have staged a successful rebellion. Demonic spirits are giving high fives and gloating, ‘We’ve taken on God and won!’
Jesus says, ‘The Scripture had to be fulfilled. You may think you’re in control, and that your plans have gone off without a hitch. But let me tell you whose plans are being carried out here. The eternal word of God is being carried out here to the letter.’
Think about that. Can you remember a time where God seemed nowhere, and a crowd of hard circumstances have stepped out of the shadows carrying swords and clubs and are bent on your destruction?
- a parent abandoned your family when you were a child.
- a friend or lover deeply wounded you
- the bank foreclosed
- the company restructured and downsized
- maybe you wish you looked different, weighed different, had been born into a different family, or married someone else
- you wish you’d never taken that first drink, that first look
God reminds us in Romans 8: All things work together for the good of those who love God and are called by him.
If when Satan himself was leading the charge in Gethsemane, Jesus said, ‘This is God’s Word being fulfilled’, could it be that – maybe – in your hard circumstances God’s plan for your life is being fulfilled? Not necessarily, but maybe God is working in a way you can hardly imagine, maybe you are feeling the blade of the plow so that something beautiful can bloom there?
Remember the Old Testament story of Joseph: sold by his brothers into slavery, imprisoned unjustly for a number of years. Through that God effected the salvation of Egypt from famine, and preservation of the Israelite people. ‘You meant it for evil, Joseph told his brothers, ‘but God meant it for good.’
Remember David: anointed king only to be hunted for a decade by the current king, while David and his men lived on the run. David learned leadership in that context that enabled him to rule his people effectively for four decades when he did become king.
Just yesterday I talked to a friend who says he has learned to think of illness as God’s gift, God’s way of slowing him down and allowing him to become more reflective. Sometimes it is in the most disruptive moments that we begin to pay attention to God and to our lives at the soul level for the first time. And it is precisely at those times where it seems as if Satan holds the reins, that God is able to move us forward in his good will for our lives.
There stands Jesus: betrayed, arrested… and yet he perceived clearly the hand of God in it all.
The disciples, though, did not, so it is appropriate then that they collapse. They abandon Jesus and flee for their lives ( including some unknown young man who apparently has thrown on a nightshirt and followed Jesus out of the city; when someone tries to grab him, he rips out of his robe and flees naked.)
Jesus had said earlier they would all leave him, and he quoted the Old Testament prophet Zechariah: I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered. In that passage, God is speaking. So again, what is happening here is, ultimately, of God. But all the disciples know is that Jesus stands there bound and captive, and in a sudden rush of fear for their own lives, they bolt for the darkness and safety of the trees.
Remember what we said last time of Jesus as he prayed in the Garden just a few moments ago: that his life of constant submission to God his Father enabled him to ride out the great storm that was sweeping over him? He had told his disciples to watch and pray so that they would not fall into temptation. Instead, they slept. And before that, for three years they had demonstrated a pattern of ‘Not your will, but mine’:
- ‘I want to be the greatest.’
- ‘We’ve left everything to follow you. So what’s in it for us?’
- ‘We saw some guy casting out demons, but he’s not one of us. Make him stop.’
- ‘This town didn’t treat us well. Shall we call down fire from heaven to destroy them?’
And so when the great moment of truth and testing came, they did not know God was in control.. Their instinct for self-preservation kicked in and they fled.
There are those moments for all of us, where we either stand with Jesus in the trust of God, or we fold and flee for safety. How do we watch and pray, how do we prepare ourselves so that we do not collapse or flee in those times? What are we doing now to strengthen character, to build faith, to walk with God so that when temptation suddenly strikes, or a crisis comes, we do not fail?
Have you ever faced a time when you had a choice between standing with Jesus in submission and trust, or preserving your own sense of safety? You have chosen job security, financial security over a sense of God’s calling you to something different. Or you have chosen an inappropriate sexual or emotional relationship over God’s clear will because you feel loved in it
There are so many ways, big and small, in which we may be tempted to leave Jesus standing and slink into the trees. How do we prepare for that? Only by cultivating faith and inner strength now:
- carving out time for God in prayer and feeding on Scripture.
- practicing virtues of humility, integrity, worship, trust, servanthood, generosity.
- learning to take our eyes off ourselves and see God and others.
The failure of the disciples is absolute, because they have not done these things. They sought their own interests first and were caught literally sleeping when the moment came. They flee, and Jesus is left alone with his captors.
The procession makes its way through the night down the mountain and into the city, to the house of the high priest Caiaphas. The city is silent and dark, but the house of Caiaphas is a hive of activity. The Sanhedrin, the ruling religious council, has been assembled. Witnesses have been gathered for the trial that is about to take place. You’d think that they’d toss Jesus into a holding tank till morning. But they have an agenda and it cannot wait, even if it is the dead of night.
Mark 15:44 is very revealing: They were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death. It was not that they had evidence, and therefore needed to condemn Jesus.
The reverse is true. They wanted to put him to death, and so had to manufacture some evidence that would give them an excuse to do that.
They even tried to rig witnesses but it did not work. It is an incredible scene: the highest religious authorities in the land, whose primary role was to call people to a high level of ethics and integrity, resort to deceit to do away with God’s Son. One of the 10 Commandments was ‘Do not bear false witness against your neighbor’. Yet the lackeys of the Sanhedrin are pressed into service in this literally ungodly hour to lie on the stand.
This so-called trial degenerates into a farce pretty quickly, and the witnesses can’t get their act together. For example, they both misquote Jesus and mistake his meaning and so they cannot even make their testimony agree with each other’s. (That is not in itself surprising. It is hard for two people to tell the same lie with consistency.)
So the hands of the Sanhedrin are tied. The Old Testament, in Numbers 30 and Deuteronomy 17 and 19, categorically state that no one can be put to death without the testimony of at least two witnesses. So until the Sanhedrin could have two agreeing witnesses, they cannot maintain even the illusion of legality. (You can tell that this trial has been slapped together!)
You might remember from the beginning of chapter 14 that the religious leaders had wanted to arrest and kill Jesus, but they assumed they had to wait until after the Passover festival. Judas’ information – namely, that Jesus would be relatively isolated in the Garden outside the city in the dead of night – presented a golden opportunity, but it also meant that their plans got suddenly expedited, and this trial shows all the signs of being arranged very hastily. Their witnesses are inept and have obviously not been adequately primed.
Eventually the high priest gives up on the witnesses and tries to just get Jesus to incriminate himself. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything? What is this testimony they are bringing against you?’ Jesus remains silent.
(Jesus is magnificent here. Having fought and won his battle in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus stands confident in the will of God, and does not need to answer his hapless persecutors.
Do you know how hard it is to hold your tongue when someone is telling lies about you? How quick we are to justify and defend ourselves! It is the supremely grounded person who does not need to do that. And so, Jesus keeps silent.)
Later on Peter, who has recovered enough courage to be in the priest’s courtyard and witnesses what is happening to Jesus, will write these words in 1 Peter 2:20-23:
For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.
Jesus remained silent, and trusted God for his vindication.
Then the high priest asks him,’ Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?’
Up to this point in Mark, Jesus has very deliberately deflected Messianic claims. He knew that if people considered him the Messiah, he would become the focus of a storm of attention, and his mission – to preach and heal and train his disciples – would be totally hindered. (As it was, he had a hard enough time avoiding the crowds.)
So he heals a leper, but says to him, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’
A demon cries out, ‘You are the Holy one of God’, and Jesus rebukes him to silence.
Peter eventually realizes, ‘You are the Christ’, and Jesus warns his disciples not to tell anyone.
Now the High Priest asks him straight, ‘Are you the Christ?’ Now, for the first time, Jesus says, ‘I am.’
To the mind of the high priest and the Sanhedrin this was, of course, ridiculous. The Messiah was God’s royal warrior, the ruler of God’s people, whom God himself would establish publicly. Jesus, an itinerant rabbi, stands alone, bound, abandoned by his few rag-tag followers. For Jesus to boldly say he is the Messiah, God’s Son, is more than silly. It makes a mockery of God’s prophetic Scriptures. This is enough to earn the charge of blasphemy, and if Jesus had said no more they would have pronounced him guilty. But he does say more. He blends the prophecies of Psalm 110:1 and Daniel 7:13, and says to the priest, ‘And you will see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of God and coming on the clouds of heaven’.
What words! Jesus stands bound before the religious leader of God’s people and says, ‘The place of sonship and honor at God’s right hand is mine, and you yourself will see me sharing in the glory of God.’ The Bible says in Philiippians 2 that one day every knee will bow and declare the Lordship of Jesus. Caiaphas will. Herod and Pilate will. I will. And you will. For Jesus truly is God’s Son. (How much better to affirm him now, and live in his lordship, than to ignore him and face his judgment later. )
Jesus’ words are too much for Caiaphas, who tears his robes and cries out, ‘You have all heard his blasphemy, his mockery of God. What do you think?’
The vote is taken and they condemn Jesus to death. More than that, they begin to spit on him. They blindfold him and beat on him with their fists and taunt him. (This is the religious people!) Then they hand him over to the guards, who beat him some more. (Do you sense a tone of the demonic in this scene, of unrestrained evil?)
Then, at the crack of dawn they reached a decision, Mark says. What was that decision? Not to put Jesus to death; they had already reached that verdict. B6ut they had a problem: They could not actually put anyone to death. That authority was reserved for the state. That Jesus was condemned as a blasphemer, a religious charge, would carry no weight with Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor. So the Sanhedrin needs a strategy, and by daybreak, they have one. They decide to secularize the charge by changing the religious term ‘Messiah’ to the more politically charged term ‘king of the Jews’. They heap all kinds of related charges around that one central charge (things like fomenting rebellion, telling people not to pay taxes and so on).
Here again, Jesus remains silent. His posture is still one of trust in God, and confidence that he is in the center of God’s good will. Pilate is amazed. He does not believe Jesus is guilty and poses a legitimate threat, but with Jesus giving no answer to his accusers, Pilate is forced to accept their charge. He makes an attempt to let Jesus go, by appealing to a custom by which a prisoner is offered amnesty. Each year the people would name a political prisoner of their choosing, and he would be released. This year, they have chosen Barabbas, who had committed murder in some kind of rebellion. He may have been considered something of a hero to the people.
So Pilate brings him out and asks them, ‘Whom shall I release to you? Barabbas, or Jesus?’ Now, whether Pilate thought they really would choose Jesus, I don’t know. But if Barabbas is a hero to them, and they think Jesus poses a threat to Barabbas’ release, it is not hard to imagine that the Sanhedrin would have no trouble stirring the gathering crowd to demand Jesus’ execution and the release of Barabbas.
So the guilty Barabbas is set free, and Jesus is flogged and turned over to the crowd. Aren’t we all like Barabbas. We have not committed murder. (Or maybe we have. Jesus once said that murder begins in the heart with hatred and contempt, and who of us is not guilty of that?) But we are all guilty people: guilty of lying, or lust or selfish ambition or greed or pride. Maybe we are guilty of ‘worse’ things: stealing or adultery or violence. Every one of us has not only done what we know is wrong, we have made a lifestyle of it. We stand condemned to the judgment of a perfect and just God. Yet we are released and Jesus is condemned in our place. This is the Christian gospel, that while we were sinners, Christ died for us that we might walk in freedom as forgiven children of God! And by the simple fact of our believing by faith that Jesus’ death is for us, we are saved.
Note Pilate’s motive for ultimately handing Jesus over to death: he wanted to satisfy the crowd. The desires of the crowd and the pressure they placed on him outweighed his desire to do what was right, and he handed Jesus over.
How often do we surrender Jesus because we want to please the crowd? In a culture that aggressively calls us to live out of values that run against the values of Jesus? My wife and I had the privilege of going to the symphony the other night, and in the program, there were advertisements that said that good wine is one of the finer things in life, that a nice condo was evidence that ‘you’ve arrived’… Does not Jesus say that relationships and character are the finer things? That ‘you’ve arrived’ when you live a life of humility and service, that treasure on earth is fleeting and treasure in heaven is lasting? It has been wisely said that in our culture the great temptation is to spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.
Poor Pilate. He becomes such a small man. Sacrificing what is right, losing his character, to please the crowd. He turned Jesus over to Roman soldiers this time, to be crucified. But first Jesus is flogged.
To be flogged was to be whipped with something called a ‘scourge’. A scourge was a whip of several strands, and each strand had bits of rock or bone tied to the end. With every blow, this rock and bone would tear flesh from the back of the victim. It was a vicious beating. The Jewish historian Josephus, who lived in Jesus’ day, records an instance where the entrails of the victim were exposed by a flogging. Sometimes the victim died. It was gruesome.
Jesus was flogged, and then crucified with his back to a rough wooden cross. Have you ever thought about the suffering of Jesus? Are we surprised then, when he collapses in the street and someone else is forced to carry his cross to Calvary? Do we realize at all what Jesus went through?
I read recently the autobiography of a man who, as a boy, was a slave on a Southern plantation in the 1910’s, 50 years after the American slaves were officially declared free. I read accounts of beatings, burnings with a red hot fireplace poker. Reading it made me cringe, horrified that someone could do those things to another person. Jesus’ suffered unimaginable pain but he did that out of obedience to his Father but also, incredibly, out of love for us. He suffered and gave his life, bearing the punishment for our sins. The book of Isaiah says, He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed… the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
In World War Two, the Japanese ran a prison camp in Burma, and the prisoners of that camp were ruthlessly used to build a railway through the Burmese jungle. The wardens who ran the camp were often vicious, with no regard for the lives of prisoners. On one particular day, as the prisoners lined up for work, one of the soldiers angrily reported that there was a shovel missing. He was about to shoot the nearest man for the infraction, when another prisoner stepped forward and said, ‘I took it.’ The soldier immediately fell upon that man and beat him to death. Later, it turned out that there was no shovel missing. But this man stepped forward to receive a beating and give his life, to save the life of his fellow prisoner.
Jesus took a beating and gave his life, to save your life, and to save mine. To buy us for eternity and rescue us in this life, that our sins would not rule us. By his wounds, we are healed.
In the Garden, Jesus said, ‘Father, let this not happen to me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours.’ God’s will was that you might enjoy his forgiveness and love. That you might have what the Bible calls ‘new life’. God’s will is that you be adopted into his family as his child, your sins not counted against you.
Jesus got up from his prayer: and was betrayed, abandoned, mocked, accused unjustly, spit upon, beaten, and flogged. He suffered so that you would not suffer the greater pain of separation from God, and the eternal punishment our sins deserved. Instead, you can step into right standing with God.
People sometimes complain that God is unfair. Well, he is. If God were fair, Jesus would not suffer. We would. Barabbas would have been condemned and Jesus released. Thank God that Jesus suffered in our place, for our sins!
Some of you may not have understood that before: that Jesus suffered for your sins, and that forgiveness and grace are freely available because of that. You don’t have to earn forgiveness or pay off your sins. The payment has been made, and all you need to do is receive it. Just say, ‘Thank you Lord for Jesus, and his death for my sins. I receive your forgiveness, and surrender to your loving Lordship.’
You can do that today. (I’d love to talk with you more about that if you need to know more.)
For those who have already taken that step, reflect anew on that reality, especially in these last two weeks before Easter, as we consider the story of Christ’s suffering and death.
Worship him with awe! Be thankful to him! Live a life that honors him!
Amen.