Our scripture today is found in Matthew chapter 26 and also the
Gospel of John. Then those who had seized Jesus
led him to Caiaphas the high priest, where the scribes and
elders had gathered, and Peter was following him at a distance
as far as the courtyard of the high priest, and going inside he
set with the guards to see the end.
Now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false
testimony against Jesus, that they might put him to death, but
they found none, though many false witnesses came forward.
At last two came forward and said, This man is able to
destroy the temple of God, and to rebuild it in three days.
And the high priest stood up and said, Have you no answer to
make? What is it that these men
testify against you? But Jesus remained silent, and
the high priest said to him, I adjure you by the living God,
tell us, if you are the Christ, the Son of God.
And Jesus said, You have said so.
But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of man seated
at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.
And then the high priest tore his robes and said, He has
uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we
need? We have now heard his blasphemy.
What is your judgment? And they answered, He deserves
death. Then they spit in his face, and
strucking, and some slapped him, saying prophecy to us.
You, Christ, who is it that struck you?
Now Pilate knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered
him up. But one of them, Caiaphas, who
was the high priest that year, had said to them, You know
nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is
better for you that one man should die for the people, and
not that the whole nation should perish.
This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated Who is
Caiaphas? He's only named a few times.
At the very end of Jesus's life we have infants, infants that
are mentioning him as just are just mentioning high priest.
But this is only 1 he is named. Why is he brought into this
picture? Why him?
He's the high priest of the nation, which made him the most
important person in the whole nation because he had the final
words. So we're asking ourself this
question, why did Caiaphas not see who Jesus was?
Caiaphas view of Jesus must first be seen through two other
sets of eyes. One of those is the Holy
Spirit's and the other is Satan's.
For you see, this trial is the greatest moment in God's eternal
plan for all of history and the whole world.
Satan is happy to see the pain that would be inflicted on
Jesus, but what he does not know is how the Holy Spirit intends
to use this horrible suffering. And Caiaphas is the key human in
this mystery and its outcome. His decision sets the final
stage of the great battle against good and evil.
By his own free will, he chooses to see Jesus as he wanted to see
him. However, in God's Providence, we
find that he was given every opportunity to see Jesus in a
different way. The Scripture tells us that
Caiapha had heard from the very beginning about Jesus's
ministry. In fact, he'd heard about John
the Baptist and that John was preaching from the prophecies of
the coming of the Messiah. And this was where Jesus was
baptized. But cafes had sent his spies who
were there. They heard every word and they
reported every word to him. He then began to hear of the
reports of Jesus, miracles, the words that he preached, the
blind who were made to see, the lepers who were cleansed, demons
who were cast out, and yet he never went to see any of these
miracles himself. He was confronted by Jesus with
the hypocrisy and the violation of God's temple, letting the
money changers be right in the very courtyard of God, making
it, as Jesus said, a den of thieves.
Caiaphas had allowed all of this to happen, and yet when he saw
and heard this public rebuke, he saw it as a reason for why Jesus
should die. Then came Caiaphas.
The biggest problem? When he heard the undeniable
miracle of Lazarus resurrection, seen by even some of the
priests, there wasn't any way to say this had not happened.
And now Caiaphas determined he had to act.
He had to do something. He knew the multiple Old
Testament prophecies about the Messiah's coming, and yet he was
even seeing it fulfilled before his own eyes.
But he did not believe. And finally in that last trial
that he performed, he knew then they could find no sin in Jesus.
And yet he planned and plotted Jesus arrest and his death and
then persuaded all of the leading priests it says, and all
of the high elders that were in the Sanhedrin to call for the
death penalty. And they did.
Why, with all of this knowledge and visible truths, why were his
eyes so blinded? I think there's several things.
First, we have to remember that Caiaphas was a political
appointee. The Romans had made him the high
priest. He was actually a sideline from
the actual line of all the priests, but he had his position
because of them, and he enjoyed that position.
But he realized that that position could be threatened by
what Jesus was bringing about, and he might lose his favorite
spot. But secondly, he had chosen to
believe that Jesus was just a man.
He wasn't anymore. There was no way he was divine.
The only way they could explain his power was they said it came
from the devil, blind to what they were seeing happening right
before him. He feared his loss of control
because Jesus was so popular with the people and therefore
knowingly and yet maybe even well for sure, unknowingly, he
actually prophesied this real truth.
He said it was expedient that one man should die for the
people so this nation should not perish.
However, the deeper truth though, was that God had a much
greater plan for the nation and more and last of all, even
pilots saw through how fake all of this was.
And it says that he knew that Caiaphas was envious.
Why was he envious? He was jealous because you see,
Jesus had revealed who the real God is and what he's like.
Jesus had revealed truth, and people knew it.
Jesus had revealed mercy and compassion, and he would state
it boldly and do it boldly, and people do it, and they loved him
for it. That drew the people to him, and
he knew that they could revolt and turn against Caiaphas.
But Caiaphas, you see, had none of those qualities, and even
worse, he had not tried to encourage the people to see the
true nature of God. And that was his role as high
priest. The high priest was to encourage
people to come to God. The high priest was the one that
made sure they came rightly before God.
The high priest was the one who would direct them and the whole
nature in this way to know that we have a God who is holy, but
we have a God of love. And therefore as you bring your
sacrifices, you find forgiveness for your sins.
But no, Caiaphas had turned the sacrifices into a money making
machine. All of this had hardened his
heart and he had refused to believe the very words he was
hearing, the very life that he saw.
But he challenged Jesus and Jesus respected his place as
high priest. But he said, I adjure you as the
high priest, tell us, are you the Messiah now?
Matthew quoted as it is, as you say, Mark quotes it as yes I am.
And he tears his robes and says blasphemy.
Can you imagine that being said to the very Son of God?
And yet Jesus stood there, and then they led him to the cross.
His blind eyes never united the hope of the nation and of all
the Scripture with faith that he was indeed who he claimed to be.
What keeps us from eyes that do not see?
What keeps us from a hardened heart?
It's actually a lot easier than we think.
Even Jesus chided his own disciples after they had seen
him feed thousands of people with some small baskets of food
and then collect a basket for each and every one of them.
And then as they go across the water, they start wondering
where they were going to get food next.
And Jesus said to them, Is your heart so hardened that you do
not see who I am and what I can do?
It's easy to begin to doubt. And if you don't bring them to
Christ, our hearts can turn us in a different direction.
But the answer to it is this. It is the lens of God's spoken
word. It is here that the Holy Spirit
thwarts the plans of the enemy to try to hardness.
You see, he combines spiritual seeing and thinking with
spiritual words that the Holy Spirit breathes lives into as we
read them. For God's Word is living, which
means it continues to bring light to our eyes, truth to our
heart, and it's enabled. It has the ability to judge
what's going on down deep inside of us, coming to us at any point
in place where we're discouraged, where we're tempted
to doubt, where Satan would love to turn us forward.
A hardness and because of that we come to Holy Week and what he
has done for us with a confident hope because of his word, the
gift of faith, believing that God told us his Son would come
and he did. That we would see miracles that
he did, and that we would find help to realize that Jesus death
was far more than just the expedientness that Caiaphas had
said. Rather, it was necessary for the
whole world, not just for the nation.
And that's why John reminds us God loved the whole world.
That whoever would believe in him would not perish but have
eternal life. This is where our eyes can be
enlightened and see the beauty of what God is doing in that
amazing week before Christ died for us.
Let's pray together silently.