Wednesday, March 22, 2023 – Lent Five, Bystanders on the way to the Cross

Then the Roman soldiers under their commander, joined by the Jewish police, seized Jesus and tied him up. They took him first to Annas, father-in-law of Caiaphas. Caiaphas was the Chief Priest that year. It was Caiaphas who had advised the Jews that it was to their advantage that one man die for the people. (John 18: 12 – 14, 19 -24, The Message Bible)                

             There is a conspiracy afoot.  A real one. A dire one.

             Both the religious and the secular powers have colluded to eliminate whatever threat they believed Jesus represented. They are all more than just bystanders; they are complicit participants in his arrest and his eventual execution.

            Religion and governments can make strange bedfellows. (Just look at the peculiar alliance between Donald Trump and the Christian Right Wing in the USA)

            We will leave Pilate and his role for a later date.

For now, let us consider just the pious religious opposition which Jesus faced. It is easy to accuse them of self-righteousness with their smug, judgmental deliberations. Annas and Caiaphas, the chief religious leaders in this drama, seemed to justify their actions as being good for the people. They were troubled by Jesus’ popularity, the authority of his ministry and teachings.  They probably feared that if this New Way was not snuffed out quickly, the Romans would supress the Jewish people even worse than it already was doing. They were weighing the consequences and it was not going to end well if Jesus was not stopped quickly.

Religious opposition was not new when it came to Jesus. He had many an argument and debate with religious leaders, notably the Pharisees. These leaders criticized Jesus for his impiety, his breaking of religious customs, his breaking the sabbath, fraternizing with low-lifes, engaging the unclean and impure, his inappropriate relationships with women. Jesus’ work was a slap in their faces, so they slapped him back, literally. (18:22)

To be honest, Jesus seldom minced his words about them, even calling them snakes and vipers, criticizing them for their hypocrisy.  (Matthew 23: 33) He did not endear himself to the proper authorities. He got into their heads, challenged their assumptions, upset more than the tables in the temple. Jesus shook up their values, their traditions and their prejudices.

How do you deal with a problem like Jesus? You get rid of him before he ruins your religious, bedrock beliefs.

It is sad to say but I think there are times when our religion still gets itself in knots over Jesus. The Church can stumble over Jesus’ teachings and his leadership. We can get in his way. We want Jesus to conform to our standards, to our creeds, to our interpretation of scripture, to our personal values. We want Jesus to value and confirm our assumptions, our prejudices, our thinking, our religious values and customs.  We want Jesus to fit into our neat, tidy spiritual boxes.

Maybe not always, but more often than we should be comfortable.

Maybe though, there are also times, I hope, when the Love of Jesus shatters the devout crystals of our religiosity and we, for a moment or two, act out of the sheer generosity of his Love. We break out of our religious shells and practice his Way, for real. We are not hindered by religious protocols.  We are not hampered by noisy, pompous preachers who try to tell us how to act and what to think. We are not circumscribed by religious judgments from others. We are not proscribed from doing religion differently but choose to do it Jesus’ Way.

There is nothing necessarily wrong or bad about having strong convictions. But those convictions must first be under the authority of Jesus Christ, not Jesus Christ under the authority of those same convictions. Annas and Caiaphas wanted Jesus to submit to their authority. Jesus could not do that.

Jesus frees us from the stagnant, dull, routine articles of religious practice and allows the Holy Spirit to let loose the fresh breezes of Love, Mercy, Forgiveness, Inclusion, Grace, Hope, Justice; qualities that sometimes don’t get past the fussy censors of religious bureaucracies and pious church leadership.

I imagine Annas and Caiaphas were good men. I am sure that they loved God and were good practicing Jews. Let’s not make them out to be villains. But like any of us, they couldn’t see Jesus because he didn’t fit their pious stereotypes. So, instead, they become participants in his death. 

How did that work out for them?

Dale