In My Place Condemned He Stood

Mark 14:53-65

February 28, 2016 • Mount Pleasant UMC

It was snowing heavily, like it was here a couple of weeks ago, and it was blowing to the point that visibility was almost zero when the young lady got off work. She made her way to her car and wondered how she was going to make it home through the snow. She sat in her car as it warmed up, and she remembered her dad's advice that if she got caught in a blizzard she should wait for a snow plow to come by and follow it. That way she would not get stuck in a snow drift. Sure enough, after a little while, a snow plow came by and she pulled out to follow it. She even smiled a bit and started to feel kind of smug because she was not having any problems with the blizzard conditions. After an hour had passed, the snowplow stopped, the driver got out and came back to her car, signaling for her to roll down her window. He asked if she was all right. “You’ve been following me for a long time,” he said. “I’m fine,” she assured him, and told him about her dad’s advice to follow a snow plow when caught in a blizzard. The driver looked at her and said, “Well, it’s okay with me if you want to continue to follow me. But I’m done with the Walmart parking lot and I’m headed to Kohl’s next.”

Sometimes, when the storms of life are raging, we can get a little lost, a little disoriented, and we might even end up following the wrong path, the wrong guide. On a much larger scale than following a snowplow, that’s where Peter and the other disciples are early in the morning on the last day of Jesus’ earthly life. We’re walking through this day, these 24 hours that changed the world, this Lenten season, very intentionally so that we can not only understand what happened, but also begin to grasp what it means. It’s not enough to know the events in sequence; this story was not preserved purely for history’s sake, though it is history. But Mark and the other Gospel writers really want us to understand what Jesus’ death and resurrection means for our lives today. So two weeks ago we started at sundown on Thursday with the Passover meal, the Last Supper, and then last week we went with Jesus down the length of the Kidron Valley to a place called Gethsemane, where Jesus faced an agonizing night of prayer. And it’s in that time of prayer where he surrendered to his father’s will: “Not what I will, but what you will” (14:36). And I suggested last week that we can only pray that in the midst of our own Gethsemanes when we’ve already been developing a heart of prayer.

Last week we left Jesus standing over his sleepy disciples announcing the arrival of his betrayer in the garden. Sometime after midnight, Judas, one of the twelve disciples, leads a group of religious guards into Gethsemane. This garden was a familiar place of prayer for Jesus and the disciples; Judas knew Jesus would go there after dinner. The guards come with swords and clubs, but Jesus doesn’t try to run. He embraces what is about to happen. But Peter struggles. In the midst of this particular storm, Peter gets a little lost. He’s a man of action, so he grabs a sword and cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant. He wants to defend, but Jesus stops him. John tells us Jesus commands Peter, “Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?” (John 18:11). That’s the same “cup” he was just praying to be taken from him. Peter, I think, after having fallen asleep in the Garden, is still trying to prove that he’s not going to abandon Jesus. He doesn’t want to deny Jesus, as Jesus has predicted. He doesn’t want to get completely lost this night. But once Jesus is taken into custody, Peter is among those who take off and hide. Mark says, “Everyone deserted him and fled” (14:50). The storm is raging, and the disciples are lost. They’re disoriented. Everything they think they knew has been turned upside down, and so they run away. Have you ever been in a situation like that, where it seemed like everyone had deserted you? I wonder what Jesus must have been feeling at that moment. I mean, he knew it was coming, but that doesn’t erase the overwhelming feeling of being absolutely alone as you face a storm. Think about your own life. Maybe you saw the desertion coming, but that didn’t change the sense of being alone, the abandonment that surrounds you like a shroud. Jesus is surrounded by many people, but still alone, utterly alone.

And so, he is taken back down the length of the Kidron Valley to the house of the high priest. The best archaeological evidence suggests that the house of the high priest wasn’t far from the Upper Room where Jesus and the disciples had dinner. It would have, then, taken Jesus about 20-25 minutes to make the journey back, maybe a bit more because he was bound on this return walk, and while the first trip earlier in the evening was full of teaching and conversation, this trip is oddly silent. We’re not told that anything is said as he walked, surrounded by guards, back toward the place where his fate will be decided.

On my first trip to the Holy Land in 1995, our last stop before returning home was this place, the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu. This church stands over the place where, it is believed, the high priest’s house was in the first century, and outside, archaeologists have uncovered steps dating to the first century. It’s very possible these steps were the very ones Jesus walked up as he entered this house. The church’s name is a Latin word meaning “cock crow,” and this is the place where Jesus stood trial, and where Peter got really lost as he denied Jesus three times. During that 1995 visit, we were taken into a prison cell which is really just a large hollowed out hole in the ground, underneath the high priest’s house. Now, wouldn’t that be a strange thing to find in the home of a religious leader? It would be like having a dungeon underneath the bishop’s house. But that hole in the ground was, probably, where Jesus was kept as the Jewish leaders assembled in the home above. The cell was dark, the only light coming from above where the prisoner would have been lowered through a hole into the cell. And as we were there in the dungeon, we sang the hymn, “Were You There,” and I still remember how, because of the shape of the walls and the configuration of the room, the song sounded so off-key. How appropriate, I thought, that the place where Jesus was condemned to die would be unable to produce beautiful music.

So the high priest assembled the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin was a group of seventy-one men who were considered to be the “wisest and most pious men of the time” (Hamilton, 24 Hours That Changed the World, pg. 47). They were not a ruling body in the sense that they met regularly; they only met when they were needed. And most likely, this group that gathers sometime after midnight on Friday morning was not the complete group. Probably, the high priest settled for whomever he could get at this hour. Beyond that, this was a highly illegal gathering; the Sanhedrin was not allowed to meet without the governor’s permission, and never at night. One author says this is the “kangaroo justice of a lynch mob” (Garland, NIV Application Commentary: Mark, pg. 559). Everything about this is wrong. It smacks of injustice.

So what was the charge against Jesus? As he told them back in the Garden, “Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me” (14:49). Why now? The high priest has trouble finding a charge that sticks, especially since they had already decided on the penalty. Mark says they brought Jesus in, then looked for evidence “so that they could put him to death” (14:55). It’s a little backwards! Actually, it’s a lot backwards! There’s no evidence of anything Jesus had done that deserved death. Everything he had done was out in the open, not hidden away. But still they bring in “witnesses,” and you can just imagine the sort of witnesses they might have found at 1 or 2 in the morning. One comes in, tells a story about something Jesus said or did, and then they bring the next one in, and his story doesn’t match the first one. And this goes on and on; no two stories match. The problem facing the Sanhedrin is that the Jewish law says you have to have more than one witness before you can convict a person, especially if you want a death penalty. The book of Deuteronomy says, “On the testimony of two or three witnesses a person is to be put to death, but no one is to be put to death on the testimony of only one witness” (17:6; cf. Garland 560; Hamilton 53). Other Old Testament texts reflect that same theme, so here, in the middle of the night, they’re desperately trying to get two people to say the same thing, but they can’t. The truly beautiful thing here is that Jesus won’t even dignify their attempts with a response. He keeps silent until the high priest gives up on the whole witness thing and asks Jesus directly: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” (14:61). At this point in the story, that is the question on which Jesus’ whole fate hangs. And, on a larger scale, it the question on which the Gospel’s entire story hangs. Are you the Messiah?

Jesus has resisted claiming that title throughout the Gospel of Mark. The only one to apply that title to him is Peter. In chapter 8, when Jesus asks, “Who do you say I am?”, Peter says, “You are the Messiah.” And immediately, Jesus warns them not to tell anyone (8:29-30). Why? What’s the big secret? It’s because that term, “Messiah,” was not just a religious term in the first century. It was that, and more. The kind of Messiah, or Savior, most people expected in the first century was one who would take up arms and destroy the Romans. He would reign as God’s king from Jerusalem. He would be both priest and king. They were looking for a political Messiah, a savior who would throw out the Romans and establish Israel as an independent nation once again. And we’re still looking for a political messiah, even in our own country. How many of the presidential candidates this year are using “messiah”-type language? They’re coming to save us from whatever we’re frightened of. They’re promising to make life better, to turn things around, to get the nation going in the right direction. That’s the same anticipation and hope people had around the title “messiah” in the first century. But, as Chuck Colson once said, “Salvation doesn’t come on Air Force One,” and in the first century, Jesus knew that he was not going to be that kind of Messiah. To use that title of himself would have caused people to rise up and try to forcibly make him king. But he didn’t come to lead a rebellion. He didn’t come to establish an earth-bound kingdom. He came as a different sort of king. And now, this king is in prison. He’s in chains. The religious leaders have gotten the people all stirred up against him. There’s not much chance of the people backing him, or trying to crown him king, now. And so, with the tide turned against him, when the high priest asks the question, “Are you the Messiah?”, Jesus answers, “I am” (Garland 569; 14:62).

I am. Those are also distinct words, rooted in the book of Exodus. You may remember the story when God appears to Moses in a burning bush and asks him to go confront Pharaoh in order to rescue the Hebrew slaves, Moses asks God what God’s name is. “Who should I tell them sent me?” he asks. And God says, “Tell them, ‘I am’” (cf. Exodus 3:13-14). I am—most likely pronounced in Hebrew as “Yahweh,” though often mispronounced in English as Jehovah. In Greek, it’s ego eimi, which is what Jesus says in Mark 14. “Are you the Messiah?” He doesn’t say, “Yes.” He doesn’t say, “You’ve got it right.” He doesn’t say, “It’s about time you figured that out.” He says, “Ego eimi. I am.” And that’s why the high priest gets so upset. It’s not just because Jesus claims to be the Messiah; that by itself was something crazy men had been claiming for years. Messiahs came and went with startling regularity. But Jesus doesn’t just claim to be the Messiah. He claims God’s own name for himself (Hamilton 53-54). “I am.”

Now, we might think the high priest overreacts. He tears his clothes, and yells, “Why do we need any more witnesses?” In the ancient world, tearing your clothes was a “way of expressing distress, mourning or outrage” (Garland 562). So you’d hope you didn’t feel that way very often; otherwise, it could get expensive! Of course, there may be some grandstanding here, but the high priest’s actions also emphasize how seriously the Hebrews took the protection of God’s name. One of the “top ten” commandments is, “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:7), and most people in those days would not even speak the name of God, for fear they might misuse it in some way. I have a Messianic Jewish friend who still, when he sends us a note, will write “G-d bless you.” It’s deeply ingrained in him to not risk misusing the name of God. We, on the other hand, have gone to the other extreme, and our culture treats God’s name with shocking casualness, so much so that it has little meaning to most people anymore. People say “Oh my God” (or the text version OMG) without even thinking about it. Most don’t even blink an eye or think about why they say that. Nobody says “Oh my Buddha” or “Oh my Mohammed.” But our culture takes God’s name incredibly lightly. Yet, when the high priest perceived that Jesus had broken that commandment, just by uttering the words “I am,” he tore his clothes and accused Jesus of blasphemy, of “profane and offensive speech.”

“Why do we need any more witnesses?” the high priest asks, and they don’t. They couldn’t get anyone to agree anyway, but in their minds, Jesus has convicted himself, and he’s handed the religious leaders the ammunition they need to not only get the Jewish people upset, but to convince Rome to give him a death sentence. The Sanhedrin were not allowed to execute anyone; if they wanted that done, they had to get Rome to go along with it. But when they find Jesus guilty of claiming to be the Messiah, they’ve got him on both religious and political charges. He’s accused of blasphemy, of claiming to be God, a religious charge. But he’s also accused of being the Messiah, which to Roman ears meant he was claiming to be a king, a rabble-rouser, and a threat to the established order (Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 205). Because of that, Mark says, “they all condemned him as worthy of death” (14:64). Worthy of death. That’s quite a sentence to pass. It literally means that, from their perspective, Jesus had an obligation to die. He was guilty, and there was no other choice. He must die. He is worthy of death. 

Can you see Jesus standing there, in the high priest’s house, in front of an illegal trial, accused of so much he didn’t do? Can you see him there, condemned, mistreated, being beaten by the very ones sworn to protect the innocent? Can you see him there, in the dim light, convicted based on his own testimony of who he really is? Can you see him there? The hymn we sang earlier this morning puts it this way: “Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned he stood.” In my place he stood…there in the high priest’s house, he stood in my place. Condemned by the righteous, convicted by the people who were considered the most holy, the most pious, the people you’d want on your Board or living next to you. We tend to demonize the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, but the reality is, these were the good guys. These were the civic leaders. They were the ones everyone respected. They were the important people. And they were the ones who carried out the greatest injustice ever known in history. In my place, condemned, he stood. Can you see him standing there? He’s in your place.

Other times, we sit in the seats of the Sanhedrin, refusing to see what’s right in front of us, making judgments and condemnations based on what we think we know rather than on what is actually happening. The truth is that sometimes we don’t always act in Christian ways toward each other. We make assumptions. We decide someone’s “fate” before we hear them out. Sometimes we commit injustices on small and large scales in the ways we treat each other. A lot of times, we think the religious leaders hated Jesus, and maybe they did at this point, but it didn’t start that way. I think, more than hate, they were motivated by fear—fear that Jesus would somehow take away their authority, fear that he would take away their followers, fear that he would cause Rome to come down on them and remove their way of life. By this point, they had convinced themselves that Jesus was a threat, and he had to be dealt with. So perhaps that ought to cause us to ask how we deal with the things and the people we perceive as threats. In what ways do we create unjust situations because we react out of fear? We do that by what we do, and we can even do that by what we don’t do, by not speaking up when we should. There is a prayer of confession in the Book of Common Prayer that reflects this tendency: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” I imagine that there must have been at least one of these Sanhedrin members who felt that what was happening was wrong. And yet, no one speaks up for Jesus. No one says anything, like the boys in the locker room who pick on the one who is the smallest, making fun of him and ridiculing him when no one speaks up on his behalf. Like the bullies on the playground, who choose who’s in and who’s out with no one defending the weakest. Like the company who uses a person’s talents and gifts and then discards them as yesterday’s news, and no one speaks up when those who made the company succeed are fired and the executives get huge bonuses. Like us when we hold back from giving time, money, energy, talent because we’re afraid there just might not be enough left over for me. Sometimes, we sit in the seats of the Sanhedrin without even realizing the harm and the damage we can do.

Have you been there? Have you been in the place where the judgment was aimed toward you? What difference does it make for someone to stand up for you, or to stand in your place? A few years ago, a little film surprised everyone and not only became a genuine box office hit but also got itself nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in a world where sentimental and heartwarming stories are rarely honored. It lost to The Hurt Locker that year, but The Blind Side challenged people about what we think we can or can’t do. It challenged us to refuse to let fear motivate the way we respond to injustice. The film, in case you haven’t seen it, tells the story of Michael Oher, a 2009 number one draft pick in football, and how he was taken in by a family when he was a homeless teen. That one response, that one chance that was given to him, changed his life. The Tuohy family could have driven on past him, left him to his own devices. That would have been the conventional wisdom, to just take care of themselves and not worry about this kid from the wrong side of town. But the family was motivated by their Christian convictions, and when they saw this injustice, when they saw a kid with great potential and little chance, they could not turn a blind eye. Conventional wisdom is not always the wisest. It’s not always the Christian response. In fact, Paul says something like that when he describes the message of the cross to the Corinthians. He writes, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:20-23). True wisdom is responding to the world as God would respond, responding to injustice with justice rather than a blind eye. True wisdom is responding to the sin of the world with a cross rather than politics. Can you see Jesus standing there, in the midst of the Sanhedrin, suffering all the injustice they can give him? He’s standing in our place, and he’s standing in theirs. Do they realize he’s about to die for them, too?

There he stands, the wisdom of God surrounded by the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of the world judges him worthy of death, and very soon, they will carry out that sentence. But as he stands there, we have to ask ourselves which side we stand on. Do we join with the wisdom of the world that creates and sustains injustices, that promotes the attitude, “That’s just the way it is”? Or do we join with the wisdom of God, the one that confronts the injustices in the world with the power of love? That’s what Jesus is doing, even here in the courtroom, when he’s on trial. He could have run. He could have kept silent. But because of his love for you and me, he choose to take the worst the world had to offer in order to give us his best. When we’re faced with injustices, with times when the wisdom of the world is simply wrong, our calling is to respond like Jesus—to respond with love and to give ourselves away for his sake. Part of our commitment at this church is to embrace others, to care for people the way Jesus would care for them by giving all that we have. Are we willing to love others, in our schools, in our neighborhoods, in this city and county, even if it means being condemned by those who believe they are righteous? Who will you speak up for? To whom will you come alongside and offer assistance? Who will you love when no one else will? Because, you see, that’s what Jesus did for us as he stood in that makeshift, illegal courtroom. He stood in our place. He was judged so we don’t have to be. He was labeled worthy of death so that we might be able to live. The challenge for us is to be bold enough to live for him, to be his hands and feet, to offer his love to a broken world.

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,

In my place condemned he stood;

Sealed my pardon with his blood.

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Amen.