GOSPEL MEDITATION # 232
Mark 14:53-65
Jesus Before the Council
- Find a quiet place without distractions.
- Be comfortably alert, still, and at peace.
- Say the Lord’s Prayer. Sing or cant the Jesus Prayer.
- Pray for family, friends, neighbors, and yourself.
- Slowly and carefully read the passage of Scripture.
- From memory, determine the central points.
- After a brief stop at the house of Annas, the former high priest, Jesus is now taken to Caiaphas, Annas’ son-in-law.
- All or part of the 71 member Sanhedrin is in place and ready to deal with Jesus. All done in secret for fear of the people.
- Peter has recovered his courage and risks entering into the courtyard of Caiaphas’s house.
- The Sanhedrin needed a list of charges against Jesus in order to then send Him to Pilate, who alone had the power to condemn Him to death.
- Witness after witness, however prepared, did not produce enough substance that would convince Pilate of the need to kill Jesus.
- The high priest, and we notice in this passage the name Caiaphas does not appear, is desperate to find something incriminating.
- Some witnesses either lied or misunderstood the statement Jesus made as we find in Matthew 24:2 about the Temple’s destruction.
- As predicted in Isaiah 53:7, Jesus remains silent and offers no defense.
- What angered the religious leaders was Jesus’ not so subtle claim to being the Son of Man or Messiah—the King of the Jews. So the high priest asked Jesus directly who He was.
- Whenever questioned about who He was, Jesus answered.
- “I Am” Jesus said, and this is the English rendering for the Greek for Tetragrammaton, the four letters in Hebrew found in Exodus 3:14, and is very name of God, which we know now as Yahweh.
- The high priest, either as a genuine gesture or as an act put on for the rest, tears his tunics, quite a feat really, to express his utter disgust. Blasphemy, here is a man claiming to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, indeed the God of Israel. The Sanhedrin now has no trouble sending Jesus to Pilate and His certain death.
- Now begins the humiliation of the King of the Jews.