Have you ever wished you could communicate with a loved one who has already passed on? Have you ever thought that perhaps that loved one wishes he or she could communicate with you as well?
In 1999 a film was released that allowed us to imagine that communication across the great chasm that separates the living from the dead is possible. John is a 36-year-old man, whose life is in turmoil, never having gotten over his firefighter father’s death in a warehouse fire in 1969. One day he discovers his dad’s old ham radio and after toying with it hears some guyed named Frank on the other end. After a few days of talking with him they realize that they are father and son, 30 years apart and are talking off “the mother of all sun spots.” John warns his father not to follow his instincts and go the other way in the fire that will happen later that day. As a result Frank does not die and John’s life is changed forever.
(Belfast: Watch this clip…)
The author of the Gospel of Luke shares a story told by Jesus of a rich man and a beggar. The rich man who lived in luxury did nothing for a beggar named Lazarus even though he lay at his door daily. When the two died the rich man was taken to the place of torment while the beggar to the place of reward. Now knowing the consequences of living life as he had, the rich man begs Abraham to send someone from the dead to warn his brothers who are still alive of this place of torment so that they will get their acts together and not come to this same place when they die. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen. His brothers, Abraham said, had the Scriptures and they alone are enough to warn them to turn from their sins.
This morning as we continue in our series taken from the final 24 hours in the life of Jesus Christ we’re going to meet yet another character. If you haven’t been with us over the past couple of weeks, this is a unique series in that I am telling the stories of characters from the perspective of those characters. This character will take less in the form of imagination and tradition to understand, for history has recorded much about him as have the Scriptures.
Tragically his story is not as positive as that of our last two characters. As I share with you I want you to imagine that he, like the rich man in Luke’s story and John in the movie “Frequency” desires to warn you about your future. I want you to imagine that it is possible for someone who already knows of the afterlife to come and speak to you. To come and warn you.
Let us pray…
I hesitate to introduce myself to you. For you know me as a villain. You have come to despise me and even hate me, and for good reason. I am responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.
My name is Caiaphas. I orchestrated and oversaw the nocturnal trial of your Savior. Before you refuse to hear from me or allow your emotional reactions to take over I beg you to listen. I plead with you to learn from my tragic story.
Jerusalem during the first century was the center of the Jewish world; it was the city of God for it contained the Temple in which God resided. While our city and our nation were occupied by the Romans, they had essentially left the power of governing in the hands of our people. That power ultimately rested with me for I was a member of the most important religious and political family in all of Israel. It could be argued that I was the most important man alive for I was the head of the entire Temple. I was the High Priest.
As High Priest not only was I responsible for overseeing and ordering the religious life of the nation but I was also the President of the Sanhedrin, the highest court in the land. For over four centuries the Sanhedrin had ruled the land. All courts were responsible to this body. Made of up 71 members it consisted of chief priests who held the most important offices in the temple (most of whom were of my family), elders – men descended from the 12 tribes of Israel, and scribes who were lawyers and experts at interpreting the Scriptures. This body of clergy and laity became known for its competence and during the era of Roman occupancy was the chief political agency of the land.
The Roman authority let us practice our faith and rule the land as long as we were accountable to them. We were responsible for keeping the Jewish populace in line and should any agitators arise who might threaten the peace, Rome expected us to arrest them and turn them over.
I prided myself in my level of competency. I had developed a good relationship with the Roman procurator, Pilate, and we had a standing arrangement for how to deal with people who caused trouble.
As president of the Sanhedrin I was also a member of the Saducees – a religious and political sect of Jews. You’ve probably heard of them before. In first Century Israel there were at least three different parties:
The Pharisees – these men adhered to the law strictly but in order to ensure that they obeyed it they weighed themselves down with extra traditions so as to come no where near breaking it. They were passivists and didn’t want to work with the Romans.
Then there were the Zealots – who were aggressive about their nationalism. They were always looking for a Messiah to come and free them! These folks were ordinarily part of the lower city and were peasants and workers. They were always posing a threat to the peace.
But my own party, the Saducees, were much more peaceful. We were always willing to compromise with Rome. And religiously speaking we held to a no-nonsense scriptural morality. There was no need for extra traditions like those of the Pharisees. And unlike the Nationalists who were searching for a Messiah to free them, we were perfectly content with this life. We were wealthy men who didn’t believe in any prospect of reward or punishment in an afterlife. For us any form of enthusiasm was unnecessary and even dangerous to our existence.
Things were going very well for me. I had been High Priest for 15 years, a feat which in and of itself was amazing and showed my level of skill at working with the Romans. I had dealt with uprisings from the people. We had eliminated threats from zealots and all the while kept the peace. But I wasn’t prepared for him.
There’d been some buzz throughout the city of an up and coming teacher from the backwoods area of Galilee who was taking the countryside by storm. Rumor had it that he was healing the blind and lame. He had supposedly fed a large crowd with a handful of food and he was even said to have claimed to be the Son of God. And now recently in Bethany just a few miles outside the city, he was said to have raised a man from the dead.
The Pharisees and some of the chief priests called the Sanhedrin together. They were afraid. The last thing we needed, they said, was to have Jesus come into Jerusalem claiming to be the Son of David the rightful heir to the throne and an army of zealots rise up with him to overthrow the Romans, an act that would certainly result in a bloodbath, not to mention the loss of our religious freedom.
The answer, to me, it seemed was simple. How could my colleagues be so stupid? He’s one man. The nation is more important than his life. Let’s simply come up with a way to take him out. It was then that we began looking for a way to trap him. Up until that point this Jesus had been a nuisance but nothing more to me.
It was the beginning of the Passover Feast when things really changed. Pilgrims had arrived from all across our land to worship. And they all had to make their way to the Temple to offer a sacrifice.
You see, our entire faith was built around the understanding that we are sinful beings and that our sins need to be paid for. In the words of the Scriptures, that atonement needs to be made in order that our guilt might be washed away.
For centuries the manner by which that atonement was accomplished was the sacrificial system that we practiced within the Temple. You see a sacrifice of an animal would be brought by a worshiper and a priest would offer that sacrifice. And then once a year, I, the High Priest, would enter the Most Holy Place, the place where the presence of God resided in order to make atonement for the sins of the people. My presence, my offering, was the only one that God would accept. And when I came it was on behalf of all the people. It was an awesome thought. In that moment I stood in the gap between man and God and God accepted my offering and mine alone as a payment for the people’s sin.
I want you to think about something with me for a moment. Knowing what you do about Jesus – about his work on the cross, about the way that he stood in the gap for all of humanity; about how his offering was the only one that God accepted for all times – can you see why I was threatened by this man? Up until the time Jesus showed up in Jerusalem I was the most righteous man in the land. I was charged with the spiritual health of the people. And now Jesus comes along and not only threatens the peace of the land but threatens the entire sacrificial system that my life was built around, my very job. Pretend for a minute that you aren’t already partial to Jesus and understand this situation from my standpoint. I had everything to lose, or so I thought.
I’m sorry to say that my fear of this man, the threat that I felt he posed to our land and to my own livelihood clouded my vision and prevented me from hearing the life changing message he had to share.
Let me get back to the story… Worshipers had arrived at the Temple where my family had set up a lucrative business selling sacrificial animals. But beyond that, you couldn’t purchase these animals in just any currency, it had to be the Temple currency, and so we had set up exchange booths and charged an exuberant exchange rate in order to make a profit for ourselves.
I don’t know whether you’ve read the account in the Scriptures or not, but Jesus showed up in the Temple one day and overturned all of our booths, both those where we exchanged money as well as those where animals were being sold – accusing us of turning the Temple into a house of thieves.
As if that wasn’t bad enough – the people were enthusiastic about his teaching to the point that I knew that if I didn’t do something soon he may in fact stir up the kind of riot from the people that would get the attention of the Romans, the kind of attention we didn’t want or need.
So we developed a plan – while we could drum up a charge and the Sanhedrin could pronounce the death penalty, we didn’t have the authority to carry it out, that was left to the Romans. What we decided was to find a way to make Jesus look guilty of treason and a danger to security. In one act we would destroy Jesus, put the blame on Rome in the eyes of the Jews, and pretend our own loyalty to the Roman authority. It seemed brilliant to me.
Our biggest problem was finding a way to arrest him and hand him over to the Romans without stirring up the people. When Judas approached us and offered to lead us to him at night we jumped at the offer.
I knew that it was illegal to try a capital charge at night, but I also feared the people and so I assembled the Sanhedrin in the early morning hours and we went to work. The court was in the lower level of my palace. Jesus stood on a raised platform in the center chained by the wrists to escorts sitting on either side of him.
As soon as Judas had made the offer I had sent some of my servants to find some witnesses who could speak against Jesus. During the trial, the plan backfired because the witnesses had not been coached adequately and ended up contradicting each other. I knew that the law stated that a prisoner was to be acquitted once the witnesses disagreed, but we couldn’t let him go. I tried invoking the most solemn oath binding on any Jew, yet still he said nothing. So finally I resorted to coercion. “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the blessed God?” “I am,” he responded, “and you will see me, the Son of Man, sitting at God’s right hand in the place of power coming back on the clouds of heaven.”
That’s all he needed to say! He had committed blasphemy. He had elevated himself to the place of God. I tore my mantle. There was no longer any need for witnesses. The rest of the council agreed with me that he should be condemned to death.
I’m ashamed of the way I behaved that night. It was the lowest point of my entire life. It haunts me every moment. I was anything but righteous or just, instead my envy and my pride reared their ugly heads and I orchestrated an evil sequence of events. A sequence that led to him being spit on, jeered, slapped, flogged, and eventually crucified.
Even though I tried to convince myself that I had saved the people, that it was better that one man died than the entire nation lose its freedom, on the way home from the next afternoon there was a terrible feeling in my gut. When I arrived one of the chief priests was waiting for me – he looked like he had seen a ghost – “You have to see this,” he said and then led me to the Temple.
When I entered I couldn’t believe my eyes, the veil, the enormous curtain that separated the sanctuary from the Most Holy Place was torn in two from top to bottom. It wasn’t humanly possible to tear that curtain. Only a divine act could accomplish such a feat.
I wish I could say I understood it all then. I didn’t. But I do now.
We once needed a high priest, another man, to stand between us and God. To offer a sacrifice on our behalf. To ensure that our sins were forgiven. A High Priest who could enter the presence of God for us. Who could go places we could not go. In my day, I was that person.
But things changed when he showed up. He became the Great High Priest once and for all. The only one who’s able to make things right between us and God. The only one who can offer a sacrifice. And because of his death the barrier that once divided us from God no longer exists.
Let me ask you something important: Do you think you can approach God on your own? On a scale of 1 to 10 where would you rate your righteousness, your goodness? I wasn’t perfect but I would say I was a pretty decent human being. I devoted my life to the service of God and even though I fowled up now and then, overall I wasn’t that bad. If my righteousness didn’t suffice, if my goodness wasn’t enough to atone for my sins, and I was the High Priest, what makes you think for a moment that you can do it on your own?
You need another high priest. But not just any high priest will do. You need the only high priest who was perfect yet chose to become a sacrifice bearing upon himself the guilt of all humanity so that we could be forgiven.
Please, don’t wait until it’s too late. There’s a place of torment, a place of suffering. And unless you heed this warning and allow Jesus Christ to stand before God on your behalf, you will join the ranks of those who learned the truth when the truth could no longer set them free.
Let us pray…
