Huzzah, from Monday I can get back to Ezekiel!
PS You may recall that I say this occasionally - I include various notes and little frameworks and stuff that I use, and even anything I write but don't end up including into my sermons. So that note about "starting with something about truth" falls into that - it was there because I didn't start my sermon the usual way - I started sort of at the fourth paragraph. For this sermon I also printed out the passage and took it on the train to work with me and scribbled various things. There aren't that many, I'll type them below with verse references.
Also, I haven't timechecked this one before posting it (I usually do) so I might end up cutting some stuff out before I give it - but then, I would have included it all for you, the discerning reader, anyway.
Mark 14:43-72
- Judas betrays Jesus – putting this world first (think they are smarter than God)
- “Scripture must be fulfilled”
- trial by religious leaders – putting religion first (think they are holier then God)
- Peter's denial – putting himself first (know they are too weak for God)
v44 Why did Judas betray Jesus? -> Some people know the truth and don't want it.
v47 Why only half the story?
v48 Danger of Jesus' teaching
v49 Do you trust the Scripture so much?
vs51-52 Wtf?
v54 Not that far - perhaps how we know about the whole thing
v56 Ends justify means?
v61 Why answer a bad case? Asked a question again, but not this question
v63 What is blasphemy really?
v65 Hatred of ideology, need to embarrass
v72 Everyone deserted him, v50. Peter knows the truth, but denies it - cf Judas
Words
(start with something about the truth)
Have you ever had someone you think you can trust betray you? Have you ever had a friend let you down? Ever had a family member do something sinister behind your back? It is a terrible feeling when someone breaks trust – whether they tell a secret they promised they would keep, or lie to you about something important, or sometimes even worse. A friend of mine was the director of an organisation, and he was betrayed by one of his employees, who was rerouting his phone calls, answering his emails, taking speaking engagements and meetings with important people, and basically trying to usurp his authority with his other employees in the hope of stealing the position of director from him. At the very same time, his own brother was attempting to use an enduring power of attorney to try and steal the life savings and family home of their own mother and put it into overseas bank accounts. It is difficult to imagine the feeling of betrayal that this man must have felt, both at work and then at home as well.
This awful feeling of betrayal, however, does not prevent us from turning around and becoming a betrayer in some situations. I am not of course suggesting that anyone here would undermine their boss, or would try and steal from their own parents. But let me describe two situations where I have been accused of betraying someone, and see if you can relate to them. I have been on a panel of leaders where a close friend of mine has put up a detailed submission about an action that panel should take, and when it has come to a vote, I have voted against my close friend's submission. He felt that I had betrayed him because I had argued against him to vote down his submission that he had worked hard on. I have also witnessed a debate between my wife and another person, and when asked what my opinion was on the subject, disagreed with my wife. In this case I broke the cardinal rule that all married men know so well – always side with your wife.
Why did I do these things, commit these acts of betrayal, albeit minor, against people I love? I would have said that I was standing up for the truth, standing up for what I believe in, and that the truth is important. In reality, of course, what I was doing was just wanting to be right, and putting my own understanding of a situation or subject ahead of the understandings of others, wanting to throw in my two cents, have my say. They might say that I betrayed their trust by not agreeing with them, but the truth is that I didn't trust their ability to make a good decision on the one hand, or the force of their argument on the other.
As a church, you have been working through the book of Mark, except for one week where someone accidentally prepared a sermon on Luke and the triumphal entry. But I've been invited back, and this time I promise we will stick to the book of Mark. And you have come a long way in Mark, too. Jesus appears on the scene rather suddenly in Mark, announced by John the Baptist as the coming messiah. He travels the land doing miracles, teaching about God with authority, and winding his way slowly but surely to Jerusalem, where he predicts he is going to die. He does a little more predicting, too – actually predicting two things that happen in the passage we are looking at today. Those two things are the actions of two of his disciples. One of them, he says, is going to betray him. Once he is arrested, the rest are going to desert him. To which they all say, “No, we'd never do that!” One in particular, Simon, who Jesus called Peter, is particularly forceful, saying he'd rather die than disown Jesus. To which Jesus replies by predicting that Peter will in fact deny him three times before the morning has come and the rooster has crowed.
In Mark 14:43, all of these predictions come to a head. This section marks the beginning of the end of Jesus' preaching and teaching ministry, and starts him on the road towards the passion – towards his ministry as a sacrifice to God for our wrongdoing. In this section, we are going to see the attitude of three people towards Jesus, his ministry and his position as Messiah.
First, we see Judas betray Jesus. That is how our passage today starts. Judas sold Jesus out to his enemies, we are told elsewhere, for 30 pieces of silver. Jesus was quite popular with the crowds, as you may remember, and so the religious leaders, who were plotting to have him killed, couldn't just arrest him in the street in the middle of the day, or else the people would have been up in arms against them. So they needed someone to tell them where Jesus goes to be alone, so they can ambush him under cover of darkness. But why does Judas partake in this betrayal? We read earlier that Judas actually approaches the religious leaders and offers to hand Jesus over. It's not like they approached him in a dark alley and opened a suitcase full of money, and he was just tempted by greed. No, there was more to it than that. Just before this section, you might remember that a woman approached Jesus and poured expensive perfume over his head, and some of the disciples rebuked her, saying that it would have been better to sell the perfume and give the money to the poor. But Jesus rebuked them, saying that this was a great thing she had done, it was an anointing, it was special, because he was special.
Mark doesn't tell us specifically (although John does in his gospel), but he implies that at least one of the disciples that complained and rebuked the woman was none other than Judas Iscariot, the betrayer. This is implied by the fact that directly after telling this story, Judas goes off and finds the high priest and offers to betray Jesus. It is a phenomenal story – one of Jesus' closest disciples hands him over to his death. When Jesus says at the last supper that the one who dips bread in the same bowl as him, ancient eating customs tell us that he is talking about someone who is sitting right beside him. Judas sat right beside Jesus at the last supper, like a best friend or a close confidant. And then then that very evening he betrayed him.
I think Judas often gets dismissed as 'the one who sold Jesus out for a bag of coins'. But as I said, I don't think greed was the only issue here. Sure, we know that Judas occasionally stole from the communal purse that the disciples carried – John tells us that too. I can assure you that there have been, and still are, treasurers of churches who have dipped into the church funds. This just makes them sinners, and we're all sinners. After all, Judas hung around with Jesus a long time, and was in the group of twelve that he kept around him. He learned from Jesus, spoke in Jesus' name, drove out demons in Jesus' name. So why the betrayal? I think the straw that broke the camel's back for Judas was Jesus telling him off for wanting to help the poor. Not that he specifically cared about the poor, but that he got sick of being told by Jesus that he had it wrong.
Think of the number of times Jesus had to rebuke the disciples. When Jesus calmed the storm, he rebukes them and asks why they have no faith. When they ask him to send away the crowds to get food, Jesus tells them, “No, you give them something to eat.” When Jesus tells the Pharisees that their religious cleansing rights don't make them righteous, and the disciples ask him to explain, Jesus responds, “Are you so dull?” After he fed the four thousand and he warns them about the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod, they think he's admonishing them for not bringing enough bread, and he says to them, “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened?” “Do you still not understand?” They argue about who is the greatest, and he tells them they're wrong. They tell someone to stop driving out demons in Jesus' name, and he tells them they were wrong. The disciples drove away people who brought their children to Jesus, and Jesus rebuked them again. They tell the blind man Bartimaeus to be quiet, and Jesus stops them. When they are amazed at his cursing of the fig tree, he tells them to have faith in God. A disciple remarks at the wonder of the great temple to God, and Jesus replies that it will be destroyed. It gets annoying to be constantly told that you're wrong, and if you don't respect the authority of the teacher telling you that his is right and you are wrong, you grumble, and you think, “I'm not stupid. I'll show this so-called teacher.” And so Judas betrays Jesus, because Judas thinks he is right and Jesus is wrong. It is not a coincidence that in betraying Jesus with a kiss, Judas calls him “Rabbi”, or teacher.
Have you ever questioned how God does things? Have you ever thought, “Look at all this pain in the world. If I was in charge, I wouldn't do it this way. Why is that bad man allowed to earn lots of money and get into power, while good righteous people are mistreated? Why are murderers and rapists given God's grace and saved, when good people who are trying their best to help, but don't believe in Jesus, go to hell? Why is homosexuality a sin, when it doesn't hurt anyone? God, you're wrong.” These words are said by people every day, and lived out by them in every decision they make. We all say these same things – perhaps not so blatantly, but every time we do something we know is wrong, every time we let our anger get the better of us, or we spend money in things we don't need, or we judge someone, or we look at pornography, or whatever way we slip and stumble, we are saying to God, “I know better than you how to run my life.” We are betraying God, like Judas did. Selling God out for 30 pieces of silver. We are saying that we can run our lives better than God can, we know better what we need than God does, and we would rather the coins in our pocket than get told what to do by God.
Friends, if this rings a bell with you, listen up. You are wrong. God is perfect, and he knows exactly what we need. He knows the world is broken, and he is going to fix it – but he will take his time, until he has given all people a chance to hear his offer of peace and accept it or reject it. In heaven, there is no pain, no war, no hunger, no poverty, nothing bad at all. Yes, God tells you how to live your life. Yes, he will convict your conscience that you are doing the wrong thing, and yes, sometimes that stings, realising that you are doing wrong. But he also offers the solution – he offers to save you from your own imperfections, and to make you perfect in God's sight. We all know that the life of self-indulgence here on earth looks tempting, and it pulls at our desires. But it is not fulfilling, and ultimately, it leads to us being enemies of God. God is offering to make peace with us, to forget our crimes, and to lead us into heaven, where everything will be perfect. But you have to accept that God is in charge, and that he makes the decisions, not us.
Judas could not accept this, and so he betrayed Jesus into the hands of the High Priest and his followers, armed with swords and clubs. One of those standing near Jesus draws a sword and cuts off one of the men's ears. That's pretty nasty. Mark doesn't tell us the full story – Jesus heals that man. He wants us to feel the tension of the moment – two groups, armed, ready to fight. But Jesus shows that he is not prepared to let this encounter come to bloodshed. He asks the servants of the high priest how dangerous they really think he is, that they come with an armed mob to arrest him. He was in the temple courts teaching every day, and they never arrested him then. He then says, “But the Scriptures must be fulfilled.” Jesus knows that his capture and his death are predicted in the Old Testament, and so he does not put up a fight. What do the disciples do? They run. The servants of the high priest probably outnumbered the disciples, they were tired, sleepy, and their leader had just given up. So they turn tail and flee. One young man is only dressed in his underpants – when the high priest's men grab him, he struggles and flees naked, leaving them holding his underwear. So you can see that the high priest's men weren't just after Jesus, they probably wanted to arrest the whole group. But in the dark (and in the ancient world night time was really dark) when a group of people runs off into the blackness, you're not going to catch them.
Here we see the second attitude to Jesus as they arrest him and take him to the high priest. The high priest is sure that Jesus has done something wrong. But no matter how hard he tried, no matter how many people they called in looking for evidence against Jesus of wrongdoing, they could not get any true statements. They got a bunch of false statements, but none of them agreed. They tried to twist his words, but even then they could still not agree on what he had said. The high priest asked him to answer these false and confused allegations, but Jesus just sat silently. Why even answer such obviously false testimony? So the high priest stops trying to trick Jesus with false testimony and lies, and asks him straight out the key thing that the religious leaders all fear so much, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus replies that he is, and that he will sit at God's right hand, in a position of authority.
This was the fear of the religious leaders of Jesus' time. They were in charge of all the religious trappings of the Jews at the time. If people wanted to know how to serve God, they came and asked these religious leaders, this high priest. Jesus was saying that they were wrong. So they wanted him dead. Again, it is not just a simple matter of money or power. They knew that Jesus was teaching something that didn't line up with the way they saw God, with the way they saw worship, and the way they saw people should act if they want to be right with God. In their eyes, Jesus had spoken against the Sabbath, spoken against ritual cleansing, spoken against the temple, and these were things that these religious leaders were sure were from God. They were sure that if they followed these practices, they would be holy and acceptable as God's people. But in all their concern about holiness and how to live correctly, they had actually forgotten the God who it was all meant to serve. The high priest and his followers were so sure that they needed to protect God and his holiness that they thought any means would justify that end – even bringing false testimony against an innocent man. When Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, and the Son of God, they accused him of blasphemy, and they would have been right about anyone else in the whole world. But Jesus was the Son of God. He was the Messiah. They could not believe that they were wrong about God and how people were to approach God. They thought when it came to holiness, they knew it all.
But Jesus was not like the religious leaders. He went and took God to the people who need him most – prostitutes, drunks, tax collectors (who were basically seen as thieves and traitors), poor people, sick people, widows. The high priest and religious leaders thought that God could not protect himself from sinners, as if his holiness and purity were somehow fragile and easily destroyed. They thought that they were holier than God, and could protect God from the evils of the world. But God doesn't need protection. God's holiness is not fragile. It is mighty. God's righteousness defeats all the evil of the world. God is in control, not evil. Jesus proved that time and time again by walking into the house of a prostitute, or a tax collector, or going to the crypts of the dead, or to the barren lands where the demon possessed lived, and every single time he came out clean, and it was the evil things that had been done away with. The high priest was so afraid of Jesus corrupting the way people came to God, that he used corrupt tactics to try and bring him down. But Jesus was so holy and righteous that he could have dinner with a prostitute and walk out of her house clean, and she was the one whose life changed.
For many of us in church, we are far more like the high priest than we are like Judas. We believe in God, we seek to serve him. We want to do the right thing. We want to live a holy life. But we get it wrong, because we get so tied up in how to be a good churchgoer, that we forget what it means to be a good servant of God. We instead start to serve our own idea of holiness, our own idea of righteousness, and we begin defending it, because lo and behold, it can't defend itself. And no wonder it can't defend itself, because it's probably wrong. We are not more holy than God. God is holy, and we are called to be holy because he is holy. We are to be holy like God, not some crazy made-up holiness that we create on our own. God's holiness can stand up against any evil or any corruption. In fact, God's holiness cleanses sinful people and makes them clean. But God's holiness is very confronting, because it is holy without being judgemental. It doesn't need to judge, because it knows what is right and what is wrong, so it just goes and does what is right. That is the spirit of righteousness and holiness that dwells within the Christian. How confident are you of God's holiness? Do you trust him to have the judgement and salvation of the world in hand, and so take part in it under his authority? Or do you think that you know what is really right and wrong, and so stand in judgement over people, and try to protect God's holiness by waging your own war against perceived evil?
Finally, in the midst of the high priest's trial of Jesus, we see Peter. Peter ran off with all the other disciples, but now he has found his way to the high priest's household, and is standing in the courtyard, warming himself by the fire as the trial takes place. But he gets spotted. The high priest's servants are still after Jesus' followers, so when Peter is confronted by them about being one of Jesus' disciples, he denies it and walks outside to the entranceway. But she sees Peter standing there, she says it again, and now more servants are around. Peter starts to feel the pressure, and he denies it once more. But the other servants are a bit wary now, and they say, “You must be, you've got the same country accent as Jesus,” and Peter is so upset now that he swears at them and curses them, “I don't know this man at all!” he says. Then the rooster crows, and Peter is reminded of Jesus' prediction concerning him, and he breaks down and cries.
Peter cries because he realises that in his weakness he has done exactly what he promised Jesus he would never do – desert him. Jesus was his teacher, his rabbi, his leader, his close friend, and also he was the Son of God, the Christ, the Messiah of his people. Peter realised this, and actually confessed it to Jesus. But now, Jesus has been captured by his enemies and is being tried and convicted of blasphemy. Jesus is going to die – and Peter ran. All the disciples did. Peter didn't have what it took to serve Jesus, and when Jesus needed him most, he ran. And then when Jesus was busy being put on trial for things he didn't do, Peter was out there denying he'd ever heard of him. Peter is a failure.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that it is Peter's response that we should seek to follow. We should not be like Judas, and think that we are smarter than God. We should definitely not be like the high priest, and think that we are holier than God. No, we should be like Peter, and realise that we are, in fact, too weak for God. We will fail all the time. But God shows his strength through our weakness. God's power is made perfect in weakness, Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 12:9. The weakness of God is stronger than humanity's greatest strength, says Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:25. Yes, we will all sin. We will all fall short of the glory of God, as it says in Romans 3:23. But as it goes on to say in Romans 3:24, “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” Jesus is the strong one. It is with his strength that we are saved, with his grace that we are justified, and it is with his power that we go out to serve him.
How upset do you get when you fail at following Christ? Do you weep about it? Does it bring you to your knees, like it did Peter? He was devastated that he had let Jesus down. Are you? It should hurt us that we have disobeyed God. But so often, our attitude is so much like Judas, that we think we know better than God, or it is so much like the high priest that we think we are holier than God, that we actually don't even realise we have failed God, so it never effects us. But trust me, you are a sinner, and you have denied God just like Peter did, just like all the disciples did. Every single one – not one hung around to get persecuted with Jesus. They all did the runner. And so have you, and so have I. And we will do it again. That thought should cut us to the bone. But it should also make us cry out for joy that God forgives us, that he is the strong one so we don't need to be. Because Jesus was found guilty, even though he was innocent; because Jesus was beaten and mocked, ridiculed, stripped, whipped, and nailed to a cross; because God poured out his anger and his wrath on Jesus, we are safe. Even though we fail. Even though we are weak. We are safe. He will work in us, and through us, so that it will be his strength that accomplishes his will. He includes us because he is a great and gracious and merciful God. Not because we are smart. Not because we are holy. But because we are so weak, that by using us to accomplish his means, people will be amazed at the strength of God.
Let's give thanks and glory to God that he can use us, just like he used Peter.
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