The Trial of Caiaphas
By Charles Rush
March 7, 1999
Matthew 26:57-68
what authority? When I was a psychiatric chaplain, still in
seminary, we had another chaplain intern named Harry. One time Harry
was on the ward when one of the patients asked who he was. He
explained that he was the chaplain. The man said ‘I don't
believe you'. So Harry reached in his wallet and pulled out his
Seminary identification card. The man looked back at him and said
‘takes more than a photo to be a real preacher' and he walked
off.
Harry stood there crestfallen. Now it is true, that it is hard to
tell who is who at many psychiatric hospitals and this one was no
exception. The staff wore jeans to work and when they took the annual
photo of the psychiatrists, you would swear they were patients. A
visitor once looked in incredulity and asked the head nurse on our ward
how you tell the patients from the staff? She responded ‘We have
the keys' and walked on.
Harry reported this sad incident to our supervisor who was slack
jawed with amazement. He said ‘Harry, if this man had questioned
your masculinity, would you have dropped your drawers?'
The supervisor said ‘Harry, authority is conferred upon you by
other people, especially spiritual authority. Apparently, you have
some things to do before this man is ready to confer it upon you.'
[Shoes Harry, think shoes].
Jesus had that charisma that moved people to invest him with
authority almost immediately upon meeting him. There was something
about him enigmatic perhaps but he had a spiritual and moral charisma
that people recognized. It is very likely that quite a few people
thought he might be the Messiah. Even the Jewish historian of the
first century, Josephus, writes about him as Jesus whom they call the
Messiah.
Other people said he was the Messiah or a prophet perhaps. Some of
the Greeks said he was a ‘Son of God'. Jesus himself,
doesn't say anything at first, to the question of what authority
he exercises. When asked again, he only gives a cryptic, enigmatic
response.
Ray Brown says that the reason Jesus doesn't say much is most
likely because he realized that nothing that he said in this forum
would be properly understood, neither would it make any difference.
It is a very frustrating situation. Some of us know what it is
like to be in a frustrating situation where speech doesn't matter
much. In the spate of mergers and acquisitions that are going on
throughout the economy, particularly in the financial sector, the new
configuration after the merger frequently has 8 people and only 5
desks.
Just as frequently the decisions on who gets a seat and who gets
the door has little or nothing to do with job performance. Often it
doesn't matter that you are at the top of your game and that you
have been responsible for earning the firm solid money in the past few
years. Sometimes being excellent just means you are expensive and
expensive is a liability. It doesn't matter that you have
sacrificed a lot of personally, been loyal. It certainly doesn't
matter that you have two kids in college and a mother-in-law in a
nursing home depending on you. It doesn't matter that you are a
great guy. You could get down on your knees and beg. You could stand
and scream about the arbitrariness of it all. But they aren't
giving you your job back.
Some of us know about illnesses that won't be cured. I got a
note from a friend my age with a terminal disease who said, with
incredulity, ‘this wasn't ever an option.' Your kids are
in elementary school. This is not happening to me. And you can curse
the doctor for not being clairvoyant when you first came with symptoms
months ago, and you can curse yourself for your diet and lifestyle, and
you can curse your ancestors for their lousy genes and our society for
its polluting toxins. You can curse God for the injustice of this
world but there still is not a cure for that disease.
Some of us know about spouses that have made up their mind, present
us with the stunning news that they are going their way, and that is
that. And you can plead about the quality of what you have had
together, you can promise to change, you can beg for them to go to
counseling. You can get your lawyer to make their life miserable. You
can exact as much settlement as you can get but they are not coming
back. And that hole in your heart is not going away.
In general, we tend to let the circumstances of our lives become
all controlling for us. That is doubly true in times of crisis. We
let the world around us set the agenda. Fredric Beuchner says ‘In
our lives in the world, the temptation is always to go where the world
takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the
strongest. When good things happen, we rise to the heaven; when bad
things happen, we descend to hell. When the world strikes out at us,
we strike back, and when one way or the other the world blesses us, our
spirits soar'... We are in constant danger of not being actors in
the drama of our own lives but reactors.'
How different it is with Jesus. Jesus is in a life-threatening
situation. Presumably there were a number of things that he could have
done. He could have just fled to begin with, head down to the coral
reef in the Red Sea, and hidden out. He didn't do that.
Presumably, he could have corralled his followers and incited a huge
riot, calling down the angels from heaven, so to speak. He didn't
do that. He could have delivered a searing oration about the injustice
of the Roman Empire and the hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders. He
didn't do that either.
Instead what he appears to have done is allow the Spirit of God to
fill him. This is the way that the gospel writers depict the whole
life of Jesus. Jesus appears to have been on a life pilgrimage to be a
conduit for the Spirit of God to flow through him in whatever situation
he happened to find himself involved.
From the time he was baptized, to the time he retreated to the
desert for 40 days of fasting and prayer to clarify his mission and
purpose; to the many acts of compassion and healing in the people that
he encountered; to the times that he retreated to refocus himself, he
appears on being intent on transforming the world around him through
releasing the loving, gracious Spirit of God. He is not floating
downstream with the current that he finds himself, he is transforming
that reality with the love of God.
That concentration of focus seems to get more intense as he heads
towards arrest, trial, torture, and death. He appears to be more
focused on being filled with the Spirit of God rather than on the
agenda of the world. He neither confirms nor denies any claims to be
the Messiah. He doesn't allow other people's questions about
him to define who he is. He doesn't allow himself to be limited
by the near sightedness of their vision of who he is and what he is
about. He is quiet, and yet it appears to be a quiet that is not so
much the silence of a victim as the peace that comes from integrity.
It is a quiet of someone who remains in control of himself. He is the
only one
quietly human
in the clamor of an
inhuman injustice.
It is a deafening silence of contrast.
Don't you wish you had that peace in the midst of
tribulation? Don't you wish you knew who you were so well and
what you were to be about? Don't you wish you were an actors and
not, like Joe said last week, ‘loitering in the vicinity of your
own lives?'
We want to fit in so much and be like everyone else that our
temptation is to lose ourselves in the process. That is why so many of
us wake up at 45 and say ‘I've been playing someone
else's game for so long, I'm not even sure who I am
anymore?' President Calvin Coolidge once invited some friends from
his hometown to dine at the White House. But they were all worried
that they wouldn't use the right table manners, they wouldn't
fit in, so they decided just to do everything that Coolidge did. Made
sense. It went well until coffee was served. The president poured his
coffee into the saucer. The guests did the same. Coolidge added sugar
and cream. His guests did, too. Then Coolidge bent over and put his
saucer on the floor for the cat.
Sound familiar? We're so good at fitting in to the slots the
world has given us that sometimes we have trouble actually knowing who
we are. Rabbi Zusya once said ‘In the world to come I shall not
be asked, ‘why weren't you Moses?' I should be asked
‘why were you not Zusya?' Jesus didn't let other people
define him. He wasn't a fixture in their agenda. He was
authentically himself.
The peace that Jesus offers', says Fredrick Beuchner
again, ‘has nothing to do with the things that are going on at the
moment he offers it, which are for the most part tragic and terrible
things. It is a peace beyond the reach of the tragic and terrible. It
is a profound and inward peace that sees with unflinching clarity the
tragic and terrible things that are happening and yet is not shattered
by them. He loves his friends enough to be more concerned for their
frightened and troubled hearts than he is for his own, and yet his love
for his friends is no more where his peace comes from than his
impending torture and death are where his peace will be destroyed. His
peace comes not from the world but from something whole and holy within
himself which sees the world also as whole and holy because deep
beneath all the broken and unholy things that are happening in it even
as he speaks, Jesus sees what he calls the Kingdom of God.'
Jesus fills this silent confrontation with the peace of God. He
points us towards the transcendent possibility that we might keep our
authentic integrity, our
compassionate humanity
when we are threatened to our very core.
Perhaps it is precisely here that his real authority resides for
us. He not only taught us with his words, he taught us with his life
and death what it looks like to become
authentically human in an inhuman world.
He points us towards resident spiritual capacities we weren't
using to our fullest potential and in so doing points our way toward
home.
In some ways, it is particularly hard for us to focus on this peace
and quietude. We would prefer something more of an action figure like
Oddeysus. When the Greeks were being overwhelmed by the Trojans at the
climax of the long battle, they had to quickly decide whether to cut
and run for their ships or to fight to the death. The leaders huddled
quickly and decided to fight to the death and they led the charge into
the middle of the Trojans and drove them back. Forget fear and just
fight till we overcome, come what may
We like that much more and it is understandable because it fits our
life a little better right now. It is courageous grit that befits the
Masters of the Universe. The vast majority of us feel, just now, like
we are pretty much in control of our lives, in control of our destiny.
We are prosperous, so we don't mind steering our yacht
downstream. The stream is good. We have an aspiring generation of
children who have known nothing but increasing opportunity and
prosperity. Our kids think a limitation is when they have to shop at
the Gap instead of Nordstrom's. And we parents think we are
exercising restraint because we send our kids to public school.
And may the prosperity continue. But, it is incredible that some
of us will be able to raise our kids through high school with one
opportunity after another, positive affirmation followed by positive
affirmation, passports full of stamps, kids full of vision that
anything is possible for them, and the only real crises and limitations
they have known are the ones of their own creation. It is an amazing
era in this regard.
But we are haunted at the same time, are we not? We know, in the
back of our minds that Pleasantville may not be a spiritually healthy
environment. Why? Because spiritual health and maturity means that we
have to deal with loss, we have to deal with frustration, we have to
deal with handling ourselves in situations we can't control.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said ‘You gain strength and confidence by
every experience where you have to really stop and look these fears in
the face You must do the thing you cannot do.'
In the back of our minds we know that is true. We know that we
would be more rounded if things weren't so prosperous. And that,
of course, is why Christians for centuries have practiced the
discipline of the season of Lent. We know that we need to learn to
deal with limitation because the reality is that our world is filled
with a great deal of tragedy, illness. And all of us must one day walk
through the portals of death alone. That won't change.
By what authority? Jesus doesn't answer that question.
Maybe it's the wrong question altogether. Jesus simply and
profoundly embodies spiritual purpose. He shows us that we can have
authentic integrity even when the whole world is falling apart around
us. He shows us that we can stay in control of our compassionate
humanity in the midst of injustice, hypocrisy, and plain old evil. He
shows us that the spiritual meaning of our lives is to release the
Spirit of loving grace come what may. And the most amazing
transformation will take place in ourselves and in others. He reminds
us that there will be critical junctures in our lives when this may be
all we have. And in a frightening, authentic way, this story suggests
it may be all we need. ‘Do not fear', says God, ‘for lo
I will be with you, even unto the close of this age.'
Amen.
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