Through the Envious Eyes of Caiaphas (Matthew 26:57-68, 27:18; John 11:49-50) - Holy Week Noon Sermon

Our scripture today is found in Matthew chapter 26 and also the

Matthew 26 · chapter mention

Gospel of John. Then those who had seized Jesus

led him to Caiaphas the high priest, where the scribes and

elders had gathered, and Peter was following him at a distance

as far as the courtyard of the high priest, and going inside he

set with the guards to see the end.

Now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false

testimony against Jesus, that they might put him to death, but

they found none, though many false witnesses came forward.

At last two came forward and said, This man is able to

destroy the temple of God, and to rebuild it in three days.

And the high priest stood up and said, Have you no answer to

make? What is it that these men

testify against you? But Jesus remained silent, and

the high priest said to him, I adjure you by the living God,

tell us, if you are the Christ, the Son of God.

And Jesus said, You have said so.

But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of man seated

at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.

And then the high priest tore his robes and said, He has

uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we

need? We have now heard his blasphemy.

What is your judgment? And they answered, He deserves

death. Then they spit in his face, and

strucking, and some slapped him, saying prophecy to us.

You, Christ, who is it that struck you?

Now Pilate knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered

him up. But one of them, Caiaphas, who

was the high priest that year, had said to them, You know

nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is

better for you that one man should die for the people, and

not that the whole nation should perish.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated Who is

Caiaphas? He's only named a few times.

At the very end of Jesus's life we have infants, infants that

are mentioning him as just are just mentioning high priest.

But this is only 1 he is named. Why is he brought into this

picture? Why him?

He's the high priest of the nation, which made him the most

important person in the whole nation because he had the final

words. So we're asking ourself this

question, why did Caiaphas not see who Jesus was?

Caiaphas view of Jesus must first be seen through two other

sets of eyes. One of those is the Holy

Spirit's and the other is Satan's.

For you see, this trial is the greatest moment in God's eternal

plan for all of history and the whole world.

Satan is happy to see the pain that would be inflicted on

Jesus, but what he does not know is how the Holy Spirit intends

to use this horrible suffering. And Caiaphas is the key human in

this mystery and its outcome. His decision sets the final

stage of the great battle against good and evil.

By his own free will, he chooses to see Jesus as he wanted to see

him. However, in God's Providence, we

find that he was given every opportunity to see Jesus in a

different way. The Scripture tells us that

Caiapha had heard from the very beginning about Jesus's

ministry. In fact, he'd heard about John

the Baptist and that John was preaching from the prophecies of

the coming of the Messiah. And this was where Jesus was

baptized. But cafes had sent his spies who

were there. They heard every word and they

reported every word to him. He then began to hear of the

reports of Jesus, miracles, the words that he preached, the

blind who were made to see, the lepers who were cleansed, demons

who were cast out, and yet he never went to see any of these

miracles himself. He was confronted by Jesus with

the hypocrisy and the violation of God's temple, letting the

money changers be right in the very courtyard of God, making

it, as Jesus said, a den of thieves.

Caiaphas had allowed all of this to happen, and yet when he saw

and heard this public rebuke, he saw it as a reason for why Jesus

should die. Then came Caiaphas.

The biggest problem? When he heard the undeniable

miracle of Lazarus resurrection, seen by even some of the

priests, there wasn't any way to say this had not happened.

And now Caiaphas determined he had to act.

He had to do something. He knew the multiple Old

Testament prophecies about the Messiah's coming, and yet he was

even seeing it fulfilled before his own eyes.

But he did not believe. And finally in that last trial

that he performed, he knew then they could find no sin in Jesus.

And yet he planned and plotted Jesus arrest and his death and

then persuaded all of the leading priests it says, and all

of the high elders that were in the Sanhedrin to call for the

death penalty. And they did.

Why, with all of this knowledge and visible truths, why were his

eyes so blinded? I think there's several things.

First, we have to remember that Caiaphas was a political

appointee. The Romans had made him the high

priest. He was actually a sideline from

the actual line of all the priests, but he had his position

because of them, and he enjoyed that position.

But he realized that that position could be threatened by

what Jesus was bringing about, and he might lose his favorite

spot. But secondly, he had chosen to

believe that Jesus was just a man.

He wasn't anymore. There was no way he was divine.

The only way they could explain his power was they said it came

from the devil, blind to what they were seeing happening right

before him. He feared his loss of control

because Jesus was so popular with the people and therefore

knowingly and yet maybe even well for sure, unknowingly, he

actually prophesied this real truth.

He said it was expedient that one man should die for the

people so this nation should not perish.

However, the deeper truth though, was that God had a much

greater plan for the nation and more and last of all, even

pilots saw through how fake all of this was.

And it says that he knew that Caiaphas was envious.

Why was he envious? He was jealous because you see,

Jesus had revealed who the real God is and what he's like.

Jesus had revealed truth, and people knew it.

Jesus had revealed mercy and compassion, and he would state

it boldly and do it boldly, and people do it, and they loved him

for it. That drew the people to him, and

he knew that they could revolt and turn against Caiaphas.

But Caiaphas, you see, had none of those qualities, and even

worse, he had not tried to encourage the people to see the

true nature of God. And that was his role as high

priest. The high priest was to encourage

people to come to God. The high priest was the one that

made sure they came rightly before God.

The high priest was the one who would direct them and the whole

nature in this way to know that we have a God who is holy, but

we have a God of love. And therefore as you bring your

sacrifices, you find forgiveness for your sins.

But no, Caiaphas had turned the sacrifices into a money making

machine. All of this had hardened his

heart and he had refused to believe the very words he was

hearing, the very life that he saw.

But he challenged Jesus and Jesus respected his place as

high priest. But he said, I adjure you as the

high priest, tell us, are you the Messiah now?

Matthew quoted as it is, as you say, Mark quotes it as yes I am.

And he tears his robes and says blasphemy.

Can you imagine that being said to the very Son of God?

And yet Jesus stood there, and then they led him to the cross.

His blind eyes never united the hope of the nation and of all

the Scripture with faith that he was indeed who he claimed to be.

What keeps us from eyes that do not see?

What keeps us from a hardened heart?

It's actually a lot easier than we think.

Even Jesus chided his own disciples after they had seen

him feed thousands of people with some small baskets of food

and then collect a basket for each and every one of them.

And then as they go across the water, they start wondering

where they were going to get food next.

And Jesus said to them, Is your heart so hardened that you do

not see who I am and what I can do?

It's easy to begin to doubt. And if you don't bring them to

Christ, our hearts can turn us in a different direction.

But the answer to it is this. It is the lens of God's spoken

word. It is here that the Holy Spirit

thwarts the plans of the enemy to try to hardness.

You see, he combines spiritual seeing and thinking with

spiritual words that the Holy Spirit breathes lives into as we

read them. For God's Word is living, which

means it continues to bring light to our eyes, truth to our

heart, and it's enabled. It has the ability to judge

what's going on down deep inside of us, coming to us at any point

in place where we're discouraged, where we're tempted

to doubt, where Satan would love to turn us forward.

A hardness and because of that we come to Holy Week and what he

has done for us with a confident hope because of his word, the

gift of faith, believing that God told us his Son would come

and he did. That we would see miracles that

he did, and that we would find help to realize that Jesus death

was far more than just the expedientness that Caiaphas had

said. Rather, it was necessary for the

whole world, not just for the nation.

And that's why John reminds us God loved the whole world.

That whoever would believe in him would not perish but have

eternal life. This is where our eyes can be

enlightened and see the beauty of what God is doing in that

amazing week before Christ died for us.

Let's pray together silently.