Luke 22:66-23:25

At daybreak, the council of the elders of the people, both the chief priests and the teachers of the law, met together, and Jesus was led before them.

If you are the Messiah, they said, Tell us.

Jesus answered, If I tell you, you will not believe me.

And if I ask you, you would not answer.

But from now on, the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the mighty God.

They all asked, Are you then the Son of God?

He replied, You say that I am.

Then they said, Why do we need any more testimony?

We have heard it from his own lips.

And we ask that you would speak into our lives today, and Lord, that you'd meet us by your Holy Spirit.

God, just the pieces of our life, the things that are real to us, Lord, our emotions, our circumstances, our relationships, resources and opportunities, Lord, these things that really compose our life.

You're intimately aware of them.

And God, we want to give you permission to speak to us.

Lord, that you would give us ears to hear what you would say, Lord, what you would say to your church.

We need your touch upon our life.

We can do life this week.

Lord, we can kind of stumble through the week, Lord, but we're truly a blind people, lost, um, and don't know where to go, or and are we're incapable of really honoring you without that touch of your spirit.

The way in this time, in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Okay, let's uh look at the text.

You can go ahead and be seated.

I forgot to dismiss the kids, but it looks like they figured it out.

Those kids, we got some sharp kids around here.

Okay, so Luke 22, what we're gonna do this morning is we're gonna spend our time on the trials, the trials that Jesus was going through.

And what I'd like to just direct your attention to first in just opening up this passage is that if you're new to Scripture in your reading of Scripture, um you may uh this is a difficult passage because here's the hero not fighting back.

Oftentimes this text bothers people because um Jesus is the hero and yet he does not um defend himself when he goes on trial.

And we're wired to defend ourselves.

Those that's what the heroes in our narratives, in the narratives that we love, that's what they do is they they'll fight for themselves, and yet Jesus is silent.

And so my hope is that as we unpack this text, you will realize by the power of the Holy Spirit how Jesus' actions are both necessary and noble.

Necessary and noble.

So let's look at a chronology really quickly, just so we know what's going on, because in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, we have accounts of these six trials, the three Jewish trials and the three uh Roman trials.

And it's it's a bit of a challenge to synthesize them, and that's where we have um godly men who've gone before us and done that work.

And basically the composite story of the four accounts is that Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then he appears before Annas, who is a figurehead in Judaism.

We talked about him last week.

He's considered a chief priest, but not officially by the Roman government.

And then Jesus is tried at Caiaphas's house at an unofficial gathering of the Sanhedrin.

That's where Peter denies Jesus.

Um, the Sanhedrin was not allowed to formulate formally condemn Jesus at a nighttime gathering.

It had to be during the day.

And so again, once day breaks, which is where our text picks up, the Sanhedrin meets again for a second time to draw up official charges against Jesus to be presented before Pilate.

And then Jesus is led to Pilate, and then from Pilate to Herod, and then from Pilate, from Herod back to Pilate.

So we're going to try to get up through verse 25 of chapter 23 this morning.

Let's look at the first verses.

The verses that uh Marvin read, this uh not Marvin, Albert, Albert read, sorry.

Albert read um at the end of chapter 22, the daybreak, in the council of the elders of the people, they gather together, chief priests, teachers of the law.

This is what composed the Sanhedrin.

And um they have this primary question that they put to Jesus Are you the coming Messiah?

The um the Sanhedrin is made up of two primary groups.

You have the religious leaders that are uh Sadducees and Pharisees, and then you have the the um middle class laity made up of what we would call the elders.

These elders would represent the different tribes and maybe teach in the synagogues around Israel.

And so there's about 70 of them, and they gather at daybreak to condemn Jesus, um, and they put this question to him Are you claiming to be the Messiah?

And so Jesus, his response is this if you are, or he says, if I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I asked you, you would not answer.

That's verse 68.

Now you'll recall that in the week, the seven days leading up to this trial, Jesus was interacting with his adversaries on the Temple Mount.

And remember, they were testing him and they were they were putting things to Jesus to really try to trip him up.

And the the the last thing that was going to happen was that these individuals were actually gonna be persuaded by Jesus.

And so here he says, If I would tell you, you would not believe.

Then he goes on in verse 69, and he says, But from now on, the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the mighty God.

They all asked, Are you the Son of God?

And he replied, You say that I am.

So what's going on here?

Why does he say, You say that I am?

It's the phrasing here is weird.

Do you agree?

You look at it, it's like, well, well, is he a is Jesus saying, Yes, I am the Messiah, or am I not?

Here would be a better translation of it.

Jesus is essentially saying, You have worded the question, and I will then not deny that I am, but I have word I would have worded it somewhat differently.

Or in other words, uh that's how you would put it, is what Jesus.

When Jesus is saying, you say that I am, he's saying, that's your way of expressing it.

Right?

So Jesus is here concretely affirming that he is the Messiah.

In verse 71, they say, Why do we need any more testimony?

We have heard it from his own lips.

So this gathering of religious leaders clearly take away from this account that Jesus is claiming to be the Messiah.

This harkens back to Psalm 110.

Uh, it goes back to all the messianic prophecies, um, back to Deuteronomy 19.

Moses, who is this great leader for Israel, he brought the people out of uh Egypt.

He set God's people free.

He was this great prophet of God for Israel, and yet in Deuteronomy 19 it says there will be another prophet like Moses.

And then the text goes on and says you need to really distinguish between good prophets and bad prophets, because there's going to be people who come in my name who are false prophets.

So Israel's grown up with this kind of discerning mentality that not anybody can come along and just claim to be the Messiah.

If you do that, if you do that and you're a false Messiah, then you're deserving of death.

And so the Sanhedrin here is going through a process where they are saying you're violating Jewish law by claiming to be the Messiah.

Now note, Jesus did all these works, and he spoke a message to prove that he was the Messiah.

His works bore testimony of his God-given role as the Messiah, the anointed one for Israel.

Here's the thing, just for a second, let's pull back.

Jesus has called out these men, right?

These 70 men that are judging him, he has called them out as hypocrites, and they perceive Jesus as a threat to their leadership.

Because he's claiming to be the Messiah, and he is perceived as a threat to their leadership.

Here's the thing the reason for rejecting Jesus has not changed in 2,000 years.

It is impossible to avoid Jesus' direct implications on our moral condition and our autonomy.

People still to this day reject Jesus Christ because he stands for a moral standard and he asks for you to follow him.

He did not come to condemn you or I, he came to rescue us, but his rescue cannot be divorced from the moral implications and self-governance.

These claims, like the clash of who I am as an individual, coming in contact with the person of Jesus Christ, it reminds me of when you go to an amusement park and you want to go on a ride and they have that measuring stick there.

Have you seen it, right?

If you go to go to the go to an amusement park with kids, they've got that standard of you've got to be this high to get on the ride.

And that's what it's like to encounter the Lord Jesus Christ.

There's a standard, right?

There is a standard that that has to be met in order to participate.

It's unavoidable.

But it's not that, hey, you just need to get two inches higher, or maybe next year you can meet God's standard.

You know, like my son a couple years ago going and I want to get on that ride.

Oh, I can't, I can't get there, but but maybe next year.

No, when we encounter God in his standard, the measuring stick goes up into the sky infinitely.

It's the holiness of God.

So it's not going to be something where it's like, well, maybe I could just, you know, break off a piece of the measuring stick and eat it and get a little bit taller, or maybe I wait till next year, or I clean up my act and then I get a little bit better.

No, the standard is in is impossible for humanity.

We need what we would call an accommodation.

If you're handicapped and you go to an amusement park, they make an accommodation for you, right?

If you're in the workplace and you have a handicap, they make an accommodation for you.

That's what we needed.

We needed an accommodation, and that is what was found in Christ.

He paid the penalty for our mare our moral failings by dying on the cross.

We're able to get on the ride, right?

We're able to get, we're we're not judging Jesus like these Pharisees and Sadducees, because Jesus for us accommodation, so that we can get on the ride.

So Jesus gets through this um first trial, and and the Sanhedrin says, This he is guilty.

We've heard it from his own lips.

He's claiming to be the Messiah in essence, and we go into verse 1.

Let's read verses 1 through 5 of chapter 23.

Then the whole assembly arose and they led him off to Pilate, and they began to accuse him, saying, We have found this man subverting our nation.

He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar, and he claims to be the Messiah, a king.

So Pilate asked Jesus, Are you the king of the Jews?

And the reply, Jesus' reply, is, You have said so.

Then Pilate announced to the chief priests and the crowd, I find no basis for a charge against this man.

But they insisted.

He stirs up the people all over Judea by his preaching.

He started in Galilee and has come all the way here.

So you'll notice that the Jews have to, because they're not allowed to kill a person, the Jews were forbidden by the Roman government from execution or carrying out capital punishment.

They had to go to the Roman governing authorities, which was Pilate, in order to get permission to kill Jesus.

And so the Jews have to change the grievances in order to get the Roman government, Pilate, to agree and to kill Jesus.

And so there's three charges there.

Subverting the nation.

This means that Jesus, they're saying Jesus is seducing people from loyalty to the empire.

The second accusation is an opposition to paying of taxes to Caesar.

We know that's bogus because back in chapter 20, Jesus said, you know, pay to Caesar what is Caesar's.

And then the third claim, accusation, is that Jesus is claiming to be the Messiah, but they're saying he's claiming to be the Messiah in a political way.

And it's this third accusation that seems to stick with Pilate.

You'll remember, or you'll recall if you know kind of this story, that when Jesus is crucified, they make a inscription plaque that is nailed over Jesus on the cross that says, Jesus, King of the Jews.

And so this third accusation that Jesus is is trying to hold a political party is kind of what Pilate um grabs onto.

Although he states, he states emphatically, look, he is not, thank you, he is not guilty.

He's not guilty as far as I can tell.

In um Isaiah 53, 7, well, before you get to Isaiah 53.7, let's go to verse 6.

Verse 6.

6 through 12.

It says this.

On hearing this, Pilate asked if the man was a Galilean.

When he heard that Jesus was under Herod's jurisdiction, he sent him to Herod, who was also in Jerusalem at that time.

When Herod saw Jesus, he was greatly pleased because he had for a long time been wanting to see him.

From what he had heard about him, he hoped to see him perform a sign of some sort.

He he plied him with many questions, but Jesus gave him no answer.

The chief priests and the teachers of the law were standing there, vehemently accusing him.

Then Herod and his soldiers ridiculed and mocked him.

Dressing him in an elegant robe, they sent him back to Pilate.

That day Herod and Pilate became friends.

Before this they had been enemies.

So Pilate and Herod, or Pilate and Herod.

I was going to say Hitler.

Pilate and Herod.

Water.

Pilate and Herod were both in, they were both in Jerusalem, right?

They both they were not normally in Jerusalem.

Normally Pilate would be in Caesarea.

Herod would be somewhere else.

I don't remember where from my reading where he's at.

But they're both there at Passover because this was the influx of the Jews gathering at the capital.

So if there was going to be an insurrection, this is when it would happen.

So the two key leaders overseeing this region would come to Jerusalem just to keep an eye on what was happening politically.

So they're both in the same area, but evidently Herod and Pilate had not been getting along.

But it's this encounter that causes them to become friends.

We're not told why Pilate sent Jesus to Herod.

Maybe it's because Pilate was just trying to pass the buck.

It could be that he was trying to bridge a divide here and build a friendship with Herod.

We're not told why this happened, but we do see that Herod does not get a word out of Jesus.

Isn't that fascinating?

There's no response that Jesus has for Herod at all.

Jesus is not going to just entertain and put on a show for a spectacle.

That's really important.

The miracles of God, the miracles worked through Jesus have a purpose.

And so when the church takes and turns God's miraculous work into an entertainment type thing, then we've got a problem.

Jesus wasn't going for it.

So we go into verse 15.

Let's read 15 on through 25.

I know we're moving here, moving, covering a lot of ground, but I want to get into this next theme that we'll see here in just a second.

So it says in verse 15, Neither was Herod, uh uh, neither has Herod, well, sorry, let's go to 13, not 15.

13.

Pilate called together the chief priests, the rulers, and the people, and said to them, You brought uh me this man as one who was inciting the people to rebellion.

I have examined him in your presence, and have found no basis for your charges against him.

Neither is Herod, for he sent him back to us, as you can see, and he has done nothing to deserve death.

Therefore I will punish him and then release him.

But the whole crowd shouted, Away with this man, release Barabbas to us.

Barabbas had been thrown into prison for an insurrection in the city and for murder.

Wanting to release Jesus, Pilate appealed to them again, but they kept shouting, Crucify him, crucify him.

For the third time he spoke to them, Why, what crime has this man committed?

I have found in him no grounds for the death penalty.

Therefore I will have him punished and then release him.

Verse 23.

But with loud shouts they ins uh instantly demanded or insistently demanded that he be crucified, and their shouts prevailed.

So Pilate decided to grant their demand.

This man is completely innocent.

In fact, Luke appears to write his letter in a strategic way, really trying to point out the innocence, the innocence of Christ.

One author says this the Lucan case for Jesus' innocence would be further supported by the words of Herod Antipas in 2315, a thief on the cross in 23, uh 39 through 43, which we will get to, and then by a centurion in verse 23 through 47.

Each of these will also testify to Jesus' innocence.

Jesus' innocence was quite evident to Luke's readers because of the weakness of the accusations against Jesus.

The theological idea of Jesus being innocent.

Is central to our faith.

It's essential to our salvation.

It's completely ironic that the only perfect man to have ever lived is on trial and is found guilty of bogus accusations and is crucified on a cross.

In um in theological circles, there's a related term called the impeccability of Christ.

It's not exactly innocence.

Impeccability means that Jesus was incapable of sinning.

And there's a bit of a debate.

Was Jesus, we know he didn't sin, but was he capable of sinning?

Was he peccable or was he impeccable?

Most theologians believe that he was impeccable, that it was impossible, he was not able to sin.

The witness of Jesus here is that Jesus comes on the scene after years of Israel's history.

Jesus is born a Jew.

Remember, God made a covenant with the Jews, and he says, You need to obey me.

And what's what is in Israel's history?

Time and time and time again, Israel is failing to obey God.

Do you remember that?

All throughout the wilderness, God is providing for them, and yet they are a rebellious people.

And so Jesus comes as a perfect Jew, and what does he do?

He goes to the wilderness, right?

He goes to the wilderness and he's tempted in the wilderness, really personifying Israel itself.

He takes on himself Israel.

One author says this, the witness of the whole New Testament, is that the Son of God is assuming the nature, in assuming human nature, recapitulates or takes the vocation of Israel unto himself and completes it perfectly, as Israel itself was unable to do.

Jesus was perfect.

Jesus was perfect and did what Israel itself could not do.

We start human history with a perfect man.

Adam is in the garden, right?

Do you remember?

Adam is in the garden.

He has innocence, and yet he rebels against God and he falls.

And what does God say?

When you eat this fruit in that day, you will surely die, right?

And so in Romans 5 it says, from Adam to Moses, death reigned.

Death has this authoritative relationship to humanity because of the sinfulness of humanity, right?

The rebellion of man results in death.

Well, that's Romans 3.23.

For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Well, Romans 6.23.

The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And so we have just the history of human failing all the way through throughout Scripture, but then we have the story of God where He's intervening.

And so in the in um in the first Passover, we have the story where God says to Israel, Go and get a lamb, have him live with you in the house, and then slaughter the lamb, put the blood all over your doorposts, so that when the angel of destruction comes through, you will not be judged, right?

It's this lamb's blood that is covering the house, preserving the house from judgment.

And then as God takes his chosen people into the wilderness, liberates them from slavery, he institutes these sacrifices that the people are to do.

These sacrifices are detailed in Leviticus 1 through 7, but the sin sacrifices are found in Leviticus 4.1 through 5.13, all the way actually through 6.7 is where we find it.

And it's the idea, take a lamb, take a lamb and slaughter that lamb, slaughter that lamb on your behalf.

Like that is the payment for your sin.

Leviticus 5, 14 says this.

He goes on, he describes the way in which the sacrifice was to be made.

And Israel lived making these sacrifices, atoning for their sin.

And then we get to Jesus, right?

And John is baptizing, and then we see Jesus.

And what does it say about Jesus?

When John comes, and well, when Jesus comes to John, John says, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

So this historic picture of the sacrifices being made, it now turns, it turns to Jesus.

Jesus is the fulfillment of this Old Testament pattern of these lambs being sacrificed to atone for sin.

But the lamb itself had to be without blemish.

It had to be a perfect lamb.

It had to be a spotless lamb because it prefigured the innocence of Christ.

Not just anybody could pay for sin, not just any lamb could pay for sin.

There had to be a perfection about it.

You know, over in Matthew 27, 4, Judas says this.

I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.

Jesus was the perfect, spotless Lamb of God.

In 2 Corinthians 5, 21.

So we don't have time because we're going to run out of time here in three minutes, right?

And I'm going to close this up.

But here's the thing.

Here's the thing.

The New Testament writers take the material that we're looking at this morning, where Luke is just trying to hammer home that Jesus is innocent.

He was innocent.

He was innocent.

And they come along, and these New Testament writers, Paul and Peter, they say he was the innocent one that was sacrificed for us, so that you and I could be reconciled to God.

You and I can have a relationship with God because the innocent one was sacrificed on our behalf.

In Peter, 1 Peter 1.18, he talks about how Jesus was the spotless, the one without blemish.

He was sacrificed for us, and he calls the believers to live in a life that's alert, that's alive, where you're fully awake because of this sacrifice of the innocent one.

1 Peter 2 22 says, He committed no sin.

There was no deceit found in his mouth.

Man, then Hebrews goes on and continues and talks about how just he's a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses.

In all points he was tempted, yet he was found to be without sin.

Therefore, pray with confidence.

This is the thing, dear friends.

Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, if you have given your life to Jesus Christ, you stand before God completely innocent because of what Jesus did.

Completely clean.

You can enter into a conversation with him with no no nothing hanging over your head.

There's nothing, there's no guilt there.

There's absolutely clean, like you're cleaner than you've ever been, more clean than a bath could make you, right?

You are clean before God.

And so the call of God is please, please, please, dear people, take advantage of the sacrifice that the perfect Lamb of God has made.

This morning, Jesus, the innocent man, stood in your place, paid for your sin, he endured the ridicule of rulers and the religious elite so that your friendship with God could be reinstated.

Hebrews calls Jesus our big brother.

In Romans, he's called the firstborn of the dead.

He has done this, he has faced these trials so that you and I did not have to.

Whatever plagues your conscience, whatever inadequacy that you feel, whatever confusion that you face, Jesus absorb that suffering on your behalf so that you can truly live today.

It's finished, right?

That's where we're going.

We're gonna hear Jesus say that.

It is finished.

But it's finished because of the innocence of Christ.

The innocence of Christ.

Let me pray for you, pray for your week, and then I'm gonna ask the good minister key to direct us.

Lord, we just want to take a minute.

We want to offer ourselves up to you.

We are so grateful, we are so grateful that you were perfect because we're not.

We are so grateful.

You're the only one that did not deserve death because you're innocent.

Lord, just apply those things to our hearts.

Like like Roman says, that the love of God would be shed abroad in our hearts.

There would be just this clean, uninterrupted sanity for us.

The reality is that Satan wants to attack us, to condemn us, to beat us up.

And we pray, Lord, that you would that that these truths would just be applied to our life.

Apply them to our life.

And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.