Jesus Of Nazareth Part Two

by Pope Benedict XVI

  There are two particular words with which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews underlines this dimension of Jesus’ prayer. The verb “bring” (prosphérein: bring before God, bear aloft—cf. Heb 5:1) comes from the language of the sacrificial cult. What Jesus does here lies right at the heart of what sacrifice is. “He offered himself to do the will of the Father”, as Albert Vanhoye comments (Let Us Confidently Welcome Christ Our High Priest, p. 60). The second word that is important for our purposes tells us that through his sufferings Jesus learned obedience and was thus “made perfect” (Heb 5:8-9). Vanhoye points out that in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, the expression “make perfect” (teleioũn) is used exclusively to mean “consecrate as priest” (p. 62). The Letter to the Hebrews takes over this terminology (cf. 7:11, 19, 28). So the passage in question tells us that Christ’s obedience, his final “yes” to the Father accomplished on the Mount of Olives, as it were, “consecrated him as a priest”; it tells us that precisely in this act of self-giving, in this bearing-aloft of human existence to God, Christ truly became a priest “according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 5:9-10; cf. Vanhoye, pp. 61-62).

  At this point, though, we must move on toward the heart of what the Letter to the Hebrews has to say concerning the prayer of the suffering Lord. The text states that Jesus pleaded with him who had the power to save him from death and that, on account of his godly fear (cf. 5: 7), his prayer was granted. But was it granted? He still died on the Cross! For this reason Harnack maintained that the word “not” must have been omitted here, and Bultmann agrees. But an exegesis that turns a text into its opposite is no exegesis. Rather, we must attempt to understand this mysterious form of “granting” so as to come closer to grasping the mystery of our own salvation.

  We may distinguish different aspects of this “granting”. One possible translation of the text would be: “He was heard and delivered from his fear.” This would correspond to Luke’s account, which says that an angel came and comforted him (cf. 22:43). It would then refer to the inner strength given to Jesus through prayer, so that he was able to endure the arrest and the Passion resolutely. Yet the text obviously says more: the Father raised him from the night of death and, through the Resurrection, saved him definitively and permanently from death: Jesus dies no more (cf. Vanhoye, Let Us Confidently Welcome Christ Our High Priest, p. 60). Yet surely the text means even more: the Resurrection is not just Jesus’ personal rescue from death. He did not die for himself alone. His was a dying “for others”; it was the conquest of death itself.

  Hence this “granting” may also be understood in terms of the parallel text in John 12:27-28, where in answer to Jesus’ prayer: “Father, glorify your name!” a voice from heaven replies: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The Cross itself has become God’s glorification, the glory of God made manifest in the love of the Son. This glory extends beyond the moment into the whole sweep of history. This glory is life. It is on the Cross that we see it, hidden yet powerful: the glory of God, the transformation of death into life.

  From the Cross, new life comes to us. On the Cross, Jesus becomes the source of life for himself and for all. On the Cross, death is conquered. The granting of Jesus’ prayer concerns all mankind: his obedience becomes life for all. This conclusion is spelled out for us in the closing words of the passage we have been studying: “He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 5:9-10; cf. Ps 110:4).

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Trial of Jesus

  All four Gospels tell us that Jesus’ night of prayer was brought to an end when an armed group of soldiers, sent by the Temple authorities and led by Judas, came and arrested him, leaving the disciples unharmed.

  This arrest—evidently ordered by the Temple authorities and ultimately by the high priest Caiaphas—how did it come about? How did it come to pass that Jesus was handed over to the tribunal of the Roman Governor Pilate and condemned to death on the Cross?

  The Gospels allow us to distinguish three stages in the juridical process leading to the sentence of death: a meeting of the Council in the house of Caiaphas, Jesus’ hearing before the Sanhedrin, and finally the trial before Pilate.

  1. Preliminary Discussion in the Sanhedrin

  In the early stages of his ministry, the Temple authorities had evidently shown little interest in the figure of Jesus or in the movement that formed around him; it all seemed a rather provincial affair—one of those movements that arose in Galilee from time to time and did not warrant much attention. The situation changed on “Palm Sunday”. The Messianic homage paid to Jesus on his entrance into Jerusalem; the cleansing of the Temple with the interpretation he gave to it, which seemed to indicate the end of the Temple altogether and a radical change in the cult, contrary to the ordinances established by Moses; Jesus’ teaching in the Temple, from which there emerged a claim to authority that seemed to channel Messianic hopes in a new direction, threatening Israel’s monotheism; the miracles that Jesus worked publicly and the growing multitude that gathered around him—all this added up to a situation that could no longer be ignored.

  In the days surrounding the Passover feast, when the city was overflowing with pilgrims and Messianic hopes could easily turn into political dynamite, the Temple authorities had to acknowledge their responsibility and establish clearly in the first instance how to interpret all this and then how to respond to it. Only John explicitly recounts a session of the Sanhedrin, which served to form opinion and to shape an eventual decision on the case of Jesus (11:47-53). John dates it, incidentally, before “Palm Sunday” and sees as its immediate occasion the popular movement generated by the raising of Lazarus. Without such a deliberate process, the arrest of Jesus during the night of Gethsemane would have been inconceivable. Evidently John is preserving a historical memory here, to which the Synoptics also refer briefly (cf. Mk 14:1, Mt 26:3-4; Lk 22:1-2).

  John tells us that the chief priests and the Pharisees were gathered together. These were the two leading groups within Judaism at the time of Jesus, and on many points they were opposed to one another. But their common fear was this: “The Romans will come and destroy both our holy place [that is, the Temple, the holy place for divine worship] and our nation” (11:48). One is tempted to say that the motive for acting against Jesus was a political concern shared by the priestly aristocracy and the Pharisees, though they arrived at it from different starting points; yet this political interpretation of the figure of Jesus and his ministry caused them to miss completely what was most characteristic and new about him. Through the message that he proclaimed, Jesus had actually achieved a separation of the religious from the political, thereby changing the world: this is what truly marks the essence of his new path.

  Nevertheless, we must not be too hasty in condemning the “purely political” outlook of his opponents. For in the world they inhabited, the two spheres—political and religious—were inseparable. The “purely” political existed no more than the “purely” religious. The Temple, the Holy City, and the Holy Land with its people: these were neither purely political nor purely religious realities. Anything to do with Temple, nation, and land involved both the religious foundation of politics and its religious consequences. The defense of the “place” and the “nation” was ultimately a religious affair, because it was concerned with God’s house and God’s people.

  It is important to distinguish between this underlying religious and political motivation on the part of Israel’s leaders and the specific power-interests of the dynasty of Annas and Caiaphas, which effectively precipitated the catastrophe of the year 70 and so caused precisely the outcome it had been their task to avoid. To this extent the death sentence passed against Jesus is characterized by a curious overlapping of two layers: the legal concern to protect the Temple and the nation, on the one hand, and the ambitious power seeking of the ruling group, on the other.

  It is
an overlap that corresponds to what we discovered in the cleansing of the Temple. Jesus fights there, on the one hand, as we saw, against self-serving abuse of the sacred space, but his prophetic gesture and the interpretation he gave to it go much deeper: the old cult of the stone Temple has come to an end. The hour of the new worship in “spirit and truth” has come. The Temple of stone must be destroyed, so that the new one, the New Covenant with its new style of worship, can come. Yet at the same time, this means that Jesus himself must endure crucifixion, so that, after his Resurrection, he may become the new Temple.

  This brings us back to the question of the interweaving and the separation of religion and politics. In his teaching and in his whole ministry, Jesus had inaugurated a non-political Messianic kingdom and had begun to detach these two hitherto inseparable realities from one another, as we said earlier. But this separation—essential to Jesus’ message—of politics from faith, of God’s people from politics, was ultimately possible only through the Cross. Only through the total loss of all external power, through the radical stripping away that led to the Cross, could this new world come into being. Only through faith in the Crucified One, in him who was robbed of all worldly power and thereby exalted, does the new community arise, the new manner of God’s dominion in the world.

  This means, though, that the Cross corresponded to a divine “necessity” and that Caiaphas, in making the decision he did, was ultimately carrying out God’s will, even if his motivation was impure and reflected, not God’s will, but his own purposes.

  John expressed with great clarity this striking combination in Caiaphas of carrying out God’s will and blind self-seeking. While the Council members were perplexed as to what should be done in view of the danger posed by the movement surrounding Jesus, he made the decisive intervention: “You do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish” (11:50). John designates this statement expressly as a “prophetic utterance” that Caiaphas formulated through the charism of his office as high priest, and not of his own accord.

  The immediate consequence of Caiaphas’ statement was this: until that moment, the assembled Council had held back in fear from a death sentence, looking for other ways out of the crisis, admittedly without finding a solution. Only a theologically motivated declaration from the high priest, spoken with the authority of his office, could dispel their doubts and prepare them in principle for such a momentous decision.

  This passage in Saint John’s Gospel—which recognizes as the decisive moment in salvation history the exercise of the charism pertaining to his office by this unworthy officeholder—corresponds to a saying of Jesus recounted by Matthew: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do” (23:2-3). Both Matthew and John wanted to recall this distinction to the Church of their own day, for at that time, too, there was a contradiction between authority of office and manner of life, between “what they say” and “what they do”.

  On the surface, the content of Caiaphas’ “prophecy” is thoroughly pragmatic, and, considered in those terms, it seems reasonable from his point of view: if the people can be saved through the death of one man (and in no other way), then this individual’s death might seem the lesser evil and the politically correct path. But what on the surface sounds and is intended to be merely pragmatic acquires an entirely new depth on the basis of its “prophetic” quality. The one man, Jesus, dies for the nation: the mystery of vicarious atonement shines forth, and it is this that constitutes the most profound content of Jesus’ mission.

  The idea of vicarious atonement pervades the entire history of religions. In many different ways people have tried to deflect the threat of disaster from the king, from the people, from their own lives, by transferring it to a substitute. Evil must be atoned for, and in this way justice must be restored. The punishment, the unavoidable misfortune, is offloaded onto others in an effort to liberate oneself. Yet this substitution through animal or even human sacrifice ultimately lacks credibility. What is offered by way of substitution is still a mere proxy for one’s own offering and can in no way take the place of the one needing to be redeemed. A proxy is not a substitute, yet the whole of history is searching for the one who can truly stand in for us, the one who is truly able to take us up with him and so lead us to salvation.

  In the Old Testament, the idea of vicarious atonement occupies a central place when Moses says to the angry God, after the people’s idolatry on Sinai: “But now, if you will forgive their sin—and if not, blot me, I beg you, out of your book which you have written” (Ex 32:32). While it is true that God replies: “Whoever has sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book” (32:33), nevertheless Moses somehow remains the substitute, the one who bears the fate of the people and through pleading on their behalf is able to change it again and again. Finally, the Book of Deuteronomy presents Moses vicariously suffering for Israel and likewise dying outside the Holy Land for Israel (cf. von Rad, Old Testament Theology I, p. 295). This idea of vicarious atonement is fully developed in the figure of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53, who takes the guilt of many upon himself and thereby makes them just (53:11). In Isaiah, this figure remains mysterious; the Song of the Suffering Servant is like a gaze into the future in search of the one who is to come. The one dies for the many—this prophetic utterance of the high priest Caiaphas brings together all the longing of the world’s religious history and Israel’s great faith traditions and applies them to Jesus. The whole of his living and dying is concealed within the word “for”; as Heinz Schürmann in particular has repeatedly emphasized, it is “pro-existence”.

  After this pronouncement of Caiaphas, which was tantamount to a death sentence, John added a further comment from the perspective of the disciples’ faith. First he makes it clear—as we have seen—that the reference to dying for the people was a prophetic utterance, and then he goes on to say that Jesus would die, “not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (11:52). On first sight this seems a thoroughly Jewish manner of speaking. It expresses the hope that, in the Messianic age, the Israelites scattered around the world would be gathered together in their own land (cf. Barrett, The Gospel according to Saint John, p. 407).

  On the lips of the evangelist, though, this saying takes on a new meaning. The gathering is oriented no longer toward a specific geographical territory, but toward the growth into unity of the children of God: we immediately hear echoes of the central element of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer. The gathering is directed toward the unity of all believers, and thus it points ahead to the community of the Church and even beyond, toward definitive eschatological unity.

  The scattered children of God are no longer exclusively Jews, but children of Abraham in the wider sense that Paul expounded: people who, like Abraham, focus their gaze upon God; people who are ready to listen to him and to respond to his call—Advent people, we might say. The new community of Jews and Gentiles is taking shape here (cf. Jn 10:16). So a further window is opened onto our Lord’s reference at the Last Supper to the “many”, for whom he would lay down his life: he was referring to the gathering of the “children of God”, that is to say, all those who are willing to hear his call.

  2. Jesus before the Sanhedrin

  The fundamental decision to take action against Jesus, reached during that meeting of the Sanhedrin, was put into effect on the night leading from Thursday to Friday with his arrest on the Mount of Olives. Jesus was led, still by night, to the high priest’s palace, where the Sanhedrin with its three constituent groups—chief priests, elders, scribes—was evidently already assembled.

  Jesus’ two “trials”, before the Sanhedrin and before the Roman Governor Pilate, have been analyzed by legal historians and exegetes down to the last detail. There is no need here to enter into all these subtle historical questions, the more so since, as Martin Hengel has em
phasized, we do not know the details of the Sadducees’ criminal law, and retrospective conclusions based on the later Mishna-treatise Sanhedrin cannot legitimately be applied to the time of Jesus (cf. Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus und das Judentum, p. 592). It now seems reasonable to assume that what took place when Jesus was brought before the Sanhedrin was not a proper trial, but more of a cross-examination that led to the decision to hand him over to the Roman Governor for sentencing.

  Let us now take a closer look at the Gospel accounts, still with the intention of gaining a better knowledge and understanding of the figure of Jesus. We have already seen that after the cleansing of the Temple, two charges against Jesus were in circulation. The first had to do with his interpretation of the prophetic gesture of driving cattle and traders out of the Temple, which seemed like an attack on the Holy Place itself and, hence, on the Torah, on which Israel’s life was built.

  I consider it important that it was not the cleansing of the Temple as such for which Jesus was called to account, but only the interpretation he gave to his action. We may conclude that the symbolic gesture itself remained within acceptable limits and did not give rise to public unrest, such as would have supplied a motive for legal intervention. The danger lay in the interpretation, in the seeming attack on the Temple, and in the authority that Jesus was claiming to possess.

  From the Acts of the Apostles we know that a similar charge was brought against Stephen, who had quoted Jesus’ Temple prophecy; this led to him being stoned, which indicates that it was considered blasphemous. In Jesus’ trial, witnesses came forward who wanted to report what Jesus had said. But there was no consistent version: his actual words could not be unequivocally established. The fact that this particular charge was then dropped reveals a concern to observe juridically correct procedure.