Feeling threatened by Jesus

Jesus was a thorn in the side of the Pharisees and the Sadducees during his entire ministry; he was someone they didn’t know exactly how to deal with. They seemed to collide with Jesus on almost every subject. Take a few examples: 

The Jewish authorities were focused on obeying the Law, but they became overly concerned with keeping up appearances rather than having a genuine heart for God. In contrast, Jesus said that what’s on the outside of a person isn’t worth squat; all that matters is what’s in your heart. 

The religious leaders separated themselves from sinners, whereas Jesus ate and socialized with them. 

The Pharisees had fanatical rules on what someone could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath (God’s ordained “day of rest”). Therefore, when Jesus healed people on the Sabbath, his actions infuriated the Pharisees to no end. (However, the reality was that Jesus never said the Sabbath wasn’t significant; rather, he made it clear that demonstrating love to the sick was simply more important.) 

When Jesus claimed equality with God, they called it blasphemy (speech that blatantly dishonours God) and wanted him killed on the spot. Such a claim would indeed have been blasphemy if it were false, but the religious leaders never honestly considered whether his claims might, in fact, be true. Rather than considering the miracles he did as possible proof, the Pharisees dismissed them as being from the devil, even though they had no theological justification in that claim (Deuteronomy 13). 

The religious authorities wanted to get rid of Jesus all along. But their concerns escalated as Jesus’ grass-roots popularity swelled in his final year. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead (John 11:36-44), convincing them that they must do something about him before everyone started to believe in him. 

Check out John 11 for the critical discussion, in which the leaders in the Sanhedrin (the council of religious authorities) resolve to take Jesus’ life. Here’s the lowdown on the scene: The chief priests and Pharisees met and said, “What are we doing? For this man does many signs. If we leave him alone like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” Caiaphas (pronounced ki-uh-fuss), the high priest, responded, “You know nothing at all. You don’t realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than have the whole nation perish.” 

Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin wanted to kill Jesus so that they could maintain their power and keep the Roman authorities from fearing any Jewish uprising. However, in a grand irony, the words of Caiaphas were true, though in a way that was quite different from what he expected. Although Caiaphas believed that it was better for one man – Jesus Christ – to be sacrificed to preserve the earthly status quo of the Jews, the reality was that it was God’s will that Jesus die rather than having the world perish eternally because of their sins. 

Manipulating authority to get rid of the troublemaker

In spite of their differences with Jesus, the religious leaders had no legal authority to execute him. Therefore, they conspired to accuse him of treason against Rome, so that the Romans would do the dirty work for them. Such a solution was the best possible scenario for the religious leaders – they’d be rid of Jesus, and the Romans would be the ones to blame. However, to pull off this plan, they had to get the Roman authorities to see Jesus as a criminal – and one who deserved not just death, but crucifixion, which was a method of death that Jews saw as being a curse from God (Deuteronomy 21:23). 

The religious leaders arrested Jesus and performed a rush trial of their own in the middle of the night to convict him. Then, they sent Jesus to Pilate, the Roman governor in Palestine. He found no guilt in Jesus and wanted to free him. In fact, three times he declared Jesus innocent of the charges. However, because Pilate didn’t have the courage to follow his convictions and disregard the Sanhedrin’s wishes, he tried to do what politicians so often do: weasel his way out of the tight spot! Because it was Roman custom to pardon a Jewish prisoner during Passover, Pilate decided to use that loophole to free an innocent man without directly opposing the Sanhedrin. But when he asked an assembled crowd which criminal should be set free, the religious leaders helped stir the crowd up to demand the release of a notorious criminal called Barabbas instead and to cry out that Jesus should be crucified (Matthew 27). After Pilate realized that the crowd had made its choice, he washed his hands in front of the crowd, symbolically absolving himself of responsibility, and the Roman soldiers carried out the wishes of the Sanhedrin later that morning.