'And the chief priests and all the council sought for witness against
Jesus to put Him to death; and found none. 56. For many bare false
witness against Him, but their witness agreed not together. 57. And
there arose certain, and bare false witness against Him, saying, 58.
We heard Him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands,
and within three days I will build another made without hands. 59. But
neither so did their witness agree together. 60. And the high priest
stood up in their midst, and asked Jesus, saying, Answerest Thou
nothing? what is it which these witness against Thee? 61. But He held
His peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked Him, and
said unto Him, Art Thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? 62. And
Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of Man, sitting on the
right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 63. Then the
high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further
witnesses? 64. Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they
all condemned Him to be guilty of death. 65. And some began to spit on
Him, and to cover His face, and to buffet Him, and to say unto Him,
Prophesy: and the servants did strike Him with the palms of their
hands.'--Mark xiv. 55-65.
Mark brings out three stages in our Lord's trial by the Jewish
authorities--their vain attempts to find evidence against Him, which
were met by His silence; His own majestic witness to Himself, which
was met by a unanimous shriek of condemnation; and the rude mockery of
the underlings. The other Evangelists, especially John, supply many
illuminative details; but the essentials are here. It is only in
criticising the Gospels that a summary and a fuller narrative are
dealt with as contradictory. These three stages naturally divide this
paragraph.
I. The judges with evil thoughts, the false witnesses, and the silent
Christ (verses 55-61). The criminal is condemned before He is tried.
The judges have made up their minds before they sit, and the Sanhedrim
is not a court of justice, but a slaughter-house, where murder is to
be done under sanction of law. Mark, like Matthew, notes the unanimity
of the 'council,' to which Joseph of Arimathea--the one swallow which
does not make a summer--appears to have been the only exception; and
he probably was absent, or, if present, was silent. He did 'not
consent'; but we are not told that he opposed. That ill-omened
unanimity measures the nation's sin. Flagrant injustice and corruption
in high places is possible only when society as a whole is corrupt or
indifferent to corruption. This prejudging of a case from hatred of
the accused as a destroyer of sacred tradition, and this hunting for
evidence to bolster up a foregone conclusion, are preeminently the
vices of ecclesiastical tribunals and not of Jewish Sanhedrim or Papal
Inquisition only. Where judges look for witnesses for the prosecution,
plenty will be found, ready to curry favour by lies. The eagerness to
find witnesses against Jesus is witness for Him, as showing that
nothing in His life or teaching was sufficient to warrant their
murderous purpose. His judges condemn themselves in seeking grounds to
condemn Him, for they thereby show that their real motive was personal
spite, or, as Caiaphas suggested, political expediency.
The single specimen of the worthless evidence given may be either a
piece of misunderstanding or of malicious twisting of innocent words;
nor can we decide whether the witnesses contradicted one another or
each himself. The former is the more probable, as the fundamental
principle of the Jewish law of evidence ('two or three witnesses')
would, in that case, rule out the testimony. The saying which they
garble meant the very opposite of what they made it mean. It
represented Jesus as the restorer of that which Israel should destroy.
It referred to His body which is the true Temple; but the symbolic
temple 'made with hands' is so inseparably connected with the real,
that the fate of the one determines that of the other. Strangely
significant, therefore, is it, that the rulers heard again, though
distorted, at that moment when they were on their trial, the
far-reaching sentence, which might have taught them that in slaying
Jesus they were throwing down the Temple and all which centred in it,
and that by His resurrection, His own act, He would build up again a
new polity, which yet was but the old transfigured, even 'the Church,
which is His body.' His work destroys nothing but 'the works of the
devil.' He is the restorer of the divine ordinances and gifts which
men destroy, and His death and resurrection bring back in nobler form
all the good things lost by sin, 'the desolations of many
generations.' The history of all subsequent attacks on Christ is
mirrored here. The foregone conclusion, the evidence sought as an
after-thought to give a colourable pretext, the material found by
twisting His teaching, the blindness which accuses Him of destroying
what He restores, and fancies itself as preserving what it is
destroying, have all reappeared over and over again.
Our Lord's silence is not only that of meekness, 'as a sheep before
her shearers is dumb.' It is the silence of innocence, and, if we may
use the word concerning Him, of scorn. He will not defend Himself to
such judges, nor stoop to repel evidence which they knew to be
worthless. But there is also something very solemn and judicial in His
locked lips. They had ever been ready to open in words of loving
wisdom; but now they are fast closed, and this is the penalty for
despising, that He ceases to speak. Deaf ears make a dumb Christ, What
will happen when Jesus and His judges change places, as they will one
day do? When He says to each, 'Answerest thou nothing? What is it
which these, thy sins, witness against thee?' each will be silent with
the consciousness of guilt and of just condemnation by His all-knowing
justice.
II. Christ's majestic witness to Himself received with a shriek of
condemnation. What a supreme moment that was when the head of the
hierarchy put this question and received the unambiguous answer! The
veriest impostor asserting Messiahship had a right to have his claims
examined; but a howl of hypocritical horror is all which Christ's
evoke. The high priest knew well enough what Christ's answer would be.
Why, then, did he not begin by questioning Jesus, and do without the
witnesses? Probably because the council wished to find some pretext
for His condemnation without bringing up the real reason; for it
looked ugly to condemn a man for claiming to be Messias, and to do it
without examining His credentials. The failure, however, of the false
witnesses compelled the council to 'show their hands,' and to hear and
reject our Lord solemnly and, so to speak, officially, laying His
assertion of dignity and office before them, as the tribunal charged
with the duty of examining His proofs. The question is so definite as
to imply a pretty full and accurate knowledge of our Lord's teaching
about Himself. It embraces two points--office and nature; for 'the
Christ' and 'the Son of the Blessed' are not equivalents. The latter
title points to our Lord's declarations that He was the Son of God,
and is an instance of the later Jewish superstition which avoided
using the divine name. Loving faith delights in the name of the Lord.
Dead formalism changes reverence into dread, and will not speak it.
Sham reverence, feigned ignorance, affected wish for information, the
false show of judicial impartiality, and other lies and vices not a
few, are condensed in the question; and the fact that the judge had to
ask it and hear the answer, is an instance of a divine purpose working
through evil men, and compelling reluctant lips to speak words the
meaning and bearing of which they little know. Jesus could not leave
such a challenge unanswered. Silence then would have been abandonment
of His claims. It was fitting that the representatives of the nation
should, at that decisive moment, hear Him declare Himself Messiah. It
was not fitting that He should be condemned on any other ground. In
that answer, and its reception by the council, the nation's rejection
of Jesus is, as it were, focused and compressed. This was the end of
centuries of training by miracle, prophet and psalmist--the saddest
instance in man's long, sad history of his awful power to frustrate
God's patient educating!
Our Lord's majestic 'I am,' in one word answers both parts of the
question, and then passes on, with strange calm and dignity, to point
onwards to the time when the criminal will be the judge, and the
judges will stand at His bar. 'The Son of Man,' His ordinary
designation of Himself, implies His true manhood, and His
representative character, as perfect man, or, to use modern language,
the 'realised ideal' of humanity. In the present connection, its
employment in the same sentence as His assertion that He is the Son of
God goes deep into the mystery of His twofold nature, and declares
that His manhood had a supernatural origin and wielded divine
prerogatives. Accordingly there follows the explicit prediction of His
assumption of the highest of these after His death. The Cross was as
plain to Him as ever; but beyond it gleamed the crown and the throne.
He anticipates 'sitting on the right hand of power,' which implies
repose, enthronement, judicature, investiture with omnipotence, and
administration of the universe. He anticipates 'coming in the clouds
of heaven,' which distinctly claims to be the future Judge of the
world. His hearers could scarcely fail to discern the reference to
Daniel's prophecy.
Was ever the irony of history more pungently exemplified than in an
Annas and Caiaphas holding up hands of horror at the 'blasphemies' of
Jesus? They rightly took His words to mean more than the claim of
Messiahship as popularly understood. To say that He was the Christ was
not 'blasphemy,' but a claim demanding examination; but to say that
He, the Son of Man, was Son of God and supreme Judge was so, according
to their canons. How unconsciously the exclamation, 'What need we
further witnesses?' betrays the purpose for which the witnesses had
been sought, as being simply His condemnation! They were 'needed' to
compass His death, which the council now gleefully feels to be
secured. So with precipitate unanimity they vote. And this was
Israel's welcome to their King, and the outcome of all their history!
And it was the destruction of the national life. That howl of
condemnation pronounced sentence on themselves and on the whole order
of which they were the heads. The prisoner's eyes alone saw then what
we and all men may see now--the handwriting on the wall of the high
priest's palace: 'Weighed in the balance, and found wanting.'
III. The savage mockers and the patient Christ (verse 65). There is an
evident antithesis between the 'all' of verse 64 and the 'some' of
verse 65, which shows that the inflictors of the indignities were
certain members of the council, whose fury carried them beyond all
bounds of decency. The subsequent mention of the 'servants' confirms
this, especially when we adopt the more accurate rendering of the
Revised Version, 'received Him with blows.' Mark's account, then, is
this: that, as soon as the unanimous howl of condemnation had beep
uttered, some of the 'judges'(!) fell upon Jesus with spitting and
clumsy ridicule and downright violence, and that afterwards He was
handed over to the underlings, who were not slow to copy the example
set them at the upper end of the hall.
It was not an ignorant mob who thus answered His claims, but the
leaders and teachers--the _crême de la crême_ of the nation. A wild
beast lurks below the Pharisee's long robes and phylacteries; and the
more that men have changed a living belief in religion for a formal
profession, the more fiercely antagonistic are they to every attempt
to realise its precepts and hopes. The 'religious' men who mock Jesus
in the name of traditional religion are by no means an extinct
species. It is of little use to shudder at the blind cruelty of dead
scribes and priests. Let us rather remember that the seeds of their
sins are in us all, and take care to check their growth. What a
volcano of hellish passion bursts out here! Spitting expresses
disgust; blinding and asking for the names of the smiters is a clumsy
attempt at wit and ridicule; buffeting is the last unrestrained form
of hate and malice. The world has always paid its teachers and
benefactors in such coin; but all other examples pale before this
saddest, transcendent instance. Love is repaid by hate; a whole nation
is blind to supreme and unspotted goodness; teachers steeped in 'law
and prophets' cannot see Him of and for whom law and prophets
witnessed and were, when He stands before them. The sin of sins is the
failure to recognise Jesus for what He is. His person and claims are
the touchstone which tries every beholder of what sort He is.
How wonderful the silent patience of Jesus! He withholds not His face
'from shame and spitting.' He gives 'His back to the smiters.' Meek
endurance and passive submission are not all which we have to behold
there. This is more than an uncomplaining martyr. This is the
sacrifice for the world's sin; and His bearing of all that men can
inflict is more than heroism. It is redeeming love. His sad, loving
eyes, wide open below their bandage, saw and pitied each rude smiter,
even as He sees us all. They were and are eyes of infinite tenderness,
ready to beam forgiveness; but they were and are the eyes of the
Judge, who sees and repays His foes, as those who smite Him will one
day find out.