What are we going to do?
This man is performing many signs.
If we leave him alone, all will believe in him,
and the Romans will come
and take away both our land and our nation.
What does one do when God seems clearly to be at work and yet that work seems to entail unpleasant consequences? Thus confronted, whose plan does he choose? The Sanhedrin knew about the signs of Jesus but they refused to look at them closely and dispassionately enough to be persuaded by them. They saw the crowds who did believe in his signs as overly credulous and the whole movement taking shape around Jesus himself as dangerous.
If we leave him alone, all will believe in him,
and the Romans will come
and take away both our land and our nation.
The Sanhedrin took as their primary concern the need to manage their own nations political interests as best they could given the fact of the Roman occupation. As a body they were not open to the possibility that God might have a different plan. They thought that by pursuing the plan that they themselves had chosen, a plan that had been cemented and sealed by their our sense of self-importance and closed to divine influence, that they could themselves save the whole nation from Roman conquest.
You know nothing,
nor do you consider that it is better for you
that one man should die instead of the people,
so that the whole nation may not perish.
God was rocking their boat and the chief priests and the Pharisees decided that the best solution was to throw him overboard. They thought that by eliminating Jesus they could prevent the danger of the Romans coming to suppress another potential hostile messianic movement, and therefore prevent any collateral damage to the temple or the nation.
“You know nothing,
nor do you consider that it is better for you
that one man should die instead of the people,
so that the whole nation may not perish.”
On the one hand, condemning Jesus to death did not prevent the Romans from coming to crush the temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD. If anything, it made God's judgment on the nation that refused to accept him all the more inevitable. But at the same time the death of Jesus did exactly what Caiaphas suggested it would, though not in the way he himself expected.
He did not say this on his own,
but since he was high priest for that year,
he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
and not only for the nation,
but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
The physical temple was in fact destroyed, and not one stone was left upon another. But the temple of the body of Jesus was raised from the dead as the new temple to which all the dispersed children of God would gather.
By taking an action which they thought was opposed to the plan of Jesus the Sanhedrin unwittingly helped bring that plan to fulfillment. They tried to act against what was in fact the will and plan of the Father but in doing so they only sped that plan onward toward completion. Yet the victory of Jesus remained hidden from those who could only look to physical realities for results. Such a perspective was limited. It could only recognize a literal restoration of the land that God gave to his servant Jacob, the land where their fathers lived. It could only accept a human king. The peace gained by military conquest was the only kind it could imagine. The Romans being so overwhelmingly powerful such a conquest seemed too risky at that particular moment in history, as though God could not bring about the fulfillment of his promises because the odds were not in his favor. This blindness to the power of God and to the primacy of spiritual realities may seem extreme and therefore culpable and blameworthy. But it seems that we ourselves often choose to see things with such eyes and not with the eyes of faith. We look at the world, imagine that it is beyond help, and so choose to work on our own plans of compromise rather than surrender to God's unlikely and even apparently impossible plans.
They shall live on the land that I gave to my servant Jacob,
the land where their fathers lived;
they shall live on it forever,
they, and their children, and their children’s children,
with my servant David their prince forever.
These promises given to Ezekiel already implied a fulfillment that would need to be more than merely physical. There was no other way by which they would live on the land "forever" and by which David would be "their prince forever". Such a covenant of peace could never be the result of compromise with the world. Nor could it be merely the lack of conflict caused by a balance of external circumstances that made it disadvantageous for one to attack another. God promised more than a mere anxious and fragile lack of conflict. He promised a peace that would not be merely external, but rather one which began within transformed hearts and minds.
I will make with them a covenant of peace;
it shall be an everlasting covenant with them,
and I will multiply them, and put my sanctuary among them forever.
The promises of the Lord have been and are being fulfilled. We ourselves are now free to worship in Spirit and truth, gathered together around the sanctuary of his body, especially in the tabernacles throughout the world. Jesus has gathered followers out of all of the tribes around himself, and brought the blessings of Israel to the Gentiles as well.
He who scattered Israel, now gathers them together,
he guards them as a shepherd his flock.
There will be a final physical manifestation when these promises are finally brought to completion. There will be a new heaven and a new earth, and those who have lived and died in Christ will receive glorified bodies in the resurrection on the last day. But that day will in some sense merely set in stone what was already true in the Spirit. The important thing now is not to lose ourselves so much in our own plans that we forget that the the only good ending to the story comes with being aligned with God's plan in the here and now. The more we keep the reality of his sanctuary among us as the central reality in our lives the easier this will be.
Thus the nations shall know that it is I, the LORD,
who make Israel holy,
when my sanctuary shall be set up among them forever.
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