Passion Week: Wednesday - The Scheme

Scripture Reading: Luke 22:1-6

What do you do with a person who says and does things that invite others to believe that he is not only the king, but God in the form of a human being? If you don’t like his message of kingship and divinity, you come up with a plan to end all this nonsense by getting rid of him.

This was the state of the world (the world of Jerusalem) a few days before the Passover. According to Luke, “..the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some way to get rid of Jesus”. At the least, they wanted him elsewhere. Better yet, they wanted him gone completely. If some revolutionary was trying to start something new in Rome, fine, but this was Jerusalem. And this “revolutionary” was starting something new that would forever turn upside down the world in which the chief priests and the teachers of the law lived, moved, and had their being. In other words, again as Luke puts it, “they were afraid.”

What were they going to do when it seemed like the whole world was going along with this Jesus the world was happy to call not just the Messiah, but their Messiah? Luckily for them, an opportunity presented itself in the form of a betrayal. This betrayal played out as Judas going to the chief priests, and the officers of the temple guard, to discuss with them how he might hand Jesus over to them.

The scheme is set, as it would seem. This “would-be” Messiah will finally get what’s coming to him.

Someone from within Jesus’s own group has turned his back on him. Maybe Jesus wasn’t so powerful after all? Either way, the religious leaders have now found their way forward. They have this Judas—who had been having a growing problem with how Jesus was doing things for some time—decide that it would be better to put an end to this, as well. “They were delighted and agreed to give him money.” Thirty pieces of silver, as we find out later.

Judas consents, takes the money, and spends the rest of his time “watching for an opportunity to hand Jesus over to them when no crowd was present.” All Judas needed was a brief moment when it was just him, Jesus, and—if there was no way around it—Jesus’s disciples. Then he’d have the freedom to move forward. Then he could betray his “friend” by handing him over to people who didn’t have the authority to take Jesus’s life on their own, but would consort with the Roman government—who they didn’t even trust and, more than likely, really grew to resent—to have them take care of Jesus for the religious leaders.

This is the result of being hailed as a king as you enter Jerusalem. This is the result of going to the temple and cleaning up the mess. And this is the result of healing those in a way only God could.

Jesus’s time was drawing short, and it would only take an arrest under the cover of darkness to bring everything to a point of no return.