Episode Transcript
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Josh.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: And I'm Gabriel.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: And today on reading the Gospel, we are studying the event, the arrest of Jesus. This is found in all four Gospels. In Matthew 26, verses 46 through 56, in Mark, chapter 14, verses 43, 52 in Luke, chapter 22, verses 47 through 53, and finally in John, chapter 18, verses 1 through through 14. Today we're going to be reading from the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 26, beginning in verse 46. Follow along with us.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: The hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.
While he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the 12. With him, a great crowd with swords and clubs from the chief priests and the elders of the people.
Now, the betrayer had given them a sign saying, the one I will kiss is the man. Seize him.
And he came up to Jesus at once and said, greetings, Rabbi. And he kissed him.
Jesus said to him, friend, do what you came to do.
Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus and seized him.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father and he will at once send me more than 12 legions of angels?
But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled that it must be so? At that hour, Jesus said to the crowds, have you come out against a robber with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But all this has taken place that the scriptures of prophecy might be fulfilled. Then all the disciples left him and fled.
So this is a sad event. We're getting down to the final events of Jesus earthly ministry. You know, we're nearing the end of this project that we're working on, going through the events in the Gospel.
And here we have the disciples fleeing, Judas betraying, and Jesus getting arrested.
When Jesus was arrested, how did he respond to that?
[00:03:25] Speaker B: His response seems to be tailored differently to Judah's versus the crowd.
And that difference might come from his prayer that we focused in the previous episode, when he connected with the Father and he put his will into the hands of the Father, saying, not my will, but your will. And he took, or at least started taking our sins upon himself. And with this state of the heart, Jesus Christ looks At the betrayer, he identified even in the upper room and said, do what you have to do. At the same time, he said to the crowds, have you come out as against a robber with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I was in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: I was wondering why Jesus message was slightly different to the crowd versus to Judas.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good question. Well, Judas knew exactly what he was doing and he made this plan. Now, we don't know the thoughts of his head. In his head, was he trying to put Jesus in a position where Jesus would have to step into the conquering role, the Messiah role that, that they understood, taking over, overthrowing the Romans. Was that the purpose? Or was it some other purpose? Had he gotten upset or fed up and just wanted to be done with Jesus? Was it the money?
We don't know what Judas was thinking, but we know that he made a deliberate decision to betray Jesus. This was not an accident. This was not just something that happened.
The crowd, on the other hand, they might have just got caught up. You know, it's easy to see how fast a crowd can turn. They can go from peaceful to violent. They can go from happy to mad. Crowds can change in an instant.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: On Sunday, they receive Jesus as a king.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: And now on Thursday night, they are, you know, ready to arrest him.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think I shared this before. I was at a concert in the Mall in Washington, D.C. where it went from a happy event to a riot. And just the, you know, the feeling inside me went from happiness to anger and this desire to destroy things. Just in a moment when I really didn't care. I wasn't there to riot. I wasn't there to disrupt stuff. But because everyone else was doing it, this thought that, hey, this is what we're doing now. And it's interesting to see how if we don't guard ourselves, we can get caught up in the crowd mentality.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: So we have to be very careful. What crowd do we join?
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So Judas comes and he betrays Jesus.
Why does he need to kiss him? I believe it's the Gospel of Mark that gives us the description. He tells the rabbis that, hey, the one I'm going to kiss, he's the one that you arrest. And once you arrest him, take him out of here quickly.
Didn't everyone know about Jesus?
Were they thinking they might arrest a wrong person?
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Judas kind of forgot that he was revealed by name in the upper room during the communion service.
He was revealed as the betrayer, and the disciples Knew. So the crowd knew because they were sent by the high priests and the elders.
I don't know what was that necessary?
Sometimes when we go down this rabbit hole of, you know, sinning, we lose our reason and we make things which are, looking back, in hindsight, unreasonable or out of control or nonsense. To kiss Jesus Christ and to hide behind that kiss that would. It was at least disingenuous.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
Then Peter comes to defend Jesus and he cuts off the ear of a servant.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Peter is true to himself.
Peter is true to his promise.
He wants to follow Jesus Christ all the way to death. And he's ready to die even before Jesus Christ dies.
But that desire, that zeal sometimes is, as Paul says, without knowledge, without knowing his own heart as well as without understanding the reality of the situation.
Jesus Christ is in control. In the Gospel of John, Jesus talks to the crowd and said, what are you looking for? And they said, jesus says, here I am.
John describes Jesus as being in control of that situation because he knows his relationship with the Father. He knows the prophecy, he knows the future, he knows people's hearts. And even in those moments, like in the storm on the sea, remember when Jesus Christ was sleeping and the disciples were working hard to save the boat and eventually went to him and kind of were screaming at him, wake up. Don't you see that we are perishing?
Jesus Christ is in control in any situation. And that is one of the strongest messages in this episode.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, God had knew that this was going to happen. The Old Testament talks about these events. There are prophecies that lead up to this. And.
And so Jesus, as he said, he could have called down all the angels from heaven.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: He could have just walked through the crowd as he did on the cliffside when they wanted to throw him off the cliff earlier in. In an event we studied, he could have done a million things to get out of that situation. But he knew what his mission was. And his mission was to come to bear the sins of the world and to go to the cross.
And so Jesus goes forward peacefully. He heals the servant's ear.
He restores that.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: He is true to his character even in moments of crisis.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Yeah. And we can learn from that because we like to think, in crisis, I would do this or that.
But when we jump into crisis, when we're. When we're put into crisis, we act based on character, who we are, what we did in the little things. And so it's the little decisions each and every day that will help us, that will determine how we will respond in crisis.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: As someone said, character is what you are doing when nobody's looking. When you are not on the spotlight, you are in the dark and you feel that nobody is around.
That is your character, what you do in those moments.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I heard this statistic. It was like the amount of men who think that they could score a point playing Serena Williams in tennis.
It was like 7 out of 10 men think that they could score a point playing Serena Williams, which is ridiculous. The same thing's true for guys who shoot guns. Everyone thinks they're the best shot, but if you look at police, they go train constantly. They're constantly having to go to the range. They're constantly having to train.
So that when they're in those emergency situations, everything comes together, everything clicks in place.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: What I also like Jesus Christ mentioned 12 Legion of Angels. A legion. It's a military unit of about a thousand people. But how about the 12?
The only correlation is with the 12 disciples like Jesus.
Even in those moments, in moments of crisis, the number in his mind was 12, right? It's the people entrusted to him by the Father. Twelve, the twelve.
This might be a small details, I don't want to make too much of it, but links to what Jesus did on the cross when he cared more about his mom and the disciples.
And he prayed for those who persecuted him. He said, father, forgive them because they don't know what they are doing.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: And so as we move through our lives, we don't need to be afraid when hard times come, when trials come, when we suffer, because Jesus is ultimately in control. So Jesus in the garden going through all this, he stands firm to his mission.
He doesn't go off script, he doesn't sin. He doesn't change what he and the Father had agreed and the Holy Spirit had agreed to do.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: Jesus Christ had to drink this cup by himself.
Nobody will carry this type of load in the day of judgment. You will be there by yourself. As the old gospel song says, not my father, not my brother, not my sister. Nobody will be there by myself. It's just me and the Lord. And God is training us for those moments. Today there are some loads that we have to carry just by ourselves in moments of crisis. We have to stay true to our professional faith, true to the character that we would like Jesus and the Holy Spirit to work in us.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Let us pray. Father God, we are so thankful that when Jesus came to this moment in his life, he stood true to who he was.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: And I pray that we will build habits in our lives in our daily routines. We will spend time with you.
That we will read the Bible and pray and serve those around us and witness.
And that those little things we do to do good will form a character in us that will help us to stand when critical crises happen. May we be like Jesus because his spirit lives in us. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Amen.
