Skip to main content

Conversations on the way to the Cross 3: The Authority


The chief priests and scribes hold an emergency meeting

"Good afternoon, gentlemen.  I trust we are all aware of our reason for meeting today?  Good.  The situation has escalated dramatically after yesterday's upheaval in the temple, and with the added pressure of the Passover feast at the end of the week, we simply must find a way of neutralising this man before he causes any more trouble.  You all know how precarious our positions are already; the Romans need hardly any excuse to abolish Temple worship altogether - and I don't need to spell out what that would mean for us as scribes and high priests.  We will not let this Jesus be that excuse.

"Now, our best option is to catch Jesus in either an outright blasphemy or a statement of revolution.  So far he has been frustratingly careful, but we sent Joseph and Matthias to talk to him this morning.  Joseph?"

"Thank you, High Priest.  Yes, Matthias and I found Jesus in the Temple courts again - fortunately not overturning tables this time, but his preaching was drawing an alarmingly large number of people.  It was hard to push our way through the crowd, but we finally got close enough to ask Jesus this question: Was his authority from heaven or men?"

"That's a good one, Joseph!  There's no right answer to that, is there?"

"Exactly what we were hoping, Luke.  The man is more cunning than you'd expect, though.  He saw through it straight away, and fired another question right back at us.  'When John was baptising people - was that from God or not?' he asked.  Well, you can picture the situation.  We were surrounded by this crowd who all believe that John was a true prophet - it would have been as much as our life was worth to say that he was deluded.  Yet it would stick in my gullet to own that rabble-rouser to be a holy man - and you know what Jesus' next question would have been, don't you?  'Well, why didn't you believe him then?'  Matthias and I kept our mouths shut and made our exit as quick as we could."

"Am I to understand, then, that you failed in your mission to entrap this country rabbi?  Two of the finest minds on this council were left shamefaced and dumb by some Nazarene upstart?"

"To be fair, High Priest, this Jesus has clearly been trained by the best, wherever he comes from.  I heard him arguing later with some of the Sadducees, and I was blown away by his responses.  They were worthy of the finest rabbinical masters."

"Thank you for that, Nicodemus.  I'm glad to hear you are so enamoured of our friend's intelligence.  Perhaps we will send you to ask him some questions next time.  In the meantime, does anyone have any more useful suggestions?

"No?  Well, it seems to me that our only hope now is to attract a defector from his side.  Simeon, Luke, Zachariah - you spend the next few days mingling with his disciples, and pounce on anyone who seems to have the least bit of a grudge.  We need to move quickly on this thing, but with the following that this wretched man still has, we simply can't just move in and arrest him in the middle of the Temple.  The rest of you, keep your eyes and ears open.  Let my secretary know immediately if you hear or see Jesus do anything that might give us some leverage.

"We will meet again tomorrow, gentlemen.  Remember, Passover is the deadline.  I need progress, and I need it now.  Good afternoon to you all."

Mark 11: 27-33 

Other Conversations from the Cross
1: The Donkey
2: The Commotion

4: The Anointing
5: The Betrayal
6: The Burial
7: The Precaution 
8: The Resurrection

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bonnie Prince Charlie Walk: Lees to Derby

These final two Bonnie Prince Charlie walks were quite a contrast: the first across empty fields and along quiet roads; the second crossing from country into city as I walked into Derby. I started both walks at the Great Northern Greenway car park, just off Station Road in Mickleover.  Walk 1 In order to keep walking the Bonnie Prince Charlie way in the right direction, I first found my way back to Lees by an alternative route. The first section, along the cycle path, was well paved. After that it quickly got very muddy. At least it's a popular walk from Mickleover to Radbourne, so it was easy to find the path.  St Andrew's, Radbourne, is rather dominated by memorials. It looks as if the preacher would be hemmed in by tombs!      I liked this bench outside, with the text, "The thoughtful soul to solitude retires". Writing this, I only just realised it was a quote. Turns out it's from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam . The rest of the walk certainly provided solitude,
Post a Comment
Read more

A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.
Post a Comment
Read more

Flexitarianism

Hey folks!  I learnt a new word today!  I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian .  Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist.  Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials.  All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal.  That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter.  So why the need for a fancy new word?  Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal.  But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course.  The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t
Post a Comment
Read more