Our final reading tonight is from the Gospel of Matthew. As we turn to Matthew 26, we are taking a step back toward the beginning of the proceedings that we have just read in John's Gospel. In John's gospel, he mentions mostly Jesus before Annas, and then His being taken to Caiaphas. In Matthew, we get the picture of Jesus before Caiaphas, and that is what we'll be reading tonight. Matthew 26, beginning to read in verse 57, and reading to verse 68. Then those who had seized Jesus led Him to Caiaphas, the high priest. where the scribes and the elders had gathered. And Peter was following him at a distance as far as the courtyard of the high priest. And going inside, he sat with the guards to see the end. Now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death. But they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. At last, two came forward and said, this man said, I am able to destroy the temple of God and to rebuild it in three days. And the high priest stood up and said, have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you? But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, I adjure you by the living God. Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus said to him, you have said so. But I tell you from now on, you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest tore his robes and said, he has uttered blasphemy. What further witness do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy. What is your judgment? And they answered, he deserves death. Then they spit in his face and struck him. And some slapped him saying, prophesy to us, you Christ, who is it that struck you? As far as the reading of God's holy and inerrant word, may he had a blessing as we consider it together tonight. What is your judgment? Verse 66, what is your judgment? Literally the words are, what do you think? After all that you've heard and after all that you've seen, what will you say concerning this Jesus? It's the most important question you could ever be asked. It's the most significant, most fundamental, most eternity-defining question you will ever have to answer. What do you think about Jesus? It was a question that Pilate was trying to get at. Matthew chapter 27, he brought out Barabbas and he stood him next to the Savior so that the people could have a choice. And when they chose the criminal, he asks the question, well, then what should I do with Jesus? What to make of him? It was a question that Christ pressed into the consciences. of His disciples. Yes, some say John and some say Elijah and some say Jeremiah or one of the prophets, but who do you say that I am? What do you think? What is your judgment? What do you say about Jesus? If you understand how significant the question is, you're perhaps confused a bit by how Jesus seems so perfectly willing to be misjudged by everyone around him during the days of his flesh. It's in John's gospel, though we didn't read it, chapter 13, where we find that when Judas leaves the upper room with the rest of the disciples to go and seal his pact with the priest, in that famous phrase, we read that it was night. It was night. Yes, it means it was an ominous indicator of the spiritual darkness that was entering the scene, but it also just means it was nighttime. It means the sun had gone down and the pre-industrial world was soon to be asleep, if not already. It means that after the discourse and the prayer with the disciples, and after the hymn and the walk into the garden, and after three long hours of prayer, soaked in blood and sweat and agony, Jesus was arrested in what we sometimes call the wee hours. He had to be taken by torchlight. He was bound by the soldiers. He was led back into the city. He was taken to Annas and then on to Caiaphas into the courtyard of the high priest where verse 57 tells us, the scribes and the elders had gathered. Now let's just say by a conservative estimate that Jesus is presented to them, oh, around about two o'clock in the morning. brought to a Jewish ruling council already in session, sleepy-eyed Sadducees sitting in their judgment seats instead of at home in their beds. And why? Because their judgment had already been passed for all intents and purposes. They knew what was going to happen. They knew the judgment they were going to make. If this were any other trial, it could wait until morning. There would be witnesses, there would be procedures, there would be questions in place to make sure that the innocent were not condemned and the guilty did not go free, but all that had already been decided. They weren't gathered at 2 a.m. for a trial. They hadn't come together to seek the truth. They were there for an opportunity. So verse 59 tells us the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put Him to death. That's what they wanted. This is not a trial. This is a guilty verdict waiting to be passed. This is a preconceived condemnation looking for a crime to hang it all on. It's not the first time. You remember that all that previous week in the temple, Jesus had dodged their theological nets while they tried to catch him in something that he said so that they might have reason to accuse him. So here came the scribes, and here come the Pharisees, and everybody took their turn trying to make Jesus say something they could make him regret later. But instead, he evaded. He parried every jab and slice they tossed at him. He proved himself so capable of avoiding their traps that they no longer laid them. He proved himself so capable that by the time you come to chapter 26, you're almost expecting him to do it all over again. I like that time that the crowd made their judgment about Jesus. A judgment to take him by force and to make him their king. And Jesus just slipped through their fingers. right under their noses, right through the crowd. He went away unseized and uncoronated. You expect him to do it again. To open his mouth and to say one brilliant thing that will put an end to all of it, to let everybody know that he's the prophet that will not be trifled with. Instead, he just stands there. He just stands there and he takes it. False witness after false witness, slander after slander, he absorbs it all like he's some kind of wounded animal who's now too weak to continue trying to fight to get away like a sheep, like a lamb before its shearers is silent. And with all that hinges on who he is, we are unprepared for how content Jesus seemed to be to be misjudged. Content to be maligned. Ready to be condemned, though he didn't deserve it. It's hard, of course, to produce skeletons from a closet that's never seen any. The best they could do was to twist his words just slightly to bring up some misremembered quote with just enough guile to make it seem like he was some mix between a megalomaniac and a religious terrorist. Some charge about the temple. The desecration of a temple was a capital crime in those days, and conspiracy with intent to distribute was enough to get the ball rolling, but even then it wasn't true, and they knew it. And all he had to do was say a word, but he didn't. He allowed himself to be misjudged. He was misjudged by the leaders, and he was misjudged by his disciples. Not insignificantly, it was Peter back in chapter 16 that answered Jesus' question to the 12, who do you say that I am? And when he answered that question, he used language that was almost identical to the statement that Caiaphas makes here. When Peter answered that question, he said, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And when you read those words in chapter 16, you breathe a sigh of relief. Somebody gets it, finally. There's a living, breathing disciple who has judged Jesus correctly. But in the very next breath, when Jesus begins to speak about rejection and death, you realize that he's still in the dark, as though Peter needs to take Jesus to the side and rebuke him. No, Lord, not you. Didn't you hear what I just said about you? Don't you know what that means about what you're supposed to do? It can't happen like that. Not you, Lord. He knew who Jesus was, but he didn't know what he had come for. Peter believed in Jesus the Messiah. He still connected messiahship with victory. He was still expecting some triumphal king rather than a criminalized pariah. Maybe that's why all of the gospels in their own way interweave the account of Peter there watching from a distance while Jesus' trial goes on. All the Gospels remind us that the impetuous disciple is there. He's at least within earshot. He's observing. He's evaluating. He's watching it unfold. Jesus had told his friends to follow him, and it says here he is following, except that he's at a distance. But he's not very close. There's a safety buffer between him and he sits with the guards to see the end. We don't know, of course, what it is he was waiting for. We have no insight into what he expected to see, how he hoped things might turn out. But it's just possible, isn't it, that still at this late hour, he expects Jesus to emerge triumphant. He'd been so bold in his declarations. Lord, even if I have to die with you, I will not deny you. And he said it like a man who was trying to convince himself. Even if I have to die with you, he said, and he said it like a man who doesn't really quite believe it could come to that, like somebody who wanted to prove to Jesus what he hoped he wouldn't have to prove to himself. And so isn't it possible The text doesn't tell us for sure, but isn't it possible that as he sat there and as he heard, he was waiting for Jesus to do something to stop it all? And isn't it possible that his confidence for following Jesus evaporates the same way that yours does? Lie upon lie and slander upon slander and you overhear it and you're troubled by it and you say to yourself, this is not the Jesus I thought I was in for. You expect Jesus to show up and silence it at any moment. And he seems so content to be misjudged by the world. He's still misjudged by the world today. He's made a fool of. He's caricatured as someone either too weak to make a difference or too benign to care. He's labeled as a fairy tale, as a myth. He's hijacked or he's pigeonholed. His words are manipulated to legitimize every cause du jour. Every flash in the pan-ism that people can come up with, they try to append Jesus to all of those things. Like some sort of cartoon mascot, we can just throw into whatever we think is important. And he's still being misjudged today. Of course, the most significant misjudgment came at the end of the trial, where the scribes and the elders, the Jewish court, you know, had no Fifth Amendment to plead. The accused was required to defend himself and to testify. And when Jesus did not answer the false claims against him, the high priest himself stood up to put his finger on the nerve and called down the name of the living God. He leveraged all the weight of his holy office. He charged Jesus to declare whether he was the Christ, the son of God. And when he agreed, they shouted him down. They called truth blasphemy. Light, darkness, and darkness, light. They lined up to spit in his face. Probably not all at the same time, probably one after another, probably not just as a show of their scorn, but as an official act of removing him from the communion of his people. This is how much we cast contempt upon you. Here is a worm and not a man. Here is a liar deserving of death. Here is a criminal upon all the crimes they dared to imagine were to be cast like a lead weight, if only they could make it heavy enough to sink him. And Jesus was content to absorb it. J.C. Ryle points out that it was fitting that the verdict of death should come in this context. He realized that it didn't come from Pilate. Pilate asked the question, why? What evil has he done? Pilate passed the sentence three times, I find no guilt in this man. Pilate played the perfect Macbeth. He washed his hangman's hands of the whole bloody affair, as if that might quiet his conscience. And so the sentence fell here. The judgment was passed in Caiaphas's court, and J.C. Ryle points out that it was fitting, because it was required of the chief priest, after all, that he should be the one to declare the sentence over the sacrifice. Leviticus chapter 16, verse 21, speaking of the day of atonement, and Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel and all their transgressions, all their sins, and he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness. Call it a misjudgment, if you like. Call it a transference of guilt. The sins of the guilty counted to the account of the innocent. Call it a vicarious sacrifice. On the Jewish Day of Atonement, of course, there were two goats. One that was counted innocent, it was offered as a sacrifice whose blood cleansed the holy place from the sin of the people defiling it. And the other who was counted as guilty with all the sins placed upon it, sent out into the wilders, not to go into goat retirement, but to die the death of the unprotected. Two goats died on that day. One of them carrying the sins of the people away into the wilderness where they could never be remembered ever again. And in Jesus, before Caiaphas, the innocent took the place of the guilty one. The lamb of God, perfect and unstained, no guilt in him, no falsehood on his lips. He who knew no sin, Paul says, yet he was made sin for us. counted as though we would say. The sins of the people pronounced upon his head with a sentence of death laid on him like a heavy burden and some might choose to call it a misjudgment. But the Lord calls it a sacrifice. The guilty set free and the innocent crushed. Isaiah says, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. Then the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. My children like to remind me of the 25 bags of white marble chips that I once loaded into the cargo hold of our minivan. They like to remind me of the way that when I came home from Lowe's, the wheels were tucked up into the fenders. And the way that ever after that, the suspension always made a creak and a groan when you hit a bump just the wrong way. That was the burden laid upon our Lord. It was a heaviness carried to the point of breaking. And if you wonder why he was willing to bear it, if you wonder how he could have stood there and absorbed it, how he could have remained silent while the slanders and the lies heaped upon him, while the spittle ran down his cheeks and the hands pulled out his beard, if you wonder how he could endure it, the answer is he endured it for you. He took the rejection that you deserved. He received the blows that should have struck you. He received the nails that should have pierced you. He bore the guilt that should have drowned you. He carried the sin that should have damned you. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, like a sheep that before its shearers is silenced, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment, he was taken away, stricken for the transgression of my people. Our Lord was misjudged by the leaders. He was condemned by the priests. He suffered the hatred of those who thought that they knew who he was. But it will not always be so. So Jesus told them, I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven. It was a statement so clear that it left no doubt for anyone in that room or that courtyard about who or what he was claiming to be. It was a combination of Old Testament quotations and it began with the very psalm that he used to silence their messianic misunderstanding earlier in the week. Psalm 110, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. It was a declaration of divinity. And it was so unmistakable that even the high priest tore his holy robes as a recognition that he stood in the presence of someone who either must be worshiped or crucified. And their fists and their jeers let you know the verdict that they reached. They misjudged him one more time. A day is coming when Christ will return. He has been condemned as a criminal. He is hung upon a cross. He's been buried in the grave. He has been there three days. He has been raised from the dead. He has ascended to the Father. A day is coming when he will return and his heavenly glory will be seen in perfect detail. A day is coming that he talked about when he will sit in the judgment seat, when he will sift the wheat from the chaff, when he will separate the sheep and the goats. And on that day, the only question that will mean anything is what do you have to say about Jesus? What is your judgment? Let's pray. Gracious God and Father, we thank you for sending your son to be our scapegoat, sending him to be the one to bear the sin that we could not carry, sending him to be the one who gives us forgiveness through faith in his name, gives us life by his resurrection. Help us, O Lord, to consider who we believe Him to be, give us faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Give us a life by His name. Help us to rejoice in You and to know Him, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.