Jesus On Trial

I love the Gospel of Mark … well, I love all the gospels … but Mark reminds me of Joe Friday from the 1950s TV series “Dragnet.” Some of us older folks remember Sargent Friday’s famous signature line: “Just the facts.” Mark’s gospel is terse and to the point. He gives us “just the facts” and events of Jesus’ life and ministry. Mark’s signature line would be the word “immediately” as he moves quickly from one event to another in Jesus’ life. No miraculous birth story. Mark jumps right in with John the Baptist and then immediately describes Jesus getting baptized by John and then driven out in to the wilderness. John is arrested and Jesus immediately begins His ministry … all in the first 14 verses of his gospel.

Mark presents us with the facts … the bare bones of Jesus’ ministry … to challenge us. No spin. No agenda. No ulterior motive. Just the facts … and then leaves us on our own to figure what these events mean so that we come to our own conclusion as to who this Jesus of Nazareth is. As we shall see, that can be a risky and bold gamble because people may or may not come to the right conclusion, amen? Like Peter, James, and John, do we drop our nets and follow Jesus? As we watch Jesus heal the sick and the lame, what do we think? Like the Pharisees and Sadducees, what do we make of Jesus and His teachings … His claim to be the Son of Man and the Son of God?

You may or may not know this, but there are two different endings to the Gospel of Mark. In the shorter … and what is believed to be the original ending … Mark’s gospel ends rather abruptly. It ends with the women discovering the empty tomb and an angel of the Lord explaining to them that Jesus’ prediction or promise had come true … “[Jesus] has been raised; He is not here. Look, there is the place they laid Him. But go, tell His Disciples and Peter that He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see Him, just as He told you” (Mark 16:6-7). The women run away from the tomb in what Mark described as “terror and amazement” and “they said nothing to anyone” (Mark 16:8). Boom! Leaving us, like the women, faced with an empty tomb trying to figure out what happened and what the angel meant.

As I said, presenting us with “just the facts” can be a bold and risky gamble … and Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. We love to condemn these men and are very smug and comfortable in judging them for the way that they condemned and judged Jesus … but can we? Maybe … just maybe … these men … these devoted, sincere religious leaders felt that they were doing the right thing in isolating and neutralizing what they thought was a blasphemous and heretical cancer in the body or nation of Judah. Is it possible for us to become so self-righteous that WE can’t see what’s right in front of us?

Now … I’m going to make a bit of a jump here but stay with me … I promise to bring you back to this point. On April 10th, the Titanic set sail for Cherbourg, France, then Queensland, Ireland with 1,300 passengers and 900 crewmembers on board. From there, she headed west and started across the Atlantic to her final destination … New York Harbor. Not only was she the largest ocean liner ever built, her designers and builders claimed that she was unsinkable. Every effort went into making her the most modern and safest ship to ever sail the Seven Seas. At 2:20 a.m. on the night of April 15th, the Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank to the bottom of the ocean.

The ship was designed by Thomas Andrew and was built by Harland and Wolff for the White Star Shipping Line. Andrew’s divided the Titanic into 16 compartments that included doors that could be closed remotely from the bridge … sealing off the compartment so that the water could be contained in the event that the hull was breached. Andrew designed it so that the ship could stay afloat if four of these compartments flooded. After hitting the iceberg, however, water began flooding the Titanic’s forward six compartments. The bulkheads and watertight walls in the compartments meant to keep water from flooding the rest of the ship were not tall enough to contain the water in the damaged compartments, filling more and more compartments until the ship sank. Even after the Titanic struck the fatal iceberg and began taking on water, Andrew, who was on the Titanic’s maiden cruise, kept insisting that the ship’s internal structure would keep the water at bay and the ship would not sink. Two hours later, the sink broke in half and sank to the ocean floor. 1,517 of the 2,223 passengers drowned; 710 survived. Fortunately, the ship wasn’t running at full capacity or there would have been an additional 1,000 or more people on board that night.