Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and if there was any doubt about whether Jesus would be known in all of Israel, or for that matter, across the world, all doubt was now removed. Everyone heard what had happened.
A man has been raised from the dead!
The Messiah has come!
Except now the Jewish leaders had a decision to make. Were they going to believe and rally behind Jesus? Or would they instead stand in opposition to him.
They were opposed to Jesus. Jesus didn’t fit the mold of the Messiah that they were looking for, what they thought he was supposed to be. He was supposed to be a political leader. Powerful. Forceful. Ready to take on the Romans and overthrow all oppression. Ready to take on any nation that would come against them.
But that wasn’t who Jesus was. He spoke forcefully to them, the Pharisees and the Jewish leaders, but he was most certainly not a political leader. He didn’t act like the archetypical Messiah that they had in their mind. Sure, he did miracles. Sure, he did things that only God could do. But he wasn’t on their side. He was against the ways of the priests. He was against the ways of the Jewish leaders. Plus, he was always talking about how he was equal with God, and he did miracles on the Sabbath. How could Jesus possibly be the Messiah?
So following Lazarus’s resurrection, they called a meeting, and they were afraid. The general consensus of the meeting was wrapped up in this one statement:
If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.
John 11:48
You might be asking yourself: Why would the Romans come just because they believed in Jesus? Why would the Romans, as a result of people believing in Jesus, take away both their temple and their nation?
The Jews weren’t thinking of Jesus as just a “savior” or a “lord” in a far-off conceptual or metaphorical sense. They were thinking of him as a savior and a king in the here and now. Right now, in their physical world. He would be the king, and he would lead them to “salvation”, in the sense that they would no longer be ruled by the Romans. No, they would instead be ruled as they wanted, by their own countrymen, and they would once again be the nation of Israel.
In other words, in their minds, Jesus should be a political leader. It wouldn’t be that much different than what we see in political movements today. People have always rallied behind political leaders with great fervor, and that is exactly the way in which they were thinking about this at that time. The Jewish leaders were essentially saying:
If more people believe in Jesus, the Romans will come to destroy us because of the rebellion that he is leading.
And, of course, they weren’t wrong. That is exactly what the Romans would have done. They would have come and squashed the rebellion. They would have killed many people. They would have destroyed Jerusalem, tearing down the walls and destroying the temple.
How do we know that is true? Because that is exactly what happened in 70AD, approximately 36 years after Jesus was resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven. The Jews had become restless for their freedom and had set up a provisional government against and independent from Rome, intending to throw off the Roman rule.
But the Romans wouldn’t have it. Rebellions must be put down. They must be destroyed. Insurrection cannot, and will not, be tollerated. And so the Jewish leaders were correct. Their city, their nation, and their temple would be destroyed.
So what would the leaders prefer? This man is doing works that only someone who comes from God can do. But the leaders, despite recognizing that Jesus has come from God, have preferred to put themselves as the arbiters of what should be. They believe they should be making the decisions, not the one who does what only God can do.
Don’t we often do the same? Don’t we often prefer to do it our way? Don’t we prefer to be the ones in charge, preferring the direction that we have in mind instead of the one who does what only God can do? Yes, of course we do. We do it all of the time. We choose our way instead of God’s way. We choose the way of man, the expedient way, the way that benefits me instead of that which glorifies God. Sometimes we even say, as the Jewish leaders would have no doubt said, we are glorifying God by disregarding the one who does what only God can do.
We fear that the Romans will come. We fear that, by doing it God’s way, we will make a decision that will put us in a bad light before others. We fear that, by doing it God’s way, we will make a decision that will remove our security, or make us poorer, or send us in a bad direction economically.
In the case of the Jewish leaders, they were afraid that they would lose power. The Romans would come and take their “nation” out from under them, take their temple out from under them. They were holding on to the little that they had so that they wouldn’t lose this shadow of who God made them to be. All for fear that the Romans would come…