Faith Presbyterian Church - Birmingham
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Faith Presbyterian Church - Birmingham
Luke 22:47-53; Jesus's Betrayal and Arrest
Jamie Peterson March 30, 2025 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL Bulletin
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Please turn with me to Luke, chapter 22, verses 47 through 53. As you're turning there, if you're here with us for the first time or maybe not aware of the series that's been going on here in 2025, Jason has been leading us through a series on meals with Jesus. In Luke, it looks like Jesus is either going to a meal, he's at a meal, or he's coming from a meal, and that's taken up a large portion of this year. But a few weeks ago we started to turn our attention away from meals with Jesus to walking with Jesus, a walk with Jesus that is eventually going to lead to Him dying on the cross for His people.
Speaker 1:Most of us in this room I don't know exactly how many, but I would say it's a large number we've all been to a large, big college professional sporting event, and one of the highlights of those big events that you go to is the National Anthem is played and within just a second or two after that last note of the national anthem, there's a stealth bomber, a squadron of F-16s, apache helicopters or whatever are flying over the stadium, whipping the crowd up into a froth, and as great and as majestic of a scene as that is what has always baffled me, and if you're a pilot you're probably thinking this isn't that complicated, but for me it is. How in the world do they get those planes to fly just at the right time, right when that song is about to end, with such precision? This is the precision we need to look at with regards to Jesus's life throughout the Gospels. Jesus never woke up, stumbled out of bed each morning, letting the day come to him. Everything that we see take place in the Gospels any of those things aren't written was a divine appointment. It was him not within a second or a couple seconds. It was right, at the right time, of Him having an interaction that was divinely appointed from the beginning of time. When he comes across the funeral procession of the young man whose mother is now a widow, going outside the city gates, he knew from the beginning of time that he was going to have that interaction and raise him from the dead, this meeting that we saw a few weeks ago with the rich young ruler, and then not only that, but his interaction with Zacchaeus and all these other things. They were not by accident. They had a specific purpose, and we have to understand here too, as we are about to read about Jesus' betrayal and arrest. It's very easy for us to look at this and think, okay, things are spinning out of control.
Speaker 1:What I want to remind us of is that Jesus has every bit of control of what's going on here, with His betrayal and arrest, as he was in creating the universe, restoring the sight to the blind, feeding the multitude, raising the dead to life. And that's what makes this passage, as well as others, so amazing, as we see the beauty and the control of Jesus and how he uses it for God's glory and for the good of His people. So, before we look at this passage, let's now go to Him and ask Him for His help. So, before we look at this passage, let's now go to Him and ask Him for His help. Father in Heaven, we come to you today as people who are in deep need of help on every level imaginable, and we need your help in understanding your Word, lord. We come in here with skewed ideas, not fully understanding the broader context of what You're doing. So, lord, I pray that You'd give us laser-sharp focus on your Word and what You're doing here through your Son and Lord, how you have been glorified through Him and how you are being glorified through Him in what seems to be His darkest hour, in His betrayal and arrest. Lord, give us eyes to see, give us ears to hear your Word. This morning we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.
Speaker 1:Luke, chapter 22, beginning with verse 47, and we'll go through verse 53. Hear the Word of the Lord. While he was still speaking, there came a crowd and the man called Judas one of the twelve was leading them who drew near to Jesus to kiss him. But Jesus said to him Judas, would you betray the son of man with a kiss? And when those who were around him saw what would follow, they said Lord, shall we strike with the sword? And one of them struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said no more of this and he touched his ear and healed him. Then Jesus said to the chief priests and officers of the temple and elders who had come out against him have you come out? As here ends a reading of God's Word.
Speaker 1:At a church where I served several years ago, I had the privilege of getting to know a fellow who's a little bit younger than me. He had been at the church just a few years before I had gotten there and he had bottomed out recently due to his addiction to drugs and alcohol. A number of the deacons at the church where I was had rallied around him, had helped him to get through rehab, had gotten him plugged into the church, had helped him find some good housing to be able to find a job, just to try to help him be able to get back up to his feet. But as I got to know him a little bit further, I was, and still am, humbled by his story. You see, this fellow is a lot like many of us. He grew up in a good home. He went to a four-year school, he got out, started working in construction and after a few years of working in construction he was able to have his own residential construction company and was doing really well, so well that he was able to take a ski vacation out west with some friends.
Speaker 1:And while he was out there he had an accident. I can't remember exactly what type of injury that he had, but it was bad enough. He had to go see a physician after he'd gotten back home. And it was even worse in the fact that he had to take some very powerful pain meds to deal with this injury. It put him out of work, it put him by himself, and many of us have probably been in this situation or know someone who's been there. His addiction to the pain meds and addiction to alcohol started to spin his life out of control to the point where he was eventually homeless and was living for his next fix.
Speaker 1:And I'll never forget, as he was telling me this story, he says I never thought something like this would happen to someone like me. We have to be very careful when we say that something will never, ever happen to us or that could never happen to me, because it certainly could. And when we read biblical accounts like the one that we have here, with the actions of Judas and the disciples, we need to be very careful to not think that we are not capable of doing something like this. If we have any doubt of our capabilities to be a Judas, think of all the things that were afforded him. He was one of the twelve. As we see here in this passage, jesus chose him to be a disciple. After a night of praying over this decision, he was personally taught by Jesus for three years and, to put it here in our faith Presbyterian terms, he was part of Jesus' grace group. He witnessed Jesus' miracles. He served as treasurer of the twelve. He had been in the upper room with Jesus just a few short hours before, where he had dined with Jesus, and Jesus had washed His feet before they ate.
Speaker 1:And by piecing together the different parts of the Gospel we get a clearer picture of perhaps what's going on with Judas that led him up to this moment, as we see in the Gospel of John. In John 12, we see at Mary's anointing of Jesus' feet that Judas is appalled by this. He says you know, this is 300 days wages. This was basically $15,000 that could have been spent on feeding the poor. In other words, thousand dollars that could have been spent on feeding the poor. In other words, he's saying is Jesus really isn't worth it? And we know from other scriptures that Judas was taking from the coffers for himself.
Speaker 1:And he became so disillusioned with Jesus that right after that anointing of Jesus' feet by Mary, he goes out to the chief priest to see what he can get for Jesus and said Mary, he goes out to the chief priest to see what he can get for Jesus and we'll give you 30 pieces of silver and put that in today's term, we'll give you 250 bucks for Jesus, and this is what Judas does. It's almost as though Judas has become disillusioned with Jesus and who he is. He's running a program that I don't like. His kingdom is not what I have in mind, and this is a fire sale. I need to get out of him what I can while the getting is still good. So he sells him out to the high priest. And because Judas had walked so closely with Jesus, he knew exactly where he could be found. He could be found praying.
Speaker 1:And to add insult to injury, he identifies Jesus with a kiss. We may be asking ourselves well, why does he do this? Well, we're going to see that there's a big, huge crowd, the disciples are whipped up into a froth, there's a lot of confusion and he wanted to make sure that they got the right guy. He couldn't just go, walk up to the disciples as they're praying and point it out, because there may be some confusion and they may get the wrong guy. He says I'm going to show you who he is by going up and giving him a kiss.
Speaker 1:And to that, insult to injury, this kiss was a common greeting amongst Jesus and his disciples. It was a show of intimate affection, and this is what Judas uses to point him out. It reminds me of a story of several years ago, when I and a bunch of my friends recently graduated. I had one friend who had started dating a girl. They had developed an affinity for this one particular restaurant they liked to go to for special occasions, for birthdays and to celebrate anniversaries and all this stuff, and eventually he came to the point where he wanted to break up with her. He just didn't feel like it was going anywhere. But where does he take her to go break up with her other than their favorite restaurant?
Speaker 1:What Judas does here is infinitely worse than that. With this display of affection, a way in which they have greeted one another throughout these three years, this is the means that he uses to betray the Son of God. And while the disciples weren't betraying Jesus in the way that Judas did, they demonstrated their own lack of trust in Jesus. Remember that while Jesus was praying, the disciples were sleeping and Jesus was warning to them and said you need to pray, you need to see that you need to depend upon God for His sustaining power over you, otherwise you're going to be led into temptation, you're going to be tempted to cling to your own devices. And that same attitude, this self-sufficiency, showed itself when the crowd came up and they came and took their swords. And they came and asked Jesus, should we come and defend you here? And before Jesus can even answer them, peter comes along and chops off the servant of the high priest's ear and, as we will see again soon, jesus is in control of the situation, but the disciples aren't doing Him any favors. Jesus has come to bring peace, but the disciples had fallen into temptation.
Speaker 1:I think the question we have to ask ourselves is how do we misrepresent Jesus in our own fashions? I think about the number of black eyes the church has received through the years, trying to impose Christianity on people through force and legislation, and those are too many to count. But the power that we possess as Christ's church is through the Word, it's through the power of the Spirit, it's through service, it's through declaration, it's allowing Jesus to be Jesus, allowing God to be God. And we see Jesus doing that very thing here by willingly laying down His life for His sheep, with this arrest and betrayal which will lead to His trial, death and resurrection. God's kingdom is not like ours. As such, our hope is not to be found in ourselves and the power that we possess, but to be found in Jesus. As we see here, through Judas and we see through the disciples, we cannot be trusted. We will mess things up, we will destroy our lives apart from Jesus, we will ruin our witness. We will destroy our lives apart from Jesus, we will ruin our witness, we will be poor representatives of Christ. But what we see here is we see three things that we can count on, that we can hang our hat on with Jesus, and the first one is Jesus' control. The second one is Jesus' heart and the third one is Jesus' purpose, with a major league baseball season heart. And the third one is Jesus' purpose, with the Major League Baseball season having just begun.
Speaker 1:A few days ago I saw a video of an interview that was done recently by Eddie Perez. He's a former catcher of the Atlanta Braves. During a large portion of his time with the Braves he was the personal catcher for Greg Maddox. Greg Maddox I know it's somewhat debatable, but you could easily put him in the top five greatest pitchers of all time. He didn't have overpowering stuff. He never really threw it into the 90s, but he was so, so smart and Eddie Perez tells us one story about when they were playing the Houston Astros.
Speaker 1:It was a blowout game. They were winning eight to nothing. And Jeff Bagwell another future Hall of Famer power hitting first baseman comes up to the plate and the scouting report they had decided on before the game is is we're not going to pitch him inside, we're going to throw everything outside. Well, they're winning eight to nothing. Greg Maddox calls a timeout. He calls Eddie Perez to come up. He says I'm going to give this guy an inside fastball. And Eddie Perez is thinking what in the world are you thinking? He's going to kill it? And he said to himself he said well, it's your game, so sure enough. Greg Maddox goes back to the mound, he throws an inside fastball and Jeff Bagwell hits it 1,000 miles. He gives it up. So, anyway, they finally get out of the inning, they go walking off the field and Eddie Perez came up to him and says what in the world were you thinking? He says hey, we're a good team, they're a good team, we're probably going to face them in the playoffs. And what we need to do is we need to set ourselves up to win a playoff game when it really matters.
Speaker 1:Sure enough, three months later, bases are loaded. They're playing the Houston Astros. Greg Maddox is up on the mound, eddie Perez is behind the plate. Bases are loaded two outs. It's the bottom of the seventh inning. Greg Maddox throws him three inside change-ups, three-pitch strikeout on Jeff Bagwell. They come walking off.
Speaker 1:Greg Maddox gets Eddie Perez's attention hey, you remember that game three months ago? And Eddie Perez says I'd totally forgotten about it. He said this is what I had in mind. And Ed Perez says I'd totally forgotten about it. He said this is what I had in mind. This is what Jesus is doing and, to use today's vernacular, jesus is playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers. While a surface reading of this account would believe that Jesus has lost control in his betrayal and arrest, he's every bit as controlled as he's ever been in the midst of this. And to get a broader context again, I think the Gospel of John adds so much color to Luke's account of this.
Speaker 1:We see Jesus and the disciples in the upper room In John 13,. Jesus looks at Judas and says whatever you must do, go, do it quickly. He knows what's going on and he tells hey, go and do it. Whatever you have to do go and do it quickly. And as soon as he leaves the room, the door closed. Jesus looks at His disciples. Now is the Son of man glorified and God is glorified in Him. If God is glorified in Him, god will also glorify Him in Himself and glorify Him at once. This is Jesus' hour. The time of his death had come.
Speaker 1:The next we see Jesus' control over the crowd. If we go back and look at the Gospels, we see where the crowd is often used as a buffer between Jesus and the religious leaders that want to kill Him. He eases into the crowd, he uses the crowd for His purposes until His hour has come, until it was time for Him to die. And not only that, but he would also use the crowds as an opportunity to teach, to show compassion, to heal and to feed. But this time the crowd is different. Compassion to heal and to feed, but this time the crowd is different. This time we see Jesus handing himself over to the crowd and this posse of sorts had come to arrest him. Why? Because his hour had now come. And then we see another level of Jesus' control over the situation in verses 52 and 53.
Speaker 1:When it says Jesus said to the chief priests and the officers of the temple and the elders who had come out against Him. Have you come out as against a robber with swords and clubs? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on Me. But this is your hour, the power of darkness. What Jesus is telling me is this the only reason you're coming to arrest me now is because I'm letting you. Day after day, I was in your temple. What you see is what you get. I was speaking truth. You had opportunity to take me then in broad daylight. Now you're like a bunch of keystone cops or barney fife coming here at night with clubs and swords, thinking that this is what you've got to do in order to be able to take me. They just here. You've got me, I'm the one that's in control. This is what he's saying is. The only reason you're arresting me now is because I'm letting you All this other stuff. You coming here at night bringing clubs and swords, treating me like a robber. You know better than that. I'm letting you do this.
Speaker 1:It's very easy for us to look at our lives and the world around us and think that everything is out of control, but in God's kingdom. Not everything is, as it seems, not on the surface. Indeed, part of the answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism is what is our only comfort in life and in death? And part of that answer is that he preserves me in such a way that, without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head. Indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Jesus is in control of this situation and he's working in and through it for the glory of his father and for the good of our salvation.
Speaker 1:Next thing, as we see Jesus's heart, if you've seen the movie Private Ryan, you remember that one of the first scenes that we see in that movie is you see a group of soldiers on a Higgins boat going across the ocean getting ready to make the landing on the beach at Normandy. And one of the things I'll never forget about watching that movie is there's not a whole lot of chatter on that boat. Everybody is stone cold. Still, there's no one that is talking, and really the only thing that you can hear is you hear the drones of the boat's motor in the background, as these group of young men knowing that many of them will soon die. Is that not how we all are in similar situations? Maybe not that extreme, but we're in the waiting room waiting on a loved one who is having life-saving surgery. There's not a lot of chatter Sitting in the library moments before a big exam, waiting in your car in the parking lot before a big interview, sitting in the locker room before a big game.
Speaker 1:When we face situations like that, stressful situations, our tendency is to turn inward and shut out the rest of the world around us. Not so with Jesus, as we have already seen. He knows His hour is at hand. Last week we saw how this great moment of tension, even to the point of Him shedding blood, sweating blood Jesus was turning His thoughts towards the Father and His will. And then he turns His attention to the disciples, exhorting them to pray so that they might not fall into temptation. And as His crowd, this mob, is standing upon Him. We see in verse 47 that he is still turning His attention towards the disciples. As I think about my own sinful self and again take this for what it's worth, trying to put myself into Jesus' shoes. And I knew what was about to happen, that I was about to be arrested. I'd be off in a corner by myself, but we see Jesus' heart and His heart for the Father. We see His heart for His people. And then we also see Jesus' heart and how he addresses Judas in verse 48.
Speaker 1:Judas, would you betray the Son of man with a kiss? It's impossible to overstate the weightiness of this statement. Jesus refers to him as Judas. He doesn't refer to him as a turncoat, as a traitor, you spy, you spawn a Satan. He uses his name to address him and then, with the name that Jesus attributes to himself is especially significant. He doesn't use the word me, would you betray me? But he uses the Son of man. There's no shortage of ink that's been spilled over what this term means, but it was the designation that Jesus used to refer to Himself as the Son of God, to refer to Him and to His deity, that he is God, no less. It's this phrase that was used in the in daniel's dream in daniel 7 that we heard jason preach back in october of last year. Again, it's a name that jesus used in reference to himself, more than any other name, to refer to his deity, his power and his dominion. And what the weightiness of this is is that Jesus is looking at Judas and said Judas, are you really going to betray God?
Speaker 1:And we see Jesus' heart further in Peter in 2 Peter 3.9. Peter, who was there in the business of chopping off people's ears during this time, says this in his second epistle in chapter 3.9. It says the Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. And this is what Jesus is doing. I'm giving you the weightiest question I can possibly give you. And what this shows is it demonstrates just how spiritually dead Judas was, and this should sober us up and it should frighten us.
Speaker 1:We also see his heart in the healing of the high priest's servant, in reattaching his ear that had been chopped off by Peter. It was a foreshadowing of the healing that he provides through His life, death and resurrection. And what we see here is that, even in the midst of His darkest hour, we see Jesus' heart. We see His heart for His Father, we see His heart for His disciples. We even see His own heart in His words to Judas and that he would repent. Indeed, we see the gentle and lowliness of His heart in this passage that he did not come for Himself but came to serve and willingly give Himself as a ransom for many.
Speaker 1:Look at what Jesus is stepping into. It's a zoo and he ran headlong into it. And, as Dane Ortlund says in his book, gentleman Lowly, he is not any more repulsed by your sin than the sickness repels a parent away from going and caring for their child. The reason he came into this world is to address our sin and to save us from it, which leads us to the third purpose, jesus' purpose.
Speaker 1:One of the many blessings that we have here at Faith are the number of children that the Lord has put under a care. We are reminded of this through the number of baptisms that we have on a regular basis, through the communicants that come up to claim Jesus as their own through their profession of faith. As we pray privately and corporately for these children, it's our prayer that they would grow to live a ripe old age, that they would discover their talents and gifts that God has given them to be a blessing to His church and to the world around them, that they would get married, that they would have other covenant children and those children would have children and those children would have children, and that they would live to a ripe old age. Jesus' purpose, on the other hand, was not to live a life that we pray for for our children and a vision for them, but it was to die, to die intentionally and purposely. He tells His disciples to cut out their plan of the defense for two reasons. First is that he must die and, as we saw in Luke 22 and even more explicitly in Matthew 26, in this account God's Word must be fulfilled. I'm here to do this because this is what I came to do, this is my purpose. And then, not only that, he had to be perfect, he had to be above reproach. And what's going on right here, and why Jesus is telling them to cut this out, is I'm no rebel rouser, and if you go on with your silly little games, with your clubs and your swords and this sort of thing going to fight for me, you're going to give them reason to draw me up on charges, and we know Jesus could never sin. But what he's doing is he's getting control of this crowd so that he could be above reproach, so that he wouldn't have anything attached to Him, any sort of a stigma, so that he could indeed go before His trial and to be tried and to go and be the Lamb without sin, without spot, without blemish.
Speaker 1:I had a friend that went on a mission trip to Africa many years ago. I can't remember exactly which country it was, but they went way back off the beaten path and they brought a generator and a projector and they were going to go show these people a Jesus video. As many of you know, the Jesus video was very popular back in the 90s and it was basically a depiction of the gospel of Luke and they showed it to this tribe and after they got to the end of the movie, this Jesus video, everybody was crying their eyeballs out and the missionaries who were there thinking, oh, my goodness, we've got a mass conversion here, there's a revival that's going on here with this tribe. But as they sat down and they started having a follow up with them, is that the reason they were crying was because this innocent man had been killed. They hadn't come to grips with their sin, they didn't know why this man had been killed.
Speaker 1:And what I can say to you is this as we get closer to Easter and we read these accounts yes, it is sad, but don't cry for Jesus. Lament your sin. Lament your sin that brought Him there, that brought Him to this earth to come and die. See in yourself the propensity to be a Judas, to be one of the disciples. Lament that. Weep over that, a godly sorrow that brings repentance.
Speaker 1:Pray for that and then look to Jesus, the one who is in control, the one who has a heart for you and the one who gave himself for you. Let us pray, lord in heaven. We thank you for your Son, jesus Christ, and how you hold this world in your hand. There is nothing going on, nothing that has ever gone on, that's outside of your control. And, lord, we thank you for how Jesus was in control of this situation, how he used His control to give His life as a ransom for many. Lord, we pray now that you would prepare us to come and to meet with Him around this table. These elements have been provided so that we may be strengthened in our faith to lean more and more into Him. We pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen.