Clough John Lesson 63

Arrest and Denial of Christ – John 18:-27

Tonight we study John 18 and this is the first time we’ve emerged from John 17 in quite a while, it does show that we are progressing through the Gospel of John. John 13-19 we have called the passion narrative. That’s because this is John’s mature reflection upon those events that led up to the cross and resurrection of Christ. As we’re going to see tonight, John, as an older man, writing after many, many years of thought, brings to the narrative a fresh perspective. Things that the other writers, writing as younger men, neglected to note or the Holy Spirit just didn’t work to bring it about in their writings. But John is writing this after most of the other apostles have died. In fact, that shows why he’s going to mention somebody’s name here that’s never mentioned in any of the other Gospels. It’s safe to mention him now because all the people associated with this particular event have died. So John gives us added perspective on the death of Christ and throughout he’s very emphatic in showing that Jesus Christ is in control. All through what appears to be on the surface a dissolution of the Christian movement, chaos, everything’s out of kilter and it looks like the whole movement, it’s John, not Matthew, Not Mark or Luke, but John who sees Jesus knowing all things, Jesus goes out to meet the arresting police, Jesus is in control of everything. And he’s doing that to teach us again to relax in God’s sovereignty, that ultimately because Jesus Christ is God-man that makes Him sovereign. And if we can relax in God’s sovereignty in the worst kinds of situations, then we can be thankful in the other kinds of situations; the thankfulness to God is always the first sign of spirituality.

Tonight we are about to study from John 18:1-27. Let’s look at the text and get the flow of what happens. It’s actually made up of two separate events; two themes that are running parallel and we’ll look at the first theme by reading John 18:1-14. “When Jesus had spoken these words, He went forth with His disciples over the brook Kidron, where was a garden, into the which He entered, and His disciples. [2] And Judas also, which betrayed him, knew the place: for Jesus often resorted there with His disciples. [3] Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, comes there with lanterns and torches and weapons. [4] Jesus therefore, knowing all things that should come upon Him, went forth, and said unto them, Whom seek ye? [5] They answered him, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus saith unto them, I am [He]. And Judas also, which betrayed him, stood with them. [6] As soon, then, as He had said unto them, I am [He], they went backward, and fell to the ground. [7] Then asked He them again, Whom seek ye? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. [8] Jesus answered, I have told you that I am [He]: if therefore ye seek Me, let these go their way: [9] That the saying might be fulfilled, which He spoke, Of them which thou gave Me have I lost none. [10] Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant’s name was Malchus. [11] Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which My Father has given me, shall I not drink it? [12] Then the band and the captain and officers of the Jews took Jesus, and bound Him, [13] And led Him away to Annas first; for he was father in law to Caiaphas, which was the high priest that same year. [14] Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people.”

So we have the scene of Christ’s arrest. We’re going to look at that scene. To give you some idea of what the Kidron Valley looks like, [he shows slides]where it took place, to give you a little idea of the perspective of distance; the reason we’re doing that is because the feature of distance enters into the situation in that verse where it says Judas was coming forth, and he brought a cohort of men. Later on I’m going to mention how much a cohort is, and when I do so I want you to picture where this happened; there’s not much space in this whole episode so we want to get an appreciation for some of the distances involved. This looks across the Kidron Valley and to make things a little clearer from where these pictures were taken if I drew a map of this area; this is the temple mount, the wall comes like this and there’s a hill here. The land from the temple wall just goes down into a valley and this is the Kidron Valley and over here is the Mount of Olives. The Kidron Valley in the middle, the temple on the west, the Mount of Olives on the east, and along this slope as you descend the Mount, as you go across and up this hill you’ll cross the area of Gethsemane, which we’ll see in the slide. So keep that map in mind and we’ll see the slide. We’re looking west; that’s the Dome of the Rock, the Islamic temple. This wall is the wall that’s in approximately the same position that the wall was in Jesus day. In fact, those little stones along the bottom of the wall are Herodian masonry that has been there since Christ’s day. In Christ’s day the wall did not cut across like this, it came around where this road is and down this way.

Since gave the upper room discourse in a house in southwest Jerusalem, His disciples between John 14-15 and John 18 walked across the city of Jerusalem behind the wall, came through the wall and walked down this valley; you see an orchard growing there now. They walked down the valley; that is the Kidron valley. This is looking northwest and there again is this valley; it’s very greatly denuded today but that’s true of the Arabs, that was not true in the time of the Jews, in Christ’s day; it was just loaded with the olive groves. That’s the area of that Garden. Just take a look at the small distance you’ve got in that valley; that is not a big valley, it just takes a couple of minutes to walk across, so from this area which is the temple mount, down into this area, is only a few hundred yards; a small distance. Here is a picture taken from down in the Kidron valley looking up at what the location which in Jesus day’ was the pinnacle of the temple. It may have been from this corner that Satan tempted Jesus to cast Himself down and see whether God would protect Him. Going up the road in the Kidron Valley you see there are tombs cut in the rock; this is an area of a graveyard; it was this reason why in Acts you have all the widows present and why you have the widows discussed in Acts 6; Jewish men in their elder years would come to Jerusalem to die and after they died their widows would be left in the city.

Keep the perspective of the distance, it is not a large valley at all. Here’s the Garden of Gethsemane as it looks today, the olive grove. Keep that picture in your mind to imaginatively re-create the scene when the soldiers come out with lights. John is going to pick that little detail up and use it in sort of his ironic way. But they’re doing it because inside a grove like this there would have been opportunities for assassination, for assault, for ambush. And so for that reason you have a massive number of soldiers coming to pick off Christ and His little band of disciples. The soldiers do not know whether there may be revolutionaries waiting for them in the darkness of those trees and so since the trees are there and there’s good cover they take no chances, hence you find this large party of soldiers coming out to the Garden.

John 18:1, Jesus now begins the walk across the “brook Kidron.” Now it’s not a brook, you didn’t see any water in that valley; the only time there’s water in that valley is after it rains; it’s a dry wadi most of the time and that’s what this word means, it doesn’t mean a flowing brook, it just means this indentation. Christ walks down “where there was a garden, into which He entered, and His disciples.”

Now it’s said that Judas knew this place very well because oftentimes Jesus would camp there overnight: passages that indicate this: Luke 21:37 and Luke 22:39. It was a campsite. In days when Jesus used to minister all afternoon in the temple He had to have a place to sleep at night and they went over and they sacked out in the Garden. Now in those days the Garden was a lot bigger than it is now; it apparently extended all the way up to the top of that hill; it wasn’t denuded, it was covered with trees. And it was there that they camped. So remember that that whole hillside was covered with orchard groves and trees it wasn’t obvious exactly where Jesus was; somewhere over on that hill, very close to the wall but still hidden in the trees, was Jesus. From the Roman perspective and from the Jewish perspective, not really being sure of what it was that they were going into, they were prepared for the worst, prepared for an ambush.

So we have in John 18:3 Judas with his resources for the arrest. “ Judas then, having received a” cohort of men and officers from the chief priests’” if you’ve been here on Sunday mornings you remember what a centurion is and the normal military structure but to refresh your mind, remember the size of the arresting party that came out to meet Christ. Let’s look at this breakdown of the Roman order. The basic idea, the basic component of the Roman army was the legion; the reason the Romans were so effective is they broke government down into small segments that were flexible and you could move legions around and within the legion you could move. A legion was equivalent to our division; it was made up of 4,200 to 5,500 men most of the time commanded by a man equivalent to our Major General. It was made up of ten cohorts which varied from 500 to 1100 men. Now in verse 3 Judas has an entire cohort. Now look what he’s got; he’s got anywhere from 500 to 1000 men. This particular cohort is set in the text with an article in the Greek which means it wasn’t “a cohort,” it was “the cohort.”

What do you mean “the cohort?” It means the only cohort that was in the city of Jerusalem at the time; the cohort which was garrisoned in the fortress of Antonias and so Judas may not have had all the cohorts, he probably didn’t, knowing the Romans they must have left a considerable number behind to guard the fortress. But nevertheless, the fact that the word “cohort” is used in verse 3 indicates that he had the major segment of a thousand group men which would be equivalent to a regiment or a brigade today. It would be commanded by a Full Bird Colonel and he was there; the arresting officer was not a Centurion who came; the arresting officer was higher than a Centurion. He would be equivalent to a Full Bird Colonel, sometimes maybe a Brigadier General. The cohort would be made up of three maniples, of 200 men each. It’s probable that at least one entire maniple, which would be equivalent to a battalion, showed up in the Garden of Gethsemane… at least a maniple. So the Bird Colonel thought it enough to take one or two maniples with him to go in and arrest Christ and put an end to this particular movement as it had been reported to him through Jewish sources.

So this gives a size idea and comparison of just how big an arrest this was. And it’s precisely for this reason that you ought not to be embarrassed as a Christian that there are no historic sources now available to show this arrest, but in the early days of the Church, the apologists for the Christian faith insisted that in the archives of Rome was the official report of this commandment and His arrest that night on the western slopes of the Mount of Olives. And it was there because the Romans were meticulous and an arrest of this magnitude, that required one or two battalions, was obviously recorded in Roman history. Now unfortunately those records have been lost but that’s all right; they at least existed for a while and can be testified to from extra-biblical sources.

Judas then, secures a cohort. Why did Judas Iscariot secure this much? There’s a psychology of tactics involved in the Roman mentality. The commander at the Fortress of Antonia had one basic mission; and remember, this costs money, if you’re going to station an entire regiment of soldiers and maintain those soldiers at one location you’ve got to have pretty good political justification for expending the government’s money to keep this outfit there. Now this colonel was charged with one of the most unenviable commands in the Roman system and that was, anything in Palestine just bugged the Romans anyway because they couldn’t stand the Jews because the Jews never fit into anything and they were always at odds and it was always a source of trouble and if wasn’t Jews then it was the Parthians to the east that were causing problems. But to have the command not only in Israel but to have the command right there in the temple complex they probably drew straws when they selected the commanders, and the loser got this command because this guy had to sit in the fortress of Antonia and all he did, all his duty was to go trotting out and stopping riots. Remember in Acts 23 that’s what happened, Paul went in there and they started a riot and he had to pull his soldiers down, the Full Bird went down with them to rescue Paul from the crowd. So that’s the story of this man’s military career, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, always a riot. So he was very schooled in how to handle liars and riot control

Now one of the things about mobs and mob control is a mob acts like a bully and if you back up before a mob you are dead. There have been instances where a few policeman have held off a mob simply because they showed that they were not going to yield an inch. But if the forces begin to back up there’s something about the flesh of a group of people that all of a sudden just burn out into one hell-raising thing, for example what happened at Kent State at Ohio, and in that situation you had a group of Guard officers who weren’t too well trained and then they had to open fire, and then everybody worried about their poor little darling that got shot. Well, what was he doing out there throwing rocks at the National Guard for in the first place; that’s why he got shot. So the Guard and other people who are charged with riot control have a very, very difficult situation, particularly now because anytime the riot control forces hurt somebody it’s bad news; of course they can get hurt and that’s all right, newspapers never report the police that get hurt, the Guard that gets hurt or the soldiers that get hurt, only some little bratty student who happen to get in the way who tripped on a pebble and cut his nose or something and that makes CBS news. But anything else is neglected.

Now the Romans had a very good psychology for dealing with mobs and it’s twice demonstrated in the pages of the New Testament. It’s once demonstrated here and it’s demonstrated again when the same commander goes in, or at least his successor, goes in to rescue Paul. And the Romans believed in this; the only way to control a mob is to meet that mob and outnumber them. The Romans always believed in massive deterrent; they believed that you could avoid a confrontation with a mob; if suddenly there are, we’ll say 50 people in danger of a riot, show up with about a thousand soldiers. There’s something intimidating about a thousand soldiers showing up; it’s sort of quells everybody and puts their sin nature back down in the cage. And that’s the psychology of mob control. The Romans at this point deploy the major point of one cohort following their psychology of mob control. They don’t know how many disciples Jesus has, for all they know, the way the Jews are talking the whole woods are full of Galileans, they came down to cause a riot over this Jesus character. So that’s the picture that the Roman commander has as he goes along with Judas.

Then Judas has, besides the Romans, he has the temple police, the “officers from the chief priests,” now these were the guys that operated within the boundaries of the temple that were considered off limits to Gentiles. The Jews were charged with maintaining their own law and order inside that area of the temple precinct. The Roman commander had jurisdiction outside that precinct. Now behind all of this was something else that operated; there was a certain political pressure being brought to bear against the Jewish authorities by Pilate and the Roman government, of course which was above this Bird Colonel who commanded the cohorts.

Turn to John 11:48 you get an inkling of this political pressure that forms the backdrop for the arrest. We want to see if we can look at this, not this Monday morning quarterback thing, but look at it through the eyes of what it must have looked like that night to the men who were called out for riot control. In John 11:48 we have one of those meetings that occurred with the hierarchy of the Jewish rulers, and we have the dialogue. “If we let Him thus alone,” says Caiaphas, “all men will believe on Him,” you get the idea that Jesus was quite popular, and then what would happen? “…then the Romans shall come and take away both our place and our nation.” So that’s ironic because if Jesus is really the Messiah and the entire nation really believes in the true Messiah they’re not going to have to worry about Romans. But you see, because they can’t conceive of a God-man Messiah they already act as though Rome is greater than God. And so regardless of this guy, whether He claims to be Messiah or not, we can’t let this Christian movement get out of control because if we do that’s just the excuse that Pilate wants to come in here, deploy his cohort and take us over.

Right now, so far the Romans have been gracious to let the Jews have some freedom but apparently if you read between the lines here the Romans for some time were threatening to come in with a marshal law situation and just as they did, or course, Caiaphas would be out, all the Jewish ruling families would be out, the Sanhedrin would be out, all the Jewish government would be respectively nullified; it would be destroyed. So that’s the political process under which the Jews are operating at this point and so therefore when Judas comes to arrest, what he’s done is he’s gone to the Sanhedrin, he’s secured their interest in the arrest, but when they go to arrest they’ve got to go to Rome to clear; there can’t be this kind of an arrest made without Roman authority. Well it must have been when they went over to the Fortress of Antonias and said hey, we’ve got a little arrest we need some help that the commander said what kind of help and what kind of an arrest are you making. Well, this guy you claims to be Messiah, a ruler? How many followers does He have. Well, it’s getting pretty hairy because there’s quite a few people, in fact, that are following Him. And you’re going to make an arrest; are you going to make an arrest at noon? How do you know where He is? Oh we know where He is. Where is He? He’s over there in the trees. [Recording very poor at this point, hard to understand] Well if you are a Bird Colonel and you get that kind of report what would you do, if you heard that kind of thing, in riot control? It would be natural for you to deploy a large force of men.

Turn back to John 18 and watch how this scene unfolds. Judas comes [can’t understand words] he comes with lanterns; he comes with torches, and he came with weapons. And then in John 18:4 he makes one of those notices that we… [tape almost unintelligible]