05. Chapter 5: Christ Standing Mute Before the Sanhedrin
C H A P T E R F I V E Christ Standing Mute Before the Sanhedrin And the high priest arose and said unto him, Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these witness against thee? But Jesus held His peace.
—Mat 26:62-63 a. THE chief Prophet maintained the profoundest silence in the presence of the highest court there ever was in the world.
Those are three striking adjectives: the “chief” Prophet, the “profoundest” silence, the “highest” court. As for the last one, we have previously pointed to the fact that the Sanhedrin by virtue of the direction of God, the great Lawgiver of the theocracy, was the highest juridical body in the sphere of spiritual law in the world.[1] Athens is the foster-mother of beauty, Rome is the center of world empire, and Jerusalem, in a similar category, is the city of religion, of revelation, of spiritual authority. Accordingly, the Sanhedrin, up to the moment of Christ’s apology, bears the heavy responsibility and the high honor of being the first and highest court of justice in religious matters. Spiritual authority as it is found in the world finds its points of culmination there. As for such irregular and “wild” pretenders to authority in spiritual things as Melchizedek represented, no one need fear being troubled by them any more. Who had ever seen Melchizedek come to life in the world? Melchizedek is a person about whom one can only preach sermons and write commentaries. No, for spiritual regulations and critiques one must go to the Sanhedrin.
Various explanations for Christ’s silence in the session of the Sanhedrin have been given. One commentator argues that Christ, our High Priest, stood mute because of resignation, just as Aaron was once silent before God when God struck him. These suppose that Christ saw in the Sanhedrin nothing but the chastisement of God, and therefore overlooking the Sanhedrin, He said nothing to God, without paying any attention to the Sanhedrin at all. Another commentator will say that Jesus maintained His silence by way of protest, first of all, against the injustice which had been done Him when the Sanhedrin began its official procedures by riding roughshod over all kinds of rules of law. Then there is a third group who are inclined to believe that Christ held His peace because defending Himself would not “do any good anyhow.” Now it is self-evident that there is an element of truth in these and similar explanations.
Nevertheless, these cannot constitute the full explanation. If one limits oneself to these reasons, one would have to marvel later on when Jesus does not persist in His silence but begins to speak. If it were actually true that Christ could respond to the injustice done Him and to the plagues which God inflicted upon Him in a genuine way only if He stood mute, His later speaking would virtually be condemned.
Or, on the other hand, if Jesus had kept His silence only because He did not want to “cast His pearls before the swine,” He would have been playing extravagantly with God’s pearls. Now there is a tendency sometimes to give our attention solely to Christ’s silence, to use it as a beautiful theme for a sermon about “the silent Prophet, the silent Priest, and the silent King.” But if we should at any time accentuate His silence too emphatically, or should name it the only means by which He could assert His official obedience, then the prophecy of Christ would be nullified by His later speaking, just as His priestship and kingship would then also suffer shipwreck on the rock of His spoken word. There is no more dangerous application of what is a rather foolish proverb anyhow: namely, that speech is silver but silence is golden.
No, we must leave things in their context. Naturally we recognize the Christ, also in His silence, as Prophet, as Priest, as King. He is always fulfilling all His offices; whether He speaks or holds His peace, He does it all to the glory of God. But if we want to understand Christ’s silence correctly, we must pay attention to the relationship in which it stands to the whole gospel narrative. Then we must beforehand be convinced—after all, faith is simply full of presuppositions—that Chris’s silence at a given moment must have a specific purpose in the whole of this wonderful and strange trial.
Now whoever sets himself to the task of reading the gospel of the passion patiently and believingly with this presupposition clearly in mind, will gradually be able to see that Christ is silent at one time and that He speaks at another time for a definite reason. Moreover, the meaning of Christ’s silence in the presence of the Sanhedrin as well as in the presence of Pilate and of Herod will also become clear to him to a certain extent. Such a person tells himself beforehand that three instances of silence must necessarily have three different meanings, that each instance of speech and silence has its own specific meaning whether it take place before the Sanhedrin, or before Pilate, or before Herod. It is only by a complete recognition of the justness of this general exegetical rule that a believing student of the Scriptures can cling to the truth that every new and different thing which the Christ of God does is new, and different, and pure in its reaction to the particular afflictions of the moment. That is also the reason for which we may not be satisfied with the contention that Christ by His silence was simply resigning Himself to the will of God. An exegesis which is satisfied with such an explanation is but another revelation of that same, unfortunate one-sidedness which so frequently has profaned and contaminated our thinking about the Man of sorrows. We mean the one-sidedness which pays attention chiefly, or solely, to Christ’s passive obedience at. the expense of his active obedience. Naturally if we pay attention solely to Christ’s suffering in obedience, to His patience and meekness, we have said enough if we interpret Christ’s silence to be an expression of a calm resignation, an acquiescence in the will of God, even though that sublime will is leading Him to His death. But Christ manifested more than a passive obedience. He remains active to the very end. And that is the case here also. To the extent, first of all, that Christ does not give a wrong answer to the Sanhedrin, His silence is indeed a “speaking” revelation of the Lamb of God which willingly allows itself to be led to the slaughter. But, on the other hand, the silence of Christ in this connection is also a deed. It is an expression of His lordship. His own strong will is on this occasion regulating the course of the trial, and intervening in the critical moments of it.
It may be true that by His resignation to what God is inflicting upon Him, Christ is manifesting obedience. But that does not take away the fact that He may abuse the law of resignation towards God by resigning at the expense of men. In this connection, this means that Christ may do no injustice to the Sanhedrin. The chief Prophet may, as a man, withhold nothing from the Highest Council which is necessary to that council at this time for its salvation. Even if the Son is compelled of God not to take His place in the judge’s seat, but in the open circle in which the Sanhedrin regularly places its accused, Christ, nevertheless, may not passively let that come upon Him which does come. For He still has a task over against this assembly which is seated to do justice. If His silence had merely been an expression of resignation and not a deed also, a redirection of the trial to its genuine purpose, Christ would have become a debtor to those who accused Him. Then the second Adam would Himself have been unjust in the exercise of His office. By virtue, then, of the presupposition of faith previously named, we shall now look for the deed in Christ’s inactivity. We shall seek out the speaking in His silence. We shall try to find the active obedience in the passive. In this connection we remember how, in the preceding chapter, mention was made of the so-called maschil of which Christ had made use in His speech next to the temple. This maschil, this riddle, had been brought into the discussion by the false witnesses who were contaminating the atmosphere around Jesus. Now Caiaphas himself comes to demand both text and exegesis of Jesus. Or—to be very accurate, even that is not quite true. In fact, we might wish that he had asked for both text and explanation. Then Jesus would have answered him by once more citing to him at the behest of the government which he honors the genuine text of His maschil. But the terrible fact is that Caiaphas, although he is the judge, does not ask for the “text.” He asks only, and he does that very formally, for the explanation. Whether or not the text which they were quoting to him on this occasion was accurately presented or not does not affect him at all. At least in the presence of the Sanhedrin the witnesses did not agree with each other about that “text.” The one cited the maschil of Jesus in one way, the other in a different way. No, the text was by no means certain. Plainly, a faithful judge would, before he did anything else, want to determine the precise phrasing of the text; not until he had done that would he demand a further explanation. But what does this judge do? He loses his poise, and without any kind of dignity, demands whether the Nazarene will care to explain what He meant by that strange statement He had made. And without giving any further attention to the uncertainty of the text of Jesus’ speech, he hopes to hear an explanation at once out of which he can forge a chain of condemnation for this proposer of riddles.
It is this explanation which Jesus refuses to give.
He refuses because in His prophetic work Christ moves along His own ways. If he chooses to pronounce the maschil without giving its explanation, that is His own privilege. The distinguishing characteristic of the maschil is precisely the fact that it is a text without an explanation; that, and also the fact that by means of it people who listen honestly, and are willing to investigate, are compelled to preserve the literal text in its exact form, or else the explanation will be hopelessly impossible. Can Caiaphas actually suppose that Christ is going to bury His own texts by way of a premature exegesis of them? By no means. True, Christ will presently give the one great explanation of Himself which will at bottom explain all of His discourses, and disclose their secret. That will take place when He says with an oath that He is truly the Messiah. But His maschil—that He will leave alone. The maschil is His privilege because it belongs to His office and no government will ever succeed in compelling Him to deny anything which is a part of the work of His office.
Therefore we can say that this is the element of Christ’s active obedience: He maintains His maschil: He holds His peace.
Just what this means in reference to His trial we can perhaps appreciate best if we ask ourselves for a moment just what would have happened if Jesus had not stood mute, if in place of His silence, He had carefully exposed the meaning of what He meant by His maschil. That maschil, we remember, was to the effect that His body was the temple which men would break down and which He Himself would rebuild in three days. Now if Christ at this moment had given this complete explanation to these people, He would not have spoken a word at the right time. But the Just One of Israel knows the time and the way in which He must do things. In the first place, riddles and parables are explained only to those whose hearts are open to them. After all, only such people are in a position to hear what is being said. Here, however, in the assembly of the Sanhedrin, there are only insusceptible hearts. These are the birds which never pick up any seeds on the threshing floor of righteousness; they are, on the contrary, birds of prey which feed on rotten spoils.
Moreover, what would have been the results if Jesus had expressed Himself completely on the issue of this particular part of His prophetic speech? If Christ in this conclusive hour, and in the presence of all the witnesses, had pointed to His body, and had said, “This is the true temple; just break it down, and within three days I will restore it,” Jesus would have been doing irretrievable damage to the Sanhedrin as well as to Himself.
Let us note each of those considerations for a moment.
We said that Christ by a premature disclosure of the maschil would have done damage to the Sanhedrin. In that case, He would have prophesied that the Sanhedrin would certainly break His blessed body, that the Sanhedrin would certainly put Him to death. He would have indicated that so much had been clear to Him for years, that the iron will of God, who is seated above the clouds, had so directed it, and that the sublime decree of election and reprobation, that the predestination of that exalted God, had in His sovereign good pleasure appointed Him for this very purpose from all eternity. Plainly, at this place and in this hour, that would have been an untimely preaching. No one, surely, has anything to do with the hidden things. Only revealed things are the yardstick by which we should measure what we do and do not do. The hidden things are of the Lord, and the revealed things for us and our children. Now the revealed things, the holy books, all the prophets taken as a unit, had indicated definitely enough the standard according to which we should act, and had indicated it to the Sanhedrin also. The revelation of the Messiah had, in fact, been so adequate that if it had been obeyed, Jesus would not have been crucified by the rulers of the world. Therefore Christ is silent about the hidden things. Could He want to be wiser and more compassionate than God, who chooses to instruct by means of the Word? And would it have been compassionate in Him if Christ said: “Ye are predestined with me even in this same hour”? No, that may not be said; it would be the greatest brutality to say that, to say that Jerusalem is being made the equivalent of Egypt today (Rev 11:8). Christ knows that. Just what did God say to Egypt? Listen, Scripture does indeed say to Pharaoh, “And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to show in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth” (Exo 9:16; Rom 9:17). But every Pharaoh in the world can take this word in either of two ways. God can make His power manifest in the world by Pharaoh’s triumph as well as by Pharaoh’s decay; by his repentance as well as by his hardening of heart. And God’s name can be declared throughout all the earth not only over a grave of Pharaoh, but also at the moment of his being received into the Father’s house. God never gives a human being a prophecy about his future perdition. Predestination is God’s great warfare against fatalism, and the preaching of it is that also. For he has also predestined the fact of responsibility. No one is ever told that his perdition is absolutely certain, and that he lies under the irrevocable judgment of a hardening of heart. Such an announcement, certainly, would dull the predestined awareness of responsibility. In fact, it would break down predestination. Besides, it would do injustice to the majesty of God, calling aloud as it does in the Word with a “most earnest cry,” and by means of that cry making everyone responsible for what he does and does not do. Moreover, it would be doing injustice to the love of God which is proclaimed aloud in the announcement of the possibility of repentance. Did you think, perhaps, that the prophecy of Christ was a kind of forecasting, a kind of fortune-telling? Not that, surely, but it is a sending out of God’s light. And this light God indeed did send out in His maschil His light even lured the curious, just as a strange star lured the Magi to the solid Word. The prophecy of Christ is never a kind of divination. Accordingly, it never puts one under the accursed ban of an absolute, eternal, predestined unproductiveness. It does not do that as long as the God of Christ has not announced: Let him bring forth no more fruit in all eternity. It does not do that as long as this saying of God is not taken up into the sublime announcements of the Kingdom, which take place there in that Public Court. The prophesying Christ makes everyone face himself; He asks everyone what he wants to do with the Word of his God.
Therefore Christ does not tell the Sanhedrin that the Counsel of God has chosen this hour to break down the body of the Son of Man, the temple of the Spirit. The Good Shepherd does not take the opportunity for repentance away from the bad shepherds, by assuring them beforehand of the impossibility of it. True, Christ does know that the Sanhedrin will be to Him, who is the fulfillment of the true Israel, what Assyria was once in the eyes of Isaiah. Assyria and the Sanhedrin will be a rod, with which God inflicts the penalty; these will be the saw with which God cuts down the trees of Israel. But the fact that the Sanhedrin will realize the Assyrian-service in the true, great, and only Israelite is a fact which is not preached to the Sanhedrin as a fatum to which it is inescapably subservient, for then the High Council of Assyria, seated on the chair of David and of Moses, would say: Are we predestined to be Assyrians? Come, let us then prove that we are Assyrians. Could it be God’s fault that the saw will rebel presently against him who draws it? Will it be reckoned against Christ, if in the judgment day “the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up” (Isa 10:15)? No, no, this glory Christ will not grant the Sanhedrin; the theodicy of the last day may not be allowed to break upon the Christ. Accordingly He wraps His cloak about Him, covers His maschil, does not explain His riddles to those who would abuse them anyhow, and—O incomparable grace—He keeps even this degenerated college to its own legal name. He does not say to the Sanhedrin, “You are predestined to the great, to the acute destruction of the temple.” He says simply: “I demand that you do your duty: it is your calling to be the guardians of the temple.” And He does not say to the select: elders of Israel: “After all, you are Assyrians, drawn up in battle array against the Son in God’s great universe.” No, He lets them be what they are, and simply says: “Ye are Israel. Therefore I want to tell you that I am the Messiah. Know now what ye would do with Him.” Thus Christ lets the responsibility rest squarely upon the shoulders of the highest Council. By His absolute silence He is obeying the predestining God. For this is to tremble before the God who is in election: namely, to let Him do what it is God’s work to do. Thus Christ compels His judges to leave the hidden things to the Lord and to busy themselves with the revealed things.
We can say, then, that Christ’s silence over against the Sanhedrin is a perfect revelation of justice. He is by no means eager to become the rock of offence over which they are to fall. A “careless” omission—how ridiculous our poor language in these things proves to be—, a bold and hasty exegesis of a text that has not even been critically ascertained, and Jesus, outside of His office, would have announced their condemnation to the Sanhedrin. But that would have meant that He, independently of His office, would have been a stumbling-block upon their way. For there is no one in the world who will ever circumvent the absolute assurance of his own predestined condemnation and this assurance, accordingly, God never gives to any man.
Now it was the majesty of Christ that He laid not a single stumbling-block in the way of anyone on that road which all men and all devils literally bestrew with stumbling-blocks and with rocks of offence.
O exalted majesty; O great Christ, eternal light, Thy way is strewn with stones. Eager human hands throw them before Thy feet. Ardent passion of devils arranges them for your difficult going. Laws of eternity forbid all the angels together to keep Thy foot lest it should stumble upon a rock. Nevertheless, Thou, O Christ, didst not play with a single stumbling-block; Thou didst not lay a single one in the road. Thy incomprehensible office was more than enough for Thee: to be set as a fall and a rising again for many in Israel was more than enough for Thee. Thy office satisfied Thee so completely that Thou didst not play a single indifferent game with it in the days of Thy sunshine, nor unleash a whirlwind in it, when bulls and goats, the “wild beasts” of Jerusalem were baying Thee. Thou didst suffer under the responsibility of this office, this being set as a fall and a rising again of many. And never in Thy office didst Thou act arbitrarily. That simply was no part of Thee. Hence Thou didst hold Thy peace, in order that Thou mightest speak at the proper time. Neither by Thy speaking, nor by Thy silence, neither by a false exegesis, nor by an untimely explanation, neither by placing text and exegesis over against each other, nor by wrenching text and exegesis apart, didst Thou, my Saviour, place the rock of offence in the way. Thou wast the rock; that was enough for Thee to endure. In this, O Saviour, Thou didst find grace with God and the angels. They may not praise Thee to Thy face, but, surely, God keeps a memorandum book. Canst Thou suppose that it would not be written there above that Thou, although surrounded with stumbling-blocks on every hand, didst not once inadvertently kick one with Thy foot in the direction of the president’s chair of Caiaphas, or of any of the seventy chairs standing in the court? Thou didst do justice to Thy judges. And by doing justice to them, Thou didst also condemn them. For, now, the maschil tells them: If you wish to explain time in terms of time, and if you wish to analyze Jesus’ words without any reference to Him who spoke them, you must walk in the flames of fire which you yourselves have kindled. The maschil is an expression of the great art of the prophet of heaven. He lets us feel the impotence of all speech which is cut loose from revelation. And he who would not enjoy the benefit of this thing by going with his unwholesome life to the Physician of his life, will be left to shift for himself. Every maschil ever pronounced announces to the meek who cannot escape from its entanglement: “Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of His servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.” Thus also every maschil that was ever spoken proclaims to those who prefer to assert themselves, even when they are caught in the coils of the maschil: “Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand; ye shall lie down in sorrow.” Today it is the second of these judgments by the silent Christ which accrues to the Sanhedrin. He lets the maschil lie just where men would have it be: that is, in the vicious circle of a “worldly” speech, which refuses healing from above. Salvation will wipe away all tears that are wept for the sake of the maschil, and will answer all questions. But an unsolved maschil is the beginning of the judgment. And this was the judgment which the silent Christ pronounced upon the Jews.
If we retrace our steps now, we will see that Jesus’ silence at this particular moment is an act of justice to Himself also. Accept for a moment that Christ without any further ado had stated exactly what He meant about His maschil, about his temple which they could break down and see restored again within three days. Then He Himself would have lured[1] the people to overrun the place where He is to be buried later, in order to see what would become of this fortune-teller. If Jesus Himself, standing before the Sanhedrin, had emphatically said: “Ye must bury me, and within three days I will arise again,” then . . .
[1]
Yes, what then?
Then the Prophet Christ would have identified Himself with the fakir who also lets the wonder run amuck in the slough of his self-ostentation. He would have identified Himself with the oriental figure, who plays with his body and with himself not by way of causing the wonders to contribute to salvation, but by way of garnering praise for Himself. If Christ had lifted the heavy burden of complete responsibility from the shoulders of the Sanhedrin, and if He had placed the advent of His resurrection-life, coming as it did through a predestined death, in a sphere in which it is possible to look at the miracle without being involved in it, Christ would have profaned the majesty of prophecy, and would have exchanged it for the empty ostentation of a clever magician. And He would have made Himself intolerable in the eyes of God. For He must accept death from God’s hand, He must accept the personal breaking down of the temple from God’s hand, but He emphatically may not accept it from the hands of men. By virtue of the secret will, we must say to God: Feel free to break down the temple of my flesh. But it is the revealed will which He must minister to His people: never, not in all eternity, break down the temple of my flesh; it will be your condemnation, if you do so. That is why He may not by an untimely disclosure of the meaning of the maschil lead the rulers of His people astray, invite them to a sacrificium obedientiae, to a joyous sacrificial feast, at which the heavy burdens of complete and infinite responsibility are cast into the fire—inasmuch as He would have given permission to His strange funeral feast. No, no, He cannot do that. The “burden of the Lord” has a place here. If Christ had lightened that burden by calling attention away from the revealed will and to the hidden will, He, who had to be the greater than Moses, would have fostered fellowship and would have mingled with the Egyptian sorcerers who opposed Moses. Then Christ would have been the third, or really the great first, in that unholy coalition of Jannes and Jambres, who opposed Moses and the truth (2Ti 3:8). Then it would have been by His fault that Jerusalem became an “Egypt” (Rev 11:8). Then Golgotha, that holy place of judgment and necessity, would have been degraded to a fine occasion for a game, to an invitation to an interesting experiment in the laboratory of Satan and of God. Then the resurrection of Christ would not have represented the breaking of the New Testament Sabbath through the shadows of Israel. But then, at about the time when God would cause the clock of His New Testament Sabbath to strike, a multitude of curiosity-seekers would have poured in the direction of Jesus’ grave in order to see whether the fakir could actually arise from the dead. Then God’s holy Sabbath joy would immediately have become contaminated by the profanum vulgus} which, in that case, would have been invited by Jesus’ own word. Cross and resurrection would then have constituted an examination, instead of a judgment. These would then have been presented in Christ’s own announcement as a fencing bout between Spirit and Beast, between death and life. But we may not climb the hill of death to feast on a spectacle; we may climb it only to place ourselves under the judgment. Had Christ explained the maschil without demanding faith, the scornful cry, “Let us see whether Elias will come down,” would have issued in that other cry, “Let us see whether the angels will come in their fiery chariot to get Him.” And such mockery would then to a small extent have become Christ’s own responsibility. Also for Him—an untimely exegesis of the maschil can harm Him for all eternity. If He Himself takes judgment, if He takes the tension of the sermon on the mount out of His trial, then He will Himself rob His work of its strength, and will perish with us. One docs not play with God’s lightnings; Christ may not forget that.
God be praised: He could not forget that. Consequently we see Christ busy in the struggle for the maintenance of the sacredness of God’s house. He leaves the maschil as it is, unexplained. By doing that He convinces the children of darkness of an obligation to go to no one else with all their honest questions save to Jesus Himself. But that is not all He does. He also sees to it that the redemptive facts which God is now making ready, remain holy and undefiled. For Christ is at this time striding through all the world in order to release the forces of law and gospel. The great redemptive event is about to be born of an accursed death and of a blessed resurrection of Christ from the dead. Now it is a great joy to us to know that Christ’s silence before Caiaphas and before the Sanhedrin left the maschil just what it was—a maschil. No recklessly spoken, untimely word relieved the tension of the events of the day of the Lord. The praise of folly is never sung in Christ’s discourses. The gospel never offers itself as an experiment. Jesus Christ maintains to the extent that is possible for Him the character of the great mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, and believed on in the world (1Ti 3:16). In virtue of the essence of this mystery, His resurrection, the restoration of the temple of His body, will have to remain a mystery, to be revealed only by the intransigent Word. It will never prostitute its chaste holiness before the eyes of a people which would like to see the last great stunt of the magician of Nazareth. Even though that resurrection will be a wonder of world-perturbing might, still—no, therefore—it will not be prostituted before the eyes of those who have gone out to see a magician. The miracle comes to the world with authority: it asks acknowledgment solely through the preached word. The miracle is never a piece of evidence which God is giving man as an “argument” in a peace conference between God and worldly unbelief.
Again, therefore, we see the great gulf which is fixed between canonical and apocryphal gospel. We have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the Apocryphal Gospel lets an avid Jesus perform His miracles simply for the sake of ostentation.[1] In it the miracle is but a sensational something to which every redemptive purpose is alien; it is a miracle without holiness, and without necessity, a miracle which is sheer play and in no sense represents awful seriousness. Indeed, if Christ had presented the wonder of His most astounding restoration of the temple as a piece of sensationalism, He would have been quite in line with the apocryphal emphasis.
O sublime trust, O goal-conscious Christ. At the beginning of Thy ministration of office Thou didst turn Satan back when He suggested that Thou perform a breath-taking miracle in front of the temple.[3] And again at this time thou dost regard the temple court as being altogether too holy for a miracle which would astonish externally but convert no one.
[3] Leaping from the pinnacle of the temple. The silence of Christ is as reasonable as the canonical Gospel. It is as serene as the dew on a clear morning. It vindicates the canon of absolute authority over against apocryphal Jewish presumptions, first of all, presumptions which regarded the Messiah as a breath-taking wonder-worker, and over against those piteous fireworks, next, which an unbelieving world is eager to set off when it proceeds to explain the Messiah in its own way. And it also vindicates the absolute authority of the canonical Gospel over against my sins, O my Lord and my God.
Feel free to break the temple down now. For a temple it is indeed. Yes, and more than a temple is here, for God is dwelling in this Christ. God and the Spirit are dwelling in Him, and entirely without restraint. This is the Holy of Holies; this is the temple in its fulfillment. And, just as the ancient temple had once been built without the distracting sounds of hammer and saw—inasmuch as it was to be God’s house—so Christ will presently restore the temple of the body without the profane accompanying noises of the mob, and without inviting the profanum vulgus to come and defile His holiness. In other words, the conclusion of the matter is that Christ by maintaining His maschil rescued the redemptive event as such and kept the holiness of God from becoming profane. This was the great demonstration of His active obedience; this He did by a silence greatly and highly to be prized. That is the first conclusion: active obedience. This obedience exercises its authority. By maintaining silence, Christ kept His judges from deriving an official phrasing of their sentence from His maschil. It is remarkable that Christ’s words about breaking down the temple and restoring it again do occasionally occur in the haranguing of the crowd, and in the mockery which periodically came to the fore during the course of the trial, but are not used in the official sentence of the Sanhedrin. This is Christ’s own achievement. He compelled His judges to return to the main issue, and to return to the main message which, quite uncamouflaged, and with no hint at all of the veil of the maschil, would soon be repeated in the form of the testimony that He was indeed the Messiah, the Son of the living God.
Now that we have seen the active obedience of Christ at work in His silence, we may speak of the passive side of His obedience. Again we look upon the Man of sorrows who stands mute and dumb as He gives Himself up to death, Alas, it had been determined that He should make the riddle about the destruction and restoration of the temple true in actual experience. He had to explain the statement not by an untimely, ostentatious word, but by a bloody event coming at just the right time.
Thus He is to be punished for that which is not His own sin. Now He must actualize His confident utterance about the destruction and restoration, of the temple by letting His body be broken and by building it up again from death itself. In this we worship Christ’s passive obedience.
Silence, silence . . . in this we bow before the will of the Father. Silence, silence . . . He scorned to speak when speaking could have hindered His death or made it prosaic. And He scorned to hold His peace when it was a matter of confessing His Messiahship. In speaking and in silence, therefore, He is obedient to His death,
Such silence is a resignation to God. He stands, as a sheep dumb before his shearers. Now He is the greater than Aaron who, although afflicted for no sin of His own, acquiesces in the will of God, and lets Himself be led where justice must lead Him. Now He is the silent prophet who proclaims aloud the atrocity of sin, the holiness of justice, and the adequacy of the messianic self-revelation: I am He. Now He is the silent King who calmly announces, “He who does not understand me even now, He who has not appreciated the sense of the maschil even now, need not reach out His hand to me.” And now He is also the silent Priest who obediently goes upon the way of the cross. In the presence of the Sanhedrin Christ was tempted. His own riddle was being used against Him; and great was the temptation to free Himself from the terrible death by a single word. One untimely word, and the very concept of His death would be transformed into the dazzling glory of a miracle, of a miracle so splendid that there would be nothing of humiliation in it. This was a temptation just as severe and exacting as the proof to which He was put on the mount of transfiguration. On that mountain also the great question had arisen whether Christ by a premature speaking or an untimely silence would depart from the way of the perfect ministration of office. In this temptation Christ triumphed completely. Moreover, this triumph adds a new terror to the cross. No, this does not mean that Christ could prove terrible only in His silence, for His silence is precisely the way by which He arrives at the important utterance later: I adjure thee that I am the Messiah. No, that which adds a new terror to the cross is not solely that the maschil is still unsolved, but is owing also to a clarity, to an eloquent and convincing potency of a Messiah who reveals Himself. Jesus held His peace because He had said enough. Presently a superscription will be hung over His martyred head bearing the words I.N.R.I., Jesus the Nazarene, the king of the Jews. That is the “title” which Pilate will give Him. The Jews will petition for a different “title,” for another superscription. As a matter of fact, everyone will conceive of his own personal title for the crucified Christ. But above any title which the fiendish hatred of our flesh will conceive for the cross, the calmly accusing finger of the unexplained maschil will always arise.
Jesus leaves the judgment hall. They let Him go, and every one knows that in reference to this man they still have an unexplained riddle. The maschil has not been satisfactorily accounted for yet. The test has not been ascertained, and the explanation has not been given. If only there were a grain of truth in the teaching of the person who says that a man can keep from revealing himself in his public utterances, we could safely say that Caiaphas’ statement, “What need have we of further witnesses?” is virtually a betrayal of the secret sense he has that the Nazarene is not being dealt with justly, and that the unexplained maschil is detracting perceptibly from the judge’s self-confidence. But do not condemn Caiaphas. Confess instead that Christ’s death in the cloud of an unexplained maschil places a huge question mark over the cross on which you and I, by which you and I because of our sin hanged Him. Every sentence which the flesh pronounces upon Jesus contains within itself an unsolved riddle, and the consciousness of that. Let us watch, therefore, and fear, now that Christ has taken His secret with Him to the grave, obstinate from the viewpoint of men, patient from the viewpoint of God. He takes His maschil with Him to the grave now. Now the riddle of Christ becomes a command:
If you His saving voice have heard,
In faith accept His precious word —
Dare not rebel, but follow where He leads. For Christ Jesus is the temple of God. Every temple has its mysteries. The maschil is His mystery. But the temple of God does not live by the grace of its own dark corner. Light falls upon it from above, light issues from the sides, light comes from within, and there is such abundance of light that even the foolish need not go astray. And as the light falls upon Him, a voice can be heard, saying: This is He, this is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. For in this great temple of God, which is broken down now, and will quickly be built up again, the question (which remains after the maschil) is not the obstacle which stands in the way of the answer, but the preliminary and recurring divine answer is the incitement of a thousand new questions on the part of those blessed souls who throughout eternity will call: Thou art He; Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God; and because Thou art that, Thou must become that more and more manifestly; and because we know that, we want to investigate it eternally. Thou hast explained Thyself, and hast explained God. Explain Thyself further, therefore, and explain God further. Explain Thyself and Thy God throughout all eternity.
Thereupon my Jesus will never again hold His peace. His silence was the way by which He earned the right to speak eternally. His silence moved His Father’s pen; the Father wrote and wrote again as silent angels watched.
He wrote of Jesus saying that He would give Him all speech in heaven and on earth, now that He had learned obedience from that which He had suffered, and speech from the silence He had kept.