THE CONSPIRACY TO KILL JESUS

Certain religious leaders are able of performing cruel acts with those who oppose them. Full of themselves and enchanted with their traditions they persecute and sometimes even destroy those who bother them with their straight lives. Jesus had to deal with this question from the beginning of his public ministry. He concentrated much of his activity in Galilee, deliberately keeping himself from Judea, for there the Jews sought to take his life (John 7: 1).

According to Mark, after Jesus had healed on one Sabbath a man who had one atrophied hand, "the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus” (3.1-6). It did not matter the goodness, grace, and power of God manifested in the miracle; for them it was important to keep the Sabbath. These same groups then appear plotting against Jesus in his last days (Mark 12.13). It so happens that the Pharisees were harsh enemies of the Herodians, for these were secular Jews who supported the family of Herod, who held power in Israel under the permission of Rome.

But these ideas of killing Jesus were not isolated initiatives of some Jews, who, for example, tried to stone him (John 8:59, 10.31). The Apostle John recorded that after Jesus resurrected Lazarus there was a meeting in the Sanhedrin, highest Jewish court, to address this matter. Someone said, "here is this man performing many signs. 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... So from that day on they plotted to take his life "(11: 45-54). Not only that of Jesus, but that of Lazarus also, trying to stifle the miracle (John 12: 9-11).

The concern with the temple and the nation is true according to John 11:48, but it is not mistaken to infer that there was in the speech of those authorities a concern for their own positions as religious leaders in Jewish society. Jesus drew crowds with his teaching and his miracles, and they feared the emptying of the religious structure they commanded. In one of his attempts to arrest Jesus, they sent him the temple guards, but they returned without Galileo and told the leaders: "No one ever spoke the way this man does" (John 7:46).

It is common knowledge that there are many religious leaders who can’t resist the temptations of fame, power, and wealth that their positions give them. According to scholars, temple worshipers were exploited by merchants who charged high prices for the animals used in the sacrifices and the money changers who practiced abusive fees, all under the approval of the priestly aristocracy, who profited at the expense of the pilgrims. Jesus, in one of his last acts of his preaching, entered into the temple and cast out all who were there buying and selling and accused them of having turned the temple into a "den of thieves." It was a strong blow to the morals of those religious who consolidated the idea of killing him.

Antônio Maia – M.Div.

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