Personalities of the Passion Story: Caiaphas

February 8, 1989

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WHO WAS chiefly responsible for the Crucifixion, humanly speaking? Who was it on whom we can put the finger and say, There, he’s the one, he’s the chief culprit, he’s the person on whom we can lay the primary blame.... He’s the one we can hold accountable for that terrible, cruel act, that inhuman treatment of the kindest, most gracious person who ever walked on the face of the earth? IS THERE ANY ONE PERSON ABOUT WHOM WE CAN SAY THAT?

Well, it’s not quite that simple, is it? Pilate, of course, was responsible, in one sense. Pilate gave the order. He was the ranking Roman official on the scene, the military governor. Crucifixion was a Roman means of execution. No one else had the authority to put another person to death in Jerusalem that day. Pilate was officially responsible.

But Pilate didn’t really understand the dynamics of what was happening. All he wanted was peace and tranquility. He gave the order reluctantly, anyhow. He really wasn’t involved, or didn’t want to be, in those internal affairs of a subjugated people. He was a bureaucrat, a little man in a job too big for him, trying just to hold on until he could move to something else.

Well, you could say Judas was the one primarily responsible. He turned Jesus in. He was the betrayer. But Judas really was only the means of getting Jesus into the hands of His enemies. If they hadn’t done it through him, they would have found another way. You can’t call him the primarily responsible one.

You might argue that the disciples themselves were responsible. Certainly they played a role. Most of them ran away when the pressure mounted. Only Simon Peter didn’t flee entirely, and he denied ever knowing Jesus when he was confronted with the question.

You see, it was a whole web of circumstances that came together to bring about the crucifixion, on the human level. There is no one, single person you can lay the blame on entirely. That’s a part of the complexity, the sometimes-hideous convoluted nature of sin. It’s more than just the sum total of the deeds we do as individuals.

But there was one man, who more than any other, comes closest, it seems to me, to being the cause of Jesus’ death. Admittedly, he never touched Jesus himself, he never personally beat Jesus with the scourge, he never hammered a nail into the wood, In fact, he only talked to Him, so far as we know, just one, brief, dramatic moment, but if anybody could be so identified, he was the architect, the plotter, the brains, if you will, behind the crucifixion plot.

Caiaphas, the high priest, the man who had most to lose by letting this radical Carpenter

continue to live.     I see Caiaphas, I think, as the embodiment of the ecclesiastical functionary. I don’t mean it as a compliment. If Pilate was essentially a political bureaucrat, Caiaphas was a churchly bureaucrat. They had a lot in common...different backgrounds, different cultures, different languages, to be sure, they still communicated with a mutually shared understanding. They both had an institution to maintain.... They both were company men... One owed his loyalty to the state, the other to...well, not the Church, of course, but it’s essentially the same kind of thing...He owed it to the Faith, as a constituted, organic entity.

Caiaphas, unquestionably, was a competent man, a shrewd man, an experienced man, a man with a head on his shoulders, and his feet on the ground. You didn’t put much past Caiaphas. I’m sure his records were all in order. He was climber, a “comer” as they say, a “can do” type of ecclesiastic. You know the type. If he’d been pastor of a local church, all his apportionments would have been paid in full by November, and he would have made sure everyone knew it.

They say Caiaphas got his job because he was the son-in-law of the old man, Annas, the

former high priest, who was still around and still swung a lot of weight. It may be true, but the very fact that he had the acumen to marry the boss’s daughter says something important about his craftiness and probably about his penchant for planning ahead.

Both Annas and Caiaphas were Sadducees, as were all the high priests during that era. The Sadducees were the arch-conservatives, the status-quo people of Jewish society, the wealthy...at least most of them were... the established, the aristocrats, who held the purse strings, and weren’t much into social service programs.

For them the only authoritative Scripture was the Torah, and they denied any doctrine of the resurrection. In the society of that day, they were on the far right. The Sadducees had learned that the safest means of protecting their property, their status, and their self-interest was by cooperating with the officials of the conquering army. They could be vicious, but they weren’t stupid. By placating those officials, or bribing them when necessary, they could prevent most change from taking place. Even under the boot of the Romans they maintained their way of life with little disturbance.

We think of the Pharisees, sometimes, as the chief enemies of Jesus, but the Pharisees were actually much closer in spirit and principle to Jesus than the Sadducees were. That’s probably why Jesus was so hard on the Pharisees, precisely because they had so much in common, they were so close in many ways to the Kingdom. Indeed, some of His strongest supporters, like Nicodemus, were Pharisees.

The Pharisees argued with Jesus, often they opposed Jesus, but they would never have contrived to kill Him. Caiaphas represented, almost right down the line, the very opposite of everything Jesus stood for---- denial of any form of resurrection... “In my Father’s house are many mansions...” a preservation of the status quo... “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last...” putting rule and regulation ahead of need ... “man was not made for the sabbath the sabbath was made for man...” wealth and prestige.... “The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head....”

At almost every point, they stood in sharp contrast...the liberties Jesus took with interpreting the Law, His association with sinners, His championing of the poor His giving response to human need a higher priority than ritual observance... His confident self-identification with the Father’s will. When Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple, it was too much. That was their revenue, their income, That was BUSINESS, and when Jesus did that, He stepped over the line that tolerance could permit.

Henry Hitt Crane’s[1] famous line is pertinent: “They didn’t crucify Jesus because he said,

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they crucified him because he said, Consider the thieves of the Temple, how they steal.”

It was the reaction of vested self-interest that finally closed around Jesus and moved Him to the Cross....entrenched business interests, entrenched political interests, entrenched religious interests....and Caiaphas, more than any other, pulled the strings.

Institutions and organizations and systems are necessary. You have to have them, or you have chaos. Without these you have nothing that will endure beyond the moment.

But the trouble with institutions, organizations and systems, even good ones, is that it’s so easy for them to become inhuman, to lose the personal touch. It can happen in the Church, when the individual gets lost in the structure. What was designed as a means of serving the person takes on a life of itself. Finally, it begins to feed on what it was intended to minister to.

I really don’t doubt the basic sincerity of Caiaphas. After all, he had machinery to operate....a huge engine to oil. When he said, “It is better for one to die than that the people die”, that makes a kind of sense. You can’t blame him entirely, but his story is something to think about during Lent.....

The tragedy of Caiaphas, on a larger, more far-reaching scale, is the tragedy of many of us in the Church, the tragedy of putting the institution ahead of the institution’s purpose. Jesus never forgot that people take precedence over principle, or structure, just as God takes precedence over everything. Caiaphas got it backward, and so contrived to kill the embodiment of the noblest hope of his people. Let us pray it will not happen to us.

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[1] Dr. Henry Hitt Crane (1890-1977) was one of the most influential American Methodist ministers of the 20^th century, serving Central Methodist in Detroit from 1938 until retiring in 1958. A nationally recognized leader in the peace, civil rights, and labor rights movements.