Lenten Darkness

In Who Is This Man, John Ortberg explains the difficulty facing the religious leaders. In order to have Jesus executed they have to turn both the Jewish people and the Roman officials against Jesus. This requires some interesting maneuvering:

“The quickest way to get Pilate to crucify Jesus was to tell him that Jesus was a threat to Rome and Caesar. But if they told the crowds this, the crowds would rally to Jesus. So they had to come up with two charges. They ended up charging Jesus with blasphemy so the crowds would turn against him and with treason so Pilate would kill him.”

“Pilate cannot risk having Caesar think he is soft on anti-Rome terrorists, so he turns to Jesus and asks, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ It is an intensely dramatic moment. Jesus may still go free if he just says no.”

“Now, when there are no crowds around to rally to him, when he’s in the hands of Pilate, when there is no chance of an army rising to defend him, when there’s no chance of his being misinterpreted as a military figure—now when it’s too late for him to be saved, Jesus says, ‘Yes, yes, that’s me. It is as you say. I’m the one they’ve been waiting for. I am their king.”

How does Ortberg’s perspective add to your understanding of what is happening in the trials before the Sanhedrin and Pilate?