Part 5: The Arrest

It is great to see you here today. My name is Valerie. I'm one of the pastors on staff here at Twin Lakes Church, and whether you are with us right in this room or over in our venue service or maybe you're watching on Facebook live this morning or you're listening in any one of the myriad ways one can listen to a sermon nowadays, I am glad you chose to spend some time with us.

Light in the darkness, that is what we are calling our series in the 40 days leading up to Easter, and we are basically taking a very slow walk through the last week of Jesus's life as it's recorded in the Gospel of Mark. Today, everybody's favorite topic: failure. Yay! We get to talk about failure today, and we're actually—it's not even just failure out there—we're actually gonna talk about personal failure.

In getting ready for this sermon this week, I looked online at all these epic fail videos they have where people are trying to do something and it just completely comes undone. I think we like those videos because it's somebody else being stupid, and we feel pretty smart when we look at those videos. But then I thought, why would I show some video from YouTube when I have a life that is so chock full of examples of failure that I could share with you?

Like the first time that I went to steal something. Yes, as your pastor, I'm telling you there was more than one time. I was a very little girl—in my defense. I was at the grocery store, and my mother—I had just decided that my mom telling me no was not gonna be the final word in my life. I desperately wanted something, and so when she was looking the other way, I went to what I desperately wanted and I grabbed the jar of pickles right off the shelf because that's what I desperately wanted. I put the pickles under my shirt as if my mother was not going to notice the sudden growth under my shirt.

But I didn't quite get gravity yet. I was young, and so I started to slowly walk away, and of course the pickles went out of my shirt, crashed onto the ground onto the floor. Pickle stealing failure—not to mention stealing, which is always a failure. Kids, hear me: stealing is always a failure.

Or the second attempt—my second robbery attempt. I was a few years older, and I had learned a few things, and so I went by myself this time to the corner market and I eyed a candy bar because I had learned to go smaller. Valerie, go smaller! So I eyed this candy bar, walked out the door with it, but once I got out that door, like total panic and fear and guilt ensued. I hopped on my purple Schwinn bike with the flowered banana seat and I rode like the wind towards my house.

I was so close to my house. I was in the last corner, and I was taking the last corner, spun out on the gravel on my bike, fell, cut my knee. I literally have the scar to this day still on my knee. The candy bar goes flying, neighbors come out, parents follow, and let's just say I was not raised in the current era of calm discussion with your children about why did you make that choice. There were consequences, folks. That was really my last main robbery attempt that I did, but it was a failure—a personal failure, a stealing failure. I knew better than that.

I mean, I could go on. I'm only up to age seven honestly right now, but some of the fails that run through my mind on this loop that I play aren't as funny as those failures in hindsight. Like the time that I was studying to take my final exam for my master's degree in history, and I failed. Now, I passed the exam the second time, but that failure—that first failure—really stung, and it was embarrassing.

Or take any one of those zillion times that I have lost my temper and I have just let every word that's on my mind and in my dark heart come right out my mouth. I mean, honestly, the times I've lost my temper and misused my words could be this loop all of its own. But I think every one of us has this fail loop, this memory loop that runs through our mind, and it's just highlighting all the things we've done wrong—thing after thing after thing—and it pops up in the least expected moment.

Suddenly you're in the dark or you're alone in the car, and all of a sudden this loop of all the things you've done wrong just starts to haunt you—all your failures running through your mind. Again, some of them in hindsight you kind of chuckle and go, "Huh, youth!" But some of them you still have scars. You might have physical scars, you might have heart scars, you might have failures that were just your own stupid choices, or you might have failures that were foisted on you by somebody else's stupid choices, and it caused you to fail too, and they just make you miserable.

I know I'm not alone in this room today, and I'm grateful for that. Every one of us has our failures. Every one of us has those things that haunt us, and I honestly believe that today as we look at this passage, I think we can find ourselves in this story today because this is a story about three failures that we're gonna see in the Gospel of Mark.

We're picking up the events today where Jesus has just been in the garden of Gethsemane on his face, pleading with his father, "Please take this cup from me." We're gonna pick up the story in Mark 14. Go ahead and open up your Bibles to Mark 14 or open your Bible app, and I want to tell you first of all there's so many verses we're gonna cover today. I have, thanks, René, I have the most verses to cover of anybody so far in this series, so I'm not gonna be able to read them all.

But there's all kinds of things that happen. We have a mob scene, we have arrests, we have betrayals, we have a random naked guy running through this story that we're gonna get to eventually. There's all kinds of stuff going on, so I want to give you the arc of the story first, and then we're gonna dive down to life level and we're gonna talk about where we can find ourselves in this story today.

So again, Jesus has just stood up from his final prayer, the third time he's begged his father, "Please take this road of suffering from me," and God has said no. He gets up, he's a resolute Savior, and he walks up to his disciples, and they're all sleeping again. But Jesus knows, okay, this is my road. He has got his face set towards the cross. If I was using modern words, it's kind of like we've got the—it's on, Jesus! We're going! Let's go! Let's take this hill!

At that moment, it all starts to go sideways. As Jesus is talking to his disciples, one of his disciples that wasn't with him, Judas, walks up to Jesus, and even though it's dark, he knows who Jesus is. He comes up, looks Jesus straight in the eye, calls him by name, kisses him, and in doing that has betrayed him to this entire crowd that's with him. We don't know how large the crowd was that came with Judas, but we know it was a crowd, and they were armed. They were ready for a battle.

So the soldiers at this moment step in to arrest Jesus, and then it starts to get really chaotic because in that moment, one of the other disciples—in the book of John tells us it was Peter—takes out a sword and just starts swinging it. Remember, this is a fisherman swinging a sword, so it's not working out well, but he catches the ear of the high priest's servant, and all of a sudden it goes quiet.

Jesus talks, and he brings relative calm for a moment. And don't, by the way, worry about the high priest's servant because it does tell us in the Gospel of Luke that Jesus, in the middle of being arrested, did pause and heal the servant's ear, so he came out of it with two ears. But the chaos has happened. Jesus is arrested, and every one of the disciples—that tells us—every one of his followers fled and deserted him. Every one of them. Jesus is on his own.

If you're looking at this passage in your Bible, this is where you're starting to wonder, okay, what's going on? Here comes a random naked guy. So Mark, the author of this book, for reasons we don't know—we'll ask him in heaven—inserted this little detail here about one of Jesus' followers who was so desperate to get away that when the soldiers grabbed his cloak, he said, "You can have the cloak," and he just ran back to town naked. What in the world? Why is this here? Again, we don't exactly know why that's here. We don't even exactly know who this follower was. The strongest Christian tradition tells us that this is actually the author of the book Mark, that this is sort of the author's way of signing the canvas and saying, "I was here, and it wasn't pretty," but he was there.

So it doesn't honestly, at the end of the day, matter who it was. What this is is an exclamation point on this passage, letting us know everybody fled, and they wanted to get out of there so badly that they were willing to run back to town naked instead of get caught with Jesus. That's how desperate the scene is.

Then in the next scene, we see the arrest of Jesus standing before the Sanhedrin, the religious leaders of Israel. The Sanhedrin at this time functioned as the Supreme Court of Israel, and their word was literally law. But remember, at this time, Rome has moved in and sapped much of the Sanhedrin's power away from them, and so they're holding on to what little they have left, and they want to try Jesus. They want him gone.

The Sanhedrin had this tremendously—holy smokes—tremendously complex set of laws and rules that they were supposed to follow every time they tried somebody. But on this night, they stuck to almost none of them. The Gospel of Mark tells us that they did stick to one of their rules they tried to, and that was the one where they had to get two witnesses to agree in order to convict somebody. Mark describes almost a comedy of errors where the Sanhedrin could not get two people to agree on an accusation of Jesus.

Finally, Caiaphas, the high priest, takes matters into his own hands, and he just steps up, looks at Jesus, and asks him directly in verse 61, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?" In my mind's eye, as I see this play out, I picture Jesus looking Caiaphas straight in the eye and saying, "I am." Yes. And then he goes on to say, "And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the mighty one and coming on the clouds of heaven." Now, from where we're sitting today, this sounds poetic, probably, but it sounds innocuous—like, okay, well, I don't know why he said that. But for the Sanhedrin, these were fighting words.

What Jesus was doing in this verse is he is quoting from prophecies in Daniel 7 and Psalm 110. In Daniel 7, his vision is that at night he looked, and there before him was one like a son of man—which just means somebody who looks like a human—coming with the clouds of heaven. He was given authority, glory, sovereign power. All nations and all people of every language worshiped him. And Psalm 110 refers to the position the Messiah will have at the right hand, which is the place of honor.

So Jesus, in this statement, is not just saying, "I am a Messiah." He is saying, "I am the Messiah. I am the Messiah from God." Remember that we've talked about in the series—in the hundred or so years leading up to Jesus, there were lots of folks who would come along and claim to be a Messiah, but typically they were trying to be a political Messiah. "I'm gonna take us away from Rome." But Jesus is claiming to be the Messiah, and by quoting these prophecies, he would have been telling the Sanhedrin in a language they understood, "I am the Messiah from God." And that is all the blasphemy the Sanhedrin needed to hear. They are absolutely enraged at this point.

The high priest Caiaphas is so overwrought and overcome that he just tears his clothes—so another naked person in this story now tears his clothes—in horror at what Jesus has said. Then the situation unhinges from there. It just unhinges, and these religious leaders begin to beat and begin to mock Jesus, and they have all they need to move Jesus on to the next trial—the Roman trial—and ultimately the trial where Jesus is condemned to death.

What an intense few hours for Jesus! From flat on his face pleading literally for his life with his father to being betrayed, arrested, convicted, mocked, beaten. From the relative safety and comfort of 2,000 years later, it's pretty easy for us to look back and go, "Boy, those guys blew it. Good thing I'm not like Judas. Good thing I'm not like the disciples. Good thing I'm not like those religious leaders. Whoo! How in the world could they let it devolve into that kind of situation? They really failed."

Well, take a look at the verse that I put there in your notes. I think this gives us some insight into what was going on that night, and it's actually a verse from Proverbs 14:12 where it says, "There is a way that appears to be right to somebody, but in the end, it leads to death." I honestly believe that these three groups that we see in this passage really thought they were doing something right. They didn't set out to have an epic fail. I think they all saw a situation that wasn't going as they wanted it to, and so they were trying to set something wrong to right.

We do that all the time in life, and we think, "Oh, this is absolutely the right path. This is the way to go. Yeah, sure, I may have to manipulate this situation a little or control this or kind of pull these people over the direction I want, but it's the right way. It feels right. It looks right. Look at all the people on this path. It must be right." But the end leads to death—failure. Now, not literally death usually, but it can lead to relational death, it can lead to spiritual death, it can lead to emotional death.

So let's look at these failures again, and let's find ourselves in this story because I think we're there, and I think we can learn something today from these folks. So again, we're in Mark 14, and the first person I want to look at is Judas. Let's look at Judas, and his failure is probably easy for us to spot, but I think it's a failure that's rooted in disappointment. I think Judas's failure was rooted in disappointment. You might want to write that down in your notes.

Again, starting in verse 43, there we see that Judas, one of the twelve, appeared with a crowd that was armed. This has always struck me because I think, when did Judas ever see Jesus with a weapon? But he brings a crowd, and it's an armed crowd, and he is so coordinated that it says in verse 44 that he had arranged a signal: "The one I kiss is the man; arrest him." He walks up to Jesus and he betrays him with the kiss of death. Amazing! Three years, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Judas has been hanging out with Jesus. Judas has seen the miracles. Think of this: Judas personally collected a basket of leftovers at the feeding of the 5,000. What an epic level of disappointment he must have been experiencing.

We learn from other passages in the Bible that Judas really seems to have wanted a political Messiah, and I think when he first hitched his wagon to Jesus, he thought that's where this is headed. "I'm gonna get my political Messiah. I am gonna get saving from Rome. I am gonna be one of the key guys. I'm gonna get power. I'm gonna have authority." We also know from other verses that Judas was stealing. He was stealing from the treasury. He wanted money, and I think when he started to realize Jesus isn't gonna be that Messiah, the disappointment just overwhelmed him to the point that he was willing to hand his Savior over to people he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt wanted him dead.

I've been like Judas. There are times in my life I have been so disappointed with the plan that God has that seems to be happening, and I thought, "God, what are you up to right now? I thought we had agreed on a path." You know, I can go merrily along when I think God and I are on the same page, but when he goes rogue and starts acting like God, then I panic, and I get disappointed, thinking, "What have you done? What are you doing?" I can think I'm so right, and in those moments, I end up making decisions that ultimately lead to failure.

Or what about the disciples, and Peter represented by Peter in this? I think in them we see that they have a failure that's rooted in fear—a failure that's rooted in fear. It says again we see them just acting crazy once Jesus is arrested. In verse 46, Peter just starts flailing around with a sword, trying to do anything to stop this, probably also trying to protect himself in this moment. Then in verse 50, it says, "Then everyone deserted him and fled." I see myself in Peter in so many ways. It's sad but true, especially in here because when I sense things are not going according to plan, I am usually the first one to step in, take out my sword, and start metaphorically chopping off ears, trying to get everything back on plan.

This part of the story honestly has been something that God has used in my life for years to remind me about a bad habit I have. I have notes in my Bible from when I was in my 20s reading this story, struggling with wanting control, wanting things to go my way. I really like things to feel under control, and if I'm honest, I really like them to feel under my control. I think that's even better. But that leads me to all kinds of failure decisions because when I think things need to be in my control, I step into places I don't belong. I step in trying to help a friend take them off a path maybe that Jesus wants them to go down because they're gonna learn something, but I'm like, "No, I don't like this way," and I start chopping off ears or trying to protect a loved one or trying to protect something I think should be this way. But I think I know better, and so I start working the circumstances to work my plan, and I make all kinds of failure decisions from that place.

And it's fear. It's a fear that God will not be as powerful in that moment as I need him to be, or it's a fear that God is not as all-knowing and all-loving as I need him to be. I think this is where Peter is in this moment. Peter loves Jesus. Peter loves Jesus, but things are clearly going sideways here. You know, Jesus had told them repeatedly, "I am going to die. I am going to die." Peter knew that. Peter had seen Jesus's true glory at the Mount of Transfiguration. Peter had walked on water with Jesus with his own mouth. Peter had declared of Jesus that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God. But in this moment, Peter thought he knew better. He was afraid, and his fear took over. He reacted to what he saw, he panicked, and he failed in that moment.

Now we're gonna keep on Peter's story a little bit even next week. Poor Peter! This is chapter 1 of Peter's failure on this night. Unfortunately, we've got chapter 2 for him too. But next up in this passage today are the religious leaders, the Sanhedrin. Now again, before we go into some of the Sanhedrin's failure, I just want to remind you that it's easy—it can be easy for us—and historically, Christianity has tried to lay all that's about to happen to Jesus at the foot of the Jewish people, but that's not fair, and that's not right because this was a group effort. It wasn't just the Jewish leaders that led to the cross; it was all of us. Remember this Venn diagram that we used a few weeks ago? Three different groups of people who did not like each other, did not trust each other, and had different agendas actually had to come together in order for Jesus to die. So this is on all of us. It's on all of us.

But in this passage today, there's a specific failure that we see with the religious leaders, and I think it was a failure that's rooted in clinging—a failure that's rooted in clinging. These people were holding on to the past. They were holding on to power. They were holding on to the last shreds of what they had. They're protecting what they have left. You know, the first-century Sanhedrin were actually pretty notable for their corruption. Jewish literature talks about how corrupt this group of people were. The high priest at this time—and the high priest, this wonderful position of high priest—was so corrupt at this time that the guy that was supposed to stand between the nation of Israel and God, that position was being put into place by Roman leaders at this time. So the Romans were deciding who the high priest was.

In other words, this has become all about influence and nothing about priestly qualifications. This high priest that we see here, Caiaphas, is protecting. He's protecting his power. He's protecting what he thinks is right, but he's clinging. He's holding on. We all know that very few good decisions are made by clinging. Very few good decisions are made when our fists are closed tight and we're holding on to something we need as opposed to having our hands open to God.

You may be clinging today. You may be clinging to something even that's good. Maybe you're clinging to a dream that you have for your life or something you hope for your children. There's nothing wrong with that, but we're clinging with our fists closed as opposed to living with our hands open to what God wants to do in our lives—clinging instead of trusting. Like I said, this isn't about the other; we're all in this story. I think that a lot of times when we make failure decisions, it's for some of the exact same reasons that these people made their failure decisions back then.

You know, I'm not gonna leave us in this spot because right now if I sent you home, it'd be like, "Oh great, Val, thanks! We're all failures! Whoo-hoo! Go home and have a carpos and have lunch!" You know, that's no good. I don't want to leave you there. But before we turn the corner and talk about the hope and talk about the big idea, I want to introduce you to someone who is willing to share with us today about a portion of the fail loop that goes through his mind. Later this afternoon, actually in a couple hours, Clay and René Cross are gonna be presenting at our marriage seminar, but I wanted all of us to hear part of Clay's story, and this honesty will encourage us also to find ourselves in this story.

So let's welcome Clay to the stage.

Well, good morning, TLC family! It's great to be here. It really is! Y'all excited about today? About being here? I'm just—I've been so thrilled about this opportunity. I love your senior pastor. I love René. I've come to know him over the past few summers out at Cannon Beach Conference Center in Cannon Beach, Oregon. I was leading worship out there for several of those weeks that he was the teacher there that week, and just—I don't need to tell you, he's amazing, and I love him so much. This was just a thrill when he invited my wife, René, and I here to share our story this afternoon at the conference.

You may see me run up these stairs and wonder, "Why would someone be so enthusiastic to run up those stairs and talk about his failure?" Well, I run up because of what God has done, because it's a story of a win. It's a story of victory. Just hearing Valerie talk about bridging that gap between something that could be looked at as ancient stories, ancient scriptures, to how they apply to us today and to truly look at what Jesus did on that cross and realize that we were certainly a part of that—it's very powerful.

I only have to look back 20 years ago to 1998 to where I felt that so strongly in my life that I was a part of that when he was crucified. My sin was certainly a part of that. In 1998, I realized that pornography was a problem in my life and something that I had to confess to God and say, "Lord, I need strength in this area. I need to overcome this." He was telling me clearly that I was going to be destroyed if I didn't deal with this issue. I went to my wife, René, and shared with her, and that was a difficult conversation to have to share with her that I wanted to change and that I was begging for her forgiveness.

Over that year, it was a year of rebuilding trust and her forgiving me, and we stand here 20 years later and just say, "Look what God has done! Look how he's blessed us!" At the time, we had two daughters, and if I hadn't addressed that issue then, I would have been destroyed, and I would have eventually seen my daughters every other weekend. There would have been some arrangement as we would have been divorced and wouldn't have made it. Interestingly, there were two children born in China that eventually God showed us were to be in our home—our forever family, my little Sophie and my Garrett. They would have never come to their forever family had that not happened, had what God did not happen in the year 1998.

So what I'm trying to lay out here is how many blessings have come in our life since that tough moment, that confession, but then how God worked in our life and blessed us with those two more children from China, blessed my life in so many ways, calling me into local ministry, calling me away from being a performer and into truly being in the ministry. I can list blessing after blessing after blessing that he has given me since that tough moment. That's why I run up those stairs, because God has won, and he's done a great work in my life, and I'm joyful and proud and thankful to share that story.

I appreciate you guys having me here today. Again, you can hear more of Clay and René's story, and it's not just all focused and centered on this addiction; it's a lot about marriage and healing and all those things, and you can just show up this afternoon at 2 o'clock. You don't even need to sign up in advance. You can get a ticket at the door, and I encourage you to do that.

Now again, as we wrap up today, I actually did briefly consider just leaving us in the same spot that Judas, the disciples, Peter, and the religious leaders all were because remember, when they experienced this failure, they were hours away from a cross. They didn't know about the cross. They were just stuck in this hopelessness. But you know, I can't even wrap my mind around that because I know there's a cross, and I thought we've got to end where the hope is, and that's at the cross.

We've got to end where, as that wonderful old hymn says, "My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, oh my soul!" I don't want to end today. The big idea of today's sermon is not about your failures or my failures. The big idea today is about our Savior. It's about our Savior, and it's this: when you face life's crossroads, when you face life's failures, run to the cross.

You know, those of us in this room who've maybe been believers for a longer period of time, we can fall into this temptation of viewing the cross kind of at the moment of salvation, so we leave the cross over here when we got saved, and we forget that every single one of us are in desperate, daily, moment-by-moment need of the cross. And not just this object of a cross, but we are in need of the saving work that was done by Jesus Christ on that cross. We are in need of the power that we have at the crossroads of life because of the cross. We are in need of the relief from the guilt and the shame of our failures that we find because Jesus took our guilt and our shame and our failures on the cross for us.

And Peter, of all people—our sword-wielding, failing, fleeing Peter—tells all of us in his epistle to the church, 1 Peter 2, "He himself," referring to Jesus, "Jesus bore our sins. He took our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin," meaning that it doesn't control us anymore, "and live for righteousness. By his wounds, we have been healed." We have been healed.

And maybe you need to hear that today as you play that failure loop. You need to hear because of Jesus's work on the cross, you have been healed. And it goes on to say that, you know, we were like sheep going astray. We were just like the disciples exiting stage left in every direction we could find. But now you have returned to the shepherd, the caretaker, the overseer, the leader of your souls.

You know, the truth is that as long as we're here on this earth, we'll be haunted by the fail loop. Honestly, it's one of our enemy's best weapons and most effective tools for getting us to think about ourselves, for getting us to feel like we're no good, for getting us to make even worse decisions to fail because we feel like we have no hope. But we have hope because there's a new loop. It's not just the fail loop; it's the loop of the cross. It's the loop of what Jesus Christ has done for us on the cross.

You may be neck deep in a failure today. You may be neck deep in consequences from a failure today. You may be at a crossroads today. But no matter where you have been, where you are right now, or where you are going, please know this truth: that Jesus, the one who knew no sin, who knew no failure, became sin, became failure for you and for me that we might truly live. So run! Run to the cross.

Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we are so eternally grateful. Words cannot fully express the gratitude we have that you sent your son Jesus to bear our sins, to bear our failures, to bear all of it at the cross. Father, I pray for everyone in this room today. I pray, first of all, that you would minister to each person in a way that fits their need right now. God, that you would remind each person in this room that this is for them—that this is for them today—that yes, they may have their failures, but even greater yes, there is a Savior, and there is a Savior for them.

Lord, I pray that you would work in each one of us, especially as we go through this week, that you would remind us daily to run to the cross, to run to you, to find at the foot of the cross all we need for life and truly living. In Jesus' name, amen.