Good Coming out of Evil as Prophesized by Caiaphas and as by Jesus: Reflected in Ezekiel’s Post-Exilic Prophetic Vision – Saturday of the Fifth Week of lent

 Remember how we started Lent on Ash Wednesday? Remember the Word of God to start Lent on that day?

Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning (Joel 2:12).

Returning to God is a running theme throughout Lent. Now, we are about to enter the very last week of Lent – Holy Week, as Palm Sunday is tomorrow.

In today’s Scripture Readings (Ezekiel 37:21-28; John 11:45-56), we can decipher a theme of returning to God. It is not that we struggle to find a way to return to God but through God’s providence that we return to Him. And, we recognize in the Gospel Reading (John 11:45-56) that it is through Jesus that we return to God. We also understand that the Passion and death, which Jesus is about to enter, as reflected during the Holy Week, is for this reason. God wants to bring everyone of His children back to Him at the expenses of His Son.

As it is the Saturday before Palm Sunday, today’s Gospel Reading (John 11:45-56), which describes how the seventh sign that Jesus performed (John 11:17-44) prompted the religious authority council, Sanhedrin, to firmly determine to kill Jesus (John 11:53). What is very important in this Gospel reading is the words of Caiaphas, the high priest of that year: It is better that Jesus alone dies rather than letting the whole Jewish nation perish by the hands of the Romans (John 11:50) to give a justification to the Sanhedrin’s decision to have Jesus killed.

According to John, what Caiaphas said of Jesus to die to save the Jewish nation implies not just to preserve the Jewish nation but to bring back diaspora Israelites scattered across the Greco-Roman world (John 11:51-52). And, this can be imaged as reflected in today’s First Reading (Ezekiel 37:21-28) – scattered diaspora Israelites brought back to reunited kingdom of Israel, which had been divided since the death of Solomon because of his sin, as Ahijah prophesized to Jeroboam (1 Kings 11:30-39), after the Babylonian exile.

Perhaps, Caiaphas’ intention to let Jesus be the scapegoat offered to the Romans to save the Jewish nation from their hands so that fellow Israelites in diaspora can return to be reunited as one nation rather in a geopolitical sense. However, it was more of what Jesus implied in saying, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself”(John 12:32).

For Jesus to bring all scattered people – as the Good Shepherd to bring the sheep scattered by false shepherds (John 10:12-13; cf. Zechariah 11:4-14) into his fold –he has to lay his life first (John 10:11, 15, 18). So, his body will be lifted up on the Cross, as the serpent on Moses’ pole was lifted, for eternal life to us (John 3:14), implying that we, as God’s sheep under his shepherding care, are to be gathered as one for eternal life.

It has become so certain that the religious authority will arrest and have Jesus killed by the hands of the Romans, as so determined by the Sanhedrin. And Caiaphas justified this as to save the Jewish nation from the hands of the Romans. But, unbeknownst to this high priest and the rest of the Sanhedrin members was that it was alluded to what Jesus said in John 12:32- how the risen Jesus will gather scattered believers to form the Church upon Pentecost as the pretext to the Kingdom on earth as it in heaven. It is the Kingdom, where he reigns as the King of the Universe.

Return of the God’s sheep upon the Good Shepherd being lifted up first on the Cross, then through his death as a grain of wheat to bring greater harvest, lifted up again to resurrect, lifted up again to ascend to bring the Holy Spirit (John 16:7) to form the gathered sheep into his Church to bring more sheep in (John 10:16).

Now, this is how the accusation against Jesus for healing a paralytic man on Sabbath (John 5:1-9), as the third sign, evolved in, through his accuser’s arguments with Jesus in Jerusalem, as written in John 5, 7-11, before Jesus enters in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to consummate his mission on the Cross.

Though the evil power of the Sanhedrin is about to have Jesus killed to make a political compromise with the Romans for the sake of the nation of Israel and for the diaspora to have the nation to return, as Caiaphas justified this decision, Jesus knew he was to be killed to bring the scattered sheep back to his fold, as in an image of Ezekiel 37:21-28, and as he himself said in John 12:32, to establish his Church upon Pentecost so that more sheep can be brought in.

Yes, God makes good out of human evil. And the goodness that God makes out of human evil wins. And this is also implicated in what Paul describes as the paradox of the Cross (1 Corinthians 1:18-25).