Many of the people who had come to visit Mary
saw what Jesus did and they believed in him. But some of them returned to the
Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.
So the Pharisees and the chief priests met with the Council and said,
“What shall we do? Look at all the miracles this man is performing! If we let
him go on in this way, everyone will believe in him, and the Roman authorities
will take action and destroy our Temple and our nation.”
One of them, named Caiaphas, who
was High Priest that year, said, “What fools you are! Don’t you realize that it
is better for you to let one man die for the people, instead of having the
whole nation destroyed?” Actually, he did not say this of his own accord;
rather, as he was High Priest that year, he was prophesying that Jesus was
going to die for the Jewish people, and not only for them, but also to bring
together into one body all the scattered people of God.
From that day on the Jewish authorities made
plan to kill Jesus. So Jesus did not
travel openly in Judea, but left and went to a place near the desert, to a town
named Ephraim, where he stayed with the disciples.
The time for the Passover Festival was near,
and many people went up from the country to Jerusalem to perform the ritual of
purification before the festival. They
were looking for Jesus, and as they gathered in the Temple, they asked one
another, “What do you think?” Surely he will not come to the festival, will he?
The chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where
Jesus was, he must report it, so that they could arrest him.
