It's Him: Fixing Your Eyes on Jesus in the Middle of the Chaos
If you have ever seen a feeling wheel, you know it is a simple tool with a surprising amount of power. Name the emotion you are feeling, and suddenly you can do something with it. You can invite God into it. Pastor Annie is, by her own description, a pretty upbeat person. She carries joy and looks for the good in people. But she is also honest that she has spent time in what the feeling wheel calls the red category, those words like humiliated, betrayed, disrespected, furious, resentful, numb. Being human means feeling all of it.
This week Annie walked us through a passage that pulled her straight into the red category. Matthew 26:57-68 is the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, and it is hard to read without your stomach tightening. Jesus is falsely accused. He is mocked. He is spit on. There is a weight here that we are not supposed to rush past. And it leaves us with a question worth sitting with: when you are surrounded by injustice and darkness, where do you actually look?
The Most Corrupt Trial in History
Historians have called Jesus' trial before the Sanhedrin the most corrupt trial in all of human history, and the details back it up. This was not simply an unfair hearing. It was secretive, deceptive, and rigged from the start. The verdict had already been decided before a single witness opened their mouth. Evidence did not matter. Truth did not matter.
Look at how many lines were crossed. Jesus was dragged not to the Sanhedrin's normal meeting place but to the private home of Caiaphas, the high priest, under the cover of darkness. Jewish law forbade trials at night. It forbade trials on feast days. It required a capital case to reconvene the next day before a guilty verdict could stand, a safeguard against rash, emotional judgment. It required two eyewitnesses whose testimony actually agreed. Every one of those protections was ignored. The very men entrusted to uphold God's law were the ones twisting it, actively hunting for liars to condemn an innocent man.
This is the scene. Darkness, corruption, and evil on every side. And standing in the middle of all of it is Jesus. It is him.
The Silence of the Suffering Servant
Here is the part that is almost impossible to imagine. Through the false witnesses and the loaded questions, Jesus remained silent.
Be honest. That is not our instinct. Annie has three daughters, and she said that when one of them is falsely accused, three voices erupt at the same time: "She is lying." "That did not happen." "There is more to the story." That is how we are wired. When what is sacred to us gets threatened, we reach for the sword like Peter did in the garden just hours earlier. We defend, we argue, we set the record straight.
But our King said nothing. And his silence was not weakness. It was prophecy being fulfilled. Isaiah wrote it hundreds of years before: "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was like a lamb led to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth" (Isaiah 53:7). Jesus did not need to defend himself, because he knew exactly who he was and exactly what he came to do. Everything had already been settled with the Father in the garden. There was a stillness in him that the chaos could not touch.
Seated at the Right Hand of Power
Jesus speaks only one line in the entire passage, and it is worth slowing down on. When the high priest demanded that he swear whether he was the Christ, the Son of God, Jesus answered, "You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Matthew 26:64).
There is gold buried in that sentence. In the original language, "see" means to behold, to perceive, to know and experience. The "right hand" is the place of honor and authority. And the word "Power" is capitalized in many Bibles for a reason. The Greek word is dunamis, meaning force, might, miraculous power, strength. When it is capitalized like that, it is functioning as a name of God. Power, with a capital P.
Let that reframe how you pray. Would you pray differently if you really believed you were talking to a God whose name is Power? Would you ask for more if you knew that? In the middle of the darkest room in human history, Jesus was not cowering. He was standing in his full identity, full of authority and power, pointing his accusers to the day they would see him seated on the throne.
He Took It
Then they spit in his face. They struck him. They slapped him and mocked him, "Prophesy to us, you Christ. Who is it that struck you?"
This is the part Annie said she hated the most. How could they dishonor what is holy and sacred like that? And yet Jesus took it. He took the lies, the humiliation, the violence, all of it, and he took it with extravagant love. Annie wondered aloud what was going through his mind in that moment. Peter was just outside in the courtyard, about to deny him three times and drown in shame. Judas was already leaving, about to be swallowed by his own guilt. And she pictured Jesus absorbing every blow and saying, "This one is for you, Peter. This one is for you, Judas."
This one is for you, too. He took your shame with him. Not a symbolic gesture, not a sip of it, but the full weight of what you deserved. The story of this passage is not ultimately about the corruption or the cruelty. It is about the one who stepped into the middle of it all and refused to hand it back. It is him.
When the Red Category Rises, Look to Him
So what do we do with a scene like this? We could get stuck in the anger, replaying everything that was wrong until it fills up all the room in our hearts. We could look away, skip the hard passage, and pretend the suffering is not there. Or we could let everything that is wrong drive us straight to Jesus.
That is the invitation. Not to ignore the evil, because we have to see it for what it is. But to let it turn our eyes back to him. Because most of us will never face a rigged trial or a crown of thorns, but we know what it is to fight a chaotic battle in our own minds. We know the arrows of fear, anger, and shame. Ephesians 6:12 reminds us the real struggle is "not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the spiritual forces of evil." And everything shifts in that battle the moment we bring our attention back to him.
Annie shared a season from 2019, before she said yes to full-time ministry, when depression caught her completely off guard. It was not her normal, and it rattled her. But in that season, through prayer and study, God flipped her perspective. She had been picturing herself trapped in the middle, surrounded on every side by pressure, anxiety, and lies. God turned the image inside out. Instead of the chaos surrounding her, she saw the chaos confined, boxed in, with a boundary of peace around it. And that boundary of peace was Jesus.
This is the difference our identity makes. Romans 8:15 says, "The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again. Rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.'" You are not a slave trapped in the middle of the storm. You are a son, a daughter, seated with Christ, free to live and move and even laugh in the middle of a chaos that has been confined behind his peace. So to the young women wondering who they are, do not look to the culture, look to your God. To the young men, the kingdom needs you to step into everything God made you to be. It is him.
Taking It Into Your Week
- Where are the red category emotions rising in you right now, and what would it look like to name them and invite God into them instead of stuffing them down?
- When injustice hits, is your first instinct to reach for the sword like Peter, to look away, or to look to him?
- Jesus stood silent and secure because he knew who he was. Where have you been letting the culture, and not God, tell you who you are?
- What chaos or lie have you let surround you that Jesus is inviting you to confine behind his boundary of peace?
- He took the spit, and he took your shame. What shame are you still carrying that he already carried for you?
Join Us This Sunday
When the world feels like it is spinning and the injustice feels louder than everything else, there is still one place to look. It is him. We gather every Sunday at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM at the Eastside Marketplace in Moscow. We have a place for your kids too through Lifer Kids, and each week we take communion together as a family, remembering the body that was broken and the cup that was poured out for us.
Come as you are. We would love to meet you.