NOTES for Mar 14:53
The "trial" of Jesus can be called a trial only in quotation marks. It is entirely clear that no one in the Sanhedrin intended to examine the substance of anything or sort anything out. The evangelist says directly: the Sanhedrin gathered in order to condemn Jesus, to condemn Him at any cost, even if it was necessary to resort to false testimony. Where does such hatred come from? And is it even hatred?
In a certain sense, of course it is: everyone gathered then in Caiaphas's house wanted the Man who stood before them to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet the hatred here was cold and calculating. There was nothing personal in it, only politics and religious-political interests. The temple elite is often presented to oneself and others as some kind of infernal villains. If that were so, we today would feel calmer, because no one would call us infernal villains.
In reality, however, and unfortunately for us, everything here is more frightening: Jesus is killed by the most ordinary people, though highly placed ones, for the most ordinary, entirely earthly, and not at all "otherworldly" interests, the interests of religious politics and politics in general, which are usually called "higher" interests but do not cease under that name to remain quite earthly. He simply got in the way of the temple elite, in the complex game it was playing with Roman power, with the Synagogue, and with the Zealots. In this game Jesus turned out to be the factor outside the system that could spoil everything, and something had to be done with Him. The whole horror of the situation was that Jesus' "judges" were completely indifferent to who stood before them. It really could have been the most ordinary teacher or preacher, and the same fate would have awaited him.
No one in the Sanhedrin intended to kill the Messiah. They only wanted to remove from the road a man who was interfering with high politics, and in the end the One they "removed" was precisely the Messiah. This is understandable: murder is murder, and the murder of any innocent person is the same sin as the murder of the Messiah. In the fallen world the life of an outstanding person is valued differently from the life of an unnoticed one, but in the Kingdom the arithmetic is different. The Messiah dies as the most ordinary person because each person is as precious to God as He is.