NOTES for Mar 14:21

How often the question is asked: "What are Judas, Pilate, and the high priests guilty of if Jesus still had to suffer and be killed? Otherwise He would not have died."

Here everything is turned upside down. These people do not become murderers because Jesus has to die; rather, Jesus has to die because people are murderers. By his fall, man brought human death into the world. More than that, the first human death came not from disease or from an earthquake, but from a brother's hand. We are all sinners, and sin is death; we are all murderers. And the only non-murderer who came into this world was doomed. But what horrifies is the inner darkness, and therefore the "quality" of life, of those who become executors of this act of this world.