Could’ve called down the angels.

Matthew 26.52-54.

When Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane on the morning of 3 April 33, the knee-jerk response of his students, same as every human, is fight or flight. Some fled; some fought.

And it was really stupid of them to fight. You realize Jesus’s Twelve (minus Judas Iscariot of course) consisted of 11 teenagers with no self-defense training, opposing the temple police accompanied by a mob. Definitely outnumbered. But you know there’s always gonna be a faction of true believers who think, “Numbers don’t matter! Gideon routed the Midianite and Amalekite armies with only 300 men. Jg 7 Samson personally slaughtered a thousand people with a jawbone. Jg 15.16 God can likewise supernaturally empower me to fight any number of people.”

Okay yes, God can do and empower anything he wants. But does he want to empower us to singlehandedly fight a mob? Did he state anything in advance about this sort of thing, like he’d said to Gideon and Samson? Or have we arrogantly presumed our cause is righteous, and right makes might?—because unless God intervenes, it really doesn’t, and if God hasn’t foresaid he’s gonna intervene, likely he won’t.

Had God foresaid he’d intervene in Jesus’s arrest? Or had Jesus said just the opposite, multiple times, Mk 8.31, 10.32-34 and the students were in denial? That second one. Jesus didn’t say, “We’ll go to Jerusalem and we’ll be just fine.” God hadn’t told anyone, “A mob will appear, but fight them and you’ll win.” Jesus warned them: He’s getting arrested. There’ll be no supernatural defeat of any mob. Neither Jesus’s kids will hold them back, nor 10,000 angels pouring from the black sky to smite every sinner on the ground. Jesus won’t fight back. He’s gonna surrender. On purpose.

And in so doing win, and win big.

But Christians still don’t understand this strategy. We still keep adopting the tactic to fight back hard.

Although the whole angels-pouring-from-the-sky idea? It actually was an option. And now I’ll quote that passage. It happens right after a violent follower lops off the ear of the head priest‘s slave. Matthew never identifies the guy (John does), nor points out Jesus immediately cured him (Luke does), but only records Jesus’s rebuke.

Matthew 26.52-54 KWL

52Then Jesus tells him, “Put your¹ machete back in its place!

For everyone who chooses arms

will be destroyed by arms.

53Or do you¹ think I can’t call out to my Father,

and he will give me, right now,

more than 12 legions of angels?

54But then how might the scriptures be fulfilled?

So this has to happen.”

I wanna zero in on this Matthew statement because it reminds us how utterly in control Jesus is: At any point of Good Friday he could’ve stopped it. Any point.

That’s a lot of angels!

Legion is not a precise number. My dictionary says it’s between 3 and 6 thousand men. That’s because at different points in Roman history, the military organized their legions differently. A legion is the largest unit of the Roman army, consisting of Roman citizens trained as soldiers and called legionarii, “legionaries.” And yep, they’d vary between 3 and 6 thousand men.

But just before Jesus was born, Cæsar Augustus reorganized the army, and it stayed that way for nearly three centuries. Legions consisted of 5,120 legionarii and an equal number of auxilia, auxiliary troops consisting of non-citizens. The auxiliaries were recruited becasue they had special skills; they were archers, horsemen, or skilled fighters. So really, a Roman general who commanded a legion just heading off to war, was in charge of 10,240 troops. That’s the actual size of a legion in Jesus’s day.

And Jesus said his Father would dispatch more than 12 of these legions, or 122,880 angels. Really, more; so let’s make that an even 130K. Now, why did Jesus go with this number?

First of all, we have no idea how strong an individual angel is. I’ve heard preachers claim one angel could take out the entire mob, but that’s based on… what? It’s not bible; bible doesn’t say. Yeah, I’ve heard ’em claim two angels took out the entire city of Sodom, but you realize how the two angels did it was to give their recommendation to God, and he dumped burning sulfur on the city. You do realize two humans coulda done that too.

Nope; whenever angels do something mighty, it’s done through the supernatural power of God. The same supernatural power, I remind you, that we’re allowed to tap. Yes, one angel could take out a mob… because one man could take out a mob if God empowered him. Jesus himself could take ’em out—and kinda did, after he spoke two words and knocked the mob backwards. Jn 18.3-9

The rest of the time, when we see Old Testament passages about angels in battle, they’re usually in armies (KJV “hosts,” Hebrew צִבְא֥וֹת/chavaót, from which we get the word “Sabaoth” Ro 9.29 KJV). God is called “the LORD of hosts” because he commands armies of angels. In the Psalms, David describes God’s chariot as accompanied by 20,000 angels. Ps 68.17 Now, David is obviously being poetic; does God have (or need) a literal chariot? Does he need the company of 20,000 runners? Not really; but God’s at least 20 times more grand than any earthly king who’d show off by having 1,000 runners.

But the point of listing huge numbers of angels, is to remind us God has no shortage of them. Or of power. One unit of angels would easily overwhelm this mob. One legion, definitely. Twelve legions is overkill. But overkill is Jesus’s point: There is no shortage of power available to him in this moment. He could stop them at any time, if he so chose. It’s just he didn’t so choose.

Jesus could’ve stopped every time the mob slapped him, punched him, spit on him, knocked him down. Could’ve stopped it during the ridiculous, pre-decided trials. Could’ve stopped the Romans from flogging him. Could’ve stopped Pontius Pilate from sending him to the cross. Could’ve stopped the soldiers from goading him to Golgotha. Could’ve stopped the nails from going in. Could’ve broken the cross. Could’ve eliminated the pain, the embarrassment, the suffering. Could’ve stopped any of it, or all of it. At any time.

Nobody in all of history was as utterly in control of his circumstances as Jesus the Nazarene. He wasn’t an unwitting participant, a victim of a situation which got way out of hand. He knew this was coming. Didn’t wanna suffer; who would? But knew this was what it was gonna take to defeat sin and death, so willingly went to his own death in one of the worst ways we humans have ever invented. And did defeat sin and death.

We who retell Jesus’s story, are frequently tempted to tell it in such a way that Jesus becomes passive; that he just accepts everything happening to him because there’s no escaping it. That’d be entirely wrong. There was escaping it. He could’ve ditched the crucifixion; he could’ve said, “Y’know, getting stabbed in the heart by some overzealous member of the arresting mob will do the job just as well and hurt way less,” and died enroute to his first trial, or his second, or his third. Heck, the people he outraged at Nazareth could’ve just stoned him to death years before; or Herod could’ve caught him when he was a baby. Jesus had options.

But he chose this option. And had his reasons; I’m not one of those psychos who insist a gory death is the only proper punishment for all the sins of humanity. I suspect the reason is more like we can never claim Jesus didn’t experience the worst death imaginable. Still defeated it though.