"Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered him, "You have said so." — Luke 23:3
SIX TRIALS IN ONE NIGHT
Between the arrest in Gethsemane and the road to Calvary, Jesus stands before six distinct tribunals. The sequence unfolds across a single night and the following morning — a few hours in which the entire judicial apparatus of first-century Palestine, both Jewish and Roman, is brought to bear on one man. The process is, from every angle of analysis, a catastrophic failure of justice. It fails by its own standards, by its own laws, by the criteria of every legal tradition that has studied it since.
The six proceedings are:
1. Before Annas — the former High Priest, father-in-law of Caiaphas, the eminence behind the office (John 18:12–23)
2. Before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin — the formal Jewish religious trial, conducted at night in the High Priest's palace (Matthew 26:57–68; Mark 14:53–65; Luke 22:54–65)
3. Before the full Sanhedrin at dawn — the morning ratification required to legalise the night verdict (Luke 22:66–71; Matthew 27:1–2)
4. Before Pilate — first hearing — the Roman prefect's initial examination (Matthew 27:11–14; Mark 15:2–5; Luke 23:1–7; John 18:28–38)
5. Before Herod Antipas — the tetrarch of Galilee, present in Jerusalem for the Passover (Luke 23:8–12)
6. Before Pilate — second hearing and condemnation — the final Roman verdict (Matthew 27:15–26; Mark 15:6–15; Luke 23:13–25; John 18:39–19:16)
Each tribunal reveals a different dimension of the corruption of justice. Together they constitute what every serious legal historian has recognised as a travesty — and what the Church has always read as something more than a travesty: the willing self-surrender of the Son of God into the hands of human injustice, so that the justice of God could be fully accomplished.
BEFORE ANNAS: THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE
"So the band of soldiers and their captain and the officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him. First they led him to Annas, for he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was the high priest that year." — John 18:12–13
John alone records the appearance before Annas, and John alone explains why it matters: Annas had been High Priest from AD 6 to 15, when the Roman prefect Valerius Gratus deposed him. He had been succeeded by a son, a son-in-law (Caiaphas), and three more sons. The high priesthood moved entirely within his family for decades. The Romans could remove the office; they could not remove the power. Annas remained the dominant figure in Jerusalem's religious establishment for a generation — the patriarch, the patron, the man whose word still shaped what the Sanhedrin decided.
Jesus is brought to Annas first — bound, as a prisoner, at whatever hour of the night the arrest in Gethsemane has occurred. Annas questions Him about His disciples and His teaching. Jesus' response is one of the most dignified in the entire Gospel:
"I have spoken openly to the world. I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret. Why do you ask me? Ask those who have heard me what I said to them; they know what I said." — John 18:20–21
It is the response of innocence: I have nothing to hide, because there is nothing to hide. Everything I have said has been said publicly, before witnesses who can be called and examined. The standard procedure of Jewish law — questioned a suspect in private before mounting a public case — is inapplicable because there is no secret teaching, no hidden agenda, no conspiracy to uncover.
One of the officers strikes Jesus on the face: "Is that how you answer the high priest?" Jesus answers without flinching and without returning the blow: "If what I said is wrong, bear witness about the wrong; but if what I said is right, why do you strike me?" (John 18:23). It is a statement of pure legal principle: if I have spoken wrongly, produce the evidence; if I have spoken rightly, the blow is without justification. The officer cannot answer it.
Annas sends Him bound to Caiaphas.
BEFORE CAIAPHAS: THE VERDICT BEFORE THE TRIAL
"Now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death, but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward." — Matthew 26:59–60
Matthew's account contains the most devastating three words in the entire trial narrative: seeking false testimony. The trial before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin does not begin with an examination of the evidence and proceed to a verdict. It begins with the verdict — death — and works backward, seeking whatever testimony can be assembled to justify what has already been decided. This is not a miscarriage of justice. It is the deliberate inversion of justice, the use of judicial forms to accomplish a predetermined conclusion.
It is also a violation of the principles of just judgment that the Law of Moses itself established. The Law required a minimum of two independent witnesses whose testimony agreed in all details (Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15). It prescribed that false witnesses receive the penalty they sought to inflict on the accused (Deuteronomy 19:18–19). It demanded that judges pursue justice without partiality or corruption (Deuteronomy 16:19–20). These were not procedural technicalities — they were the Law's protection of the innocent, the Law's own recognition that the power of judgement could be used to destroy what it was meant to defend.
The trial before Caiaphas violates every one of these protections. It is conducted at night — illegal for capital cases. The witnesses are sought in advance and their testimony is coordinated rather than independent. The false testimonies presented do not agree with each other (Mark 14:56: "their testimony did not agree"), which should by law have ended the proceedings. The court is not a neutral body seeking truth but a body seeking a conclusion.
What finally produces the verdict is not testimony about Jesus at all. It is His own response to a direct oath.
The High Priest's Question
"But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, 'I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.'" — Matthew 26:63
Caiaphas invokes the sacred oath — "I adjure you by the living God" — the formula under which a Jewish man was legally and religiously obligated to speak the truth. Jesus, who has remained silent through the parade of false witnesses (fulfilling Isaiah 53:7: "like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth"), now speaks.
"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
Mark's account is even more direct: "I am." (egΕ eimi — the divine name again, as in Gethsemane when the soldiers fell to the ground.)
The response fuses two great Old Testament texts: Psalm 110:1 — "The LORD says to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand'" — the psalm Jesus had already used to challenge the scribes about the nature of the Messiah (Matthew 22:41–45); and Daniel 7:13–14 — the vision of "one like a son of man" coming with the clouds of heaven and receiving an everlasting dominion from the Ancient of Days. Jesus applies both texts to Himself, simultaneously: I am the one who sits at the right hand of God, and I am the one who comes on the clouds.
Caiaphas tears his robes. The gesture is the formal act of mourning for blasphemy — required by Jewish law when the divine name was uttered in a blasphemous context (though the name itself is not uttered; Caiaphas responds as though it has been). "He has uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy. What is your judgement?" They answer: "He deserves death." (Matthew 26:65–66)
The verdict is unanimous and immediate — violating the requirement of overnight deliberation. And it is based not on the testimony of any witness but on the prisoner's answer to a direct oath about His identity. In the theology of the trial, this is the central irony of the entire Passion: Jesus is condemned for telling the truth.
The Abuse After the Verdict
"Then they spat in his face and struck him. And some slapped him, saying, 'Prophesy to us, you Christ! Who is it that struck you?'" — Matthew 26:67–68
The mockery that follows the verdict is not a loss of control or an excess of zeal by some members of the Sanhedrin. It is directed, systematic, and theologically precise in its cruelty. They blindfold Him and ask Him to name who strikes Him — a prophet should know. They spit on the face that had shone like the sun on Mount Tabor. They strike the hands that had touched lepers and raised the dead.
Luke records that "the men who were holding Jesus in custody were mocking him and beating him" (Luke 22:63) — it is the servants, the guards, who carry out the physical abuse, but the atmosphere of contempt has been established from the top. The court that has just condemned a man for claiming to be the Son of God now invites him to prove his prophetic credentials by identifying his tormentors in the dark.
The prophecy is being fulfilled, unrecognised, in the very act of mockery: "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows... he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities." (Isaiah 53:4–5)
THE MORNING SESSION: THE LEGAL FICTION
"When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death." — Matthew 27:1
The night verdict before Caiaphas was almost certainly illegal under Jewish law — conducted in the dark, in haste, without the required deliberative pause. The morning session of the Sanhedrin is the attempt to regularise what has already been decided: a formal ratification meeting, legally conducted in daylight, to give the night's proceedings the appearance of due process.
Luke records the morning session in detail (Luke 22:66–71): the council asks again whether He is the Christ, and again whether He is the Son of God. Jesus answers both questions with the same calm that has characterised every response in the trials: "If I tell you, you will not believe, and if I ask you, you will not answer. But from now on the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God." (Luke 22:67–69). They ask: "Are you the Son of God, then?" He answers: "You say that I am." — and they have what they need. "What further testimony do we need? We have heard it ourselves from his own lips." (Luke 22:71)
The morning session produces the decision to take Him to Pilate. The Sanhedrin has the power to try and condemn for religious offences. What it lacks, under Roman occupation, is the power of capital execution — the ius gladii, the right of the sword, which Rome reserved exclusively to its own prefects. To have Jesus put to death, the Sanhedrin must bring him to Pilate and construct a case that Roman law can condemn.
The charge before Caiaphas had been blasphemy — a religious offence under Jewish law. The charge that will be brought to Pilate must be political — because Pilate cares nothing about blasphemy and everything about sedition.
BEFORE PILATE: THE FIRST HEARING
"Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor's headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor's headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover." — John 18:28
John notes the bitter irony with his characteristic precision: the chief priests who have spent the night arranging a judicial murder will not enter a Gentile building on the day of Passover, lest ritual contamination prevent them from eating the Passover lamb. The letter of the ceremonial law is scrupulously observed; the spirit of the law — "do not shed innocent blood" (Jeremiah 22:3) — has been abandoned entirely.
Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect of Judaea at the time of the Lord's Passion — his name embedded permanently in the Creed of the Church: suffered under Pontius Pilate. The Gospels themselves supply his character: a man who knows the truth ("I find no guilt in him"), who fears the crowd, who uses the forms of justice while betraying its substance, who washes his hands before the multitude and thereby demonstrates that guilt is not cleansed by ceremony. He is the image of the man of power who chooses expediency over conscience — a figure the Church has recognised in every generation, because every generation has produced him.
The charges presented to Pilate are not the blasphemy charge of the Sanhedrin — that would get no traction in a Roman court. They are reformulated as political charges: "We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ, a king." (Luke 23:2)
Every word is either a lie or a distortion. He has not forbidden tribute to Caesar — He had said "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:21), a statement the Pharisees had themselves found unanswerable. He has consistently evaded the crowds' attempts to make Him a political king (John 6:15). The charges are constructed for Roman consumption, calibrated to Pilate's specific vulnerability: any suggestion of a rival king, any hint of a challenge to Caesar's authority, is the kind of thing that could end a prefect's career or his life.
The Examination of the King
"So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, 'Are you the King of the Jews?' Jesus answered, 'Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?'" — John 18:33–34
The exchange between Jesus and Pilate in John 18:33–38 is one of the great dialogues in world literature — and one of the most theologically dense conversations in the entire Gospel. Pilate asks his question from within the Roman framework of power: king means political ruler, army, territory, subjects, taxation. Jesus reframes it entirely:
"My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world." — John 18:36
Not of this world — not meaning not real, not meaning not present in this world, but meaning: not derived from the sources from which worldly kingdoms derive their power. No army, no throne, no tax revenue, no hereditary claim, no conquest. A kingdom of truth — "For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world — to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice." (John 18:37)
Pilate's response — "What is truth?" (John 18:38) — has been read in every generation: as cynicism, as genuine philosophical inquiry, as the exhausted pragmatism of a man who has governed a troublesome province long enough to be suspicious of all absolutes. He does not wait for an answer. He turns and goes out to the Jews.
But he has already given his verdict — the verdict that the subsequent proceedings will fail to overturn: "I find no guilt in him." (John 18:38). Pilate's repeated declarations of Jesus' innocence — he will make them three times before the final condemnation — are the Roman legal system's formal judgment on the case: not guilty. The man he eventually hands over to be crucified has been declared innocent by the judge who condemns him. The condemnation is unjust by Rome's own standard, pronounced by Rome's own governor.
BEFORE HEROD ANTIPAS: THE SILENT KING
"And when Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had long desired to see him, because he had heard about him, and he was hoping to see some sign done by him." — Luke 23:8
Learning that Jesus is a Galilean, Pilate sends Him to Herod Antipas — the tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, son of Herod the Great, who happens to be in Jerusalem for the Passover. It is a legal gesture designed to relieve Pilate of a politically uncomfortable decision: Galilee is Herod's jurisdiction; let Herod deal with his own subjects.
Herod Antipas is the man who had beheaded John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1–12) — the same man about whom Jesus had said: "Go and tell that fox..." (Luke 13:32). He had heard reports of Jesus for years and longed to see a miracle performed on demand. Here, at last, is the man Himself — and Herod questions Him at length.
Jesus says nothing. Not a word. Not a defence, not a rebuke, not a miracle. The silence before Herod is total and deliberate — the most complete silence in the entire trial sequence. Before Annas He had defended His teaching. Before Caiaphas He had answered under oath. Before Pilate He had spoken at length about the nature of His kingdom. Before Herod, who wanted a spectacle, He maintains an absolute silence that no amount of questioning can break.
The reason is theologically precise: Herod is not seeking truth, not exercising judicial authority, not genuinely questioning. He is seeking entertainment. He wants a sign performed for his diversion. And Jesus, who had consistently refused to perform signs for the benefit of those who demanded them without openness to what the signs mean (Matthew 12:39; Luke 23:8), extends the same refusal to the tetrarch of Galilee. Herod, who murdered the greatest prophet since Isaiah, receives from the one greater than all the prophets exactly what he deserves: silence.
The chief priests and scribes stand before Herod accusing Jesus vehemently. Herod and his soldiers treat Him with contempt and mock Him, dress Him in an elegant robe in parody of royal dignity, and send Him back to Pilate. Luke records that on this day Herod and Pilate, formerly enemies, became friends (Luke 23:12) — united by their shared encounter with the one they have both found innocent and both refused to protect.
BEFORE PILATE: THE CONDEMNATION
"Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him." — John 19:1
Pilate's second hearing with Jesus is the most psychologically complex sequence in the entire trial narrative — a man who knows the truth, has declared the truth, and destroys the truth by degrees under political pressure.
The Flogging and the Crown of Thorns
Before the final verdict, Pilate orders Jesus flogged — apparently as a compromise: a severe punishment short of execution, intended to satisfy the crowd's demand for blood without going as far as crucifixion. The Roman flogging (flagellatio) was not the Jewish punishment of thirty-nine lashes; it was administered with the flagrum — a whip whose multiple leather thongs were weighted with lead balls or bone fragments — and had no legal limit. Men died under it. Those who survived it often did not survive crucifixion.
The soldiers crown Him with thorns and dress Him in a purple robe — the colour of royalty — and mock Him: "Hail, King of the Jews!" (John 19:3). They strike Him on the face. The mockery of the Sanhedrin is repeated by the pagan soldiers of Rome, separated by miles and cultures and religions, converging on the same systematic degradation of the one they cannot comprehend.
Pilate brings Him out, flogged and crowned with thorns, and presents Him to the crowd: "Behold the man" — Ecce Homo (John 19:5). It may be an appeal for pity — look at what has been done to him, is this not enough? It is also, in John's Gospel, something far more: the man, ho anthrΕpos — the human being in his fullness, the new Adam, the one who has taken on all that humanity is and offered it back to the Father in perfect love. Pilate says more than he knows.
"We Have No King But Caesar"
The crowd cries for crucifixion. Pilate presses: "Where are you from?" (John 19:9) — and Jesus gives him no answer. The silence this time is of a different kind than the silence before Herod: not the refusal of one who has nothing to say but the reticence of one before whom human judicial authority has reached its limit. "Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?" Pilate demands. Jesus answers: "You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin." (John 19:11)
It is the most precise judicial statement in the trial: Pilate has real authority — given from above, from God, who allows the powers of this world their governance even when they abuse it. Pilate's guilt is real but not the greatest: the greater sin belongs to those who have the knowledge of the law and the Scriptures, who have been the stewards of the divine revelation, and who have deliberately engineered this outcome. Both are guilty. Both are named.
The crowd plays its final card — the card that destroys whatever remains of Pilate's resistance: "If you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar." (John 19:12). The phrase "Caesar's friend" — philos tou Kaisaros — was a specific, semi-official Roman political title, a mark of imperial favour whose loss meant political ruin. Pilate is being threatened with what he most fears: a report to Tiberius that his governor in Judaea had released a man who claimed to be a king.
He capitulates.
He brings Jesus out and sits on the judgement seat. He says to the Jews: "Behold your King!" They cry: "Away with him, away with him, crucify him!" Pilate asks: "Shall I crucify your King?" The chief priests answer: "We have no king but Caesar." (John 19:15)
In the theology of John's Gospel, these five words — we have no king but Caesar — are the theological nadir of the entire Passion. The chief priests of Israel, the guardians of the covenant and the Law, renounce the kingship of God over Israel in order to destroy the one in whom that kingship has arrived in person. From the time of Samuel, when Israel first demanded a human king (1 Samuel 8:7 — "they have rejected me from being king over them"), Israel had been called to acknowledge that God alone was its ultimate King. The Psalms, the Prophets, the entire covenant theology of the Hebrew Bible speak from this centre. Now the chief priests of the covenant people formally proclaim their allegiance: we have no king but Caesar.
Pilate hands Jesus over to be crucified.
THE WASHING OF THE HANDS
"So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, 'I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves.'" — Matthew 27:24
Pilate's gesture — washing his hands before the crowd — is drawn from Jewish law (Deuteronomy 21:6–9), where the elders of a city wash their hands over a heifer to declare innocence of an unsolved murder: "Our hands did not shed this blood." The pagan governor reaches for a Jewish ritual to declare what his own repeated declarations of Jesus' innocence have already established: he knows this man is innocent, and he is condemning him anyway.
The washing of the hands does not and cannot produce the innocence it claims. Guilt is not cleansed by ceremony. Pilate's hand-washing is the most self-deluding gesture in the Gospel — the performance of a clean conscience by a man who has consciously chosen to violate his own judgment. He will go down in history not as the governor who washed his hands but as the governor who handed Jesus over to be crucified — recorded in the Creed of the universal Church, prayed by a billion Catholics every Sunday, "suffered under Pontius Pilate."
Matthew records the crowd's response: "His blood be on us and on our children!" (Matthew 27:25). These words have been the most catastrophically misused verse in the New Testament — the proof-text for centuries of anti-Jewish violence, pogrom, and persecution that the Church has formally and irrevocably condemned. The Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate (1965) explicitly repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Christ: "Neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his Passion." The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§597–598) reiterates this with precision: "The Church does not hesitate to impute to Christians the gravest responsibility for the torments inflicted upon Jesus." The crowd before Pilate was not all of Israel; it was a crowd manipulated by a specific leadership with specific interests. And the death of Jesus was not a crime committed by one people against another — it was the voluntary self-offering of the Son of God for the sins of all people, of every nation, in every age.
THE DEEPER JUSTICE: WHAT THE TRIALS ACCOMPLISH
Every tribunal in the trial sequence fails by its own standard. The Sanhedrin violates the procedural protections of its own law. Pilate condemns the man he has repeatedly declared innocent. Herod dismisses a man he cannot convict. Annas conducts a preliminary examination without authority to condemn. Between them, they represent the full complement of human judicial authority — religious and civil, Jewish and Roman, priestly and royal — and every single tribunal fails.
This is not merely a historical tragedy. It is a theological statement.
The trials of Jesus reveal what the Gospel has been showing from the beginning: that the justice of human systems — however sophisticated, however principled, however carefully constructed — cannot handle the presence of perfect goodness in its midst. The Son of God is not condemned by the worst legal system the ancient world produced. He is condemned by the best: the Roman system, celebrated for its procedural fairness, its appeal to evidence, its concept of the defendant's rights; and the Jewish system, the most morally serious legal tradition in the ancient world, rooted in the Torah's passionate concern for the poor and the falsely accused. Both fail. Both condemn the innocent.
This failure is not incidental to the Gospel. It is its necessary condition. The salvation of the world required that Jesus pass through human injustice and emerge from the other side — that the last Adam enter the place of condemnation that the first Adam had prepared for all his descendants, absorb it fully, and transform it from within. The Cross is not the defeat of justice. It is the place where the justice of God and the mercy of God, which human systems can never hold together, meet in the body of the one who is both perfectly just and infinitely merciful.
St. Paul speaks of God "whom Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." (Romans 3:25–26)
Just and the justifier. The Cross is where these two apparently irreconcilable attributes of God — His justice, which requires that sin be answered, and His mercy, which longs to forgive — are simultaneously and perfectly satisfied. The trials in which human justice collapses are the necessary preparation for the Cross in which divine justice is fully accomplished.
PETER'S DENIAL: THE TRIAL WITHIN THE TRIAL
Threaded through the accounts of the Jewish trial is a scene that all four Gospels record, that none of them omit, and that the Church has always understood as the other side of the trial narrative: the three denials of Peter (Matthew 26:69–75; Mark 14:66–72; Luke 22:54–62; John 18:15–18, 25–27).
While Jesus stands before Caiaphas and is condemned for claiming to be the Son of God, Peter stands in the courtyard below and is challenged — not by a judge under oath, but by a servant girl — about whether he knows the man. Three times. Three denials: I do not know what you mean. I do not know the man. I do not know the man.
The crowing of the cock recalls Jesus' prophecy at the Supper: "Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times." (Matthew 26:34). Luke records the detail that has devastated readers across twenty centuries: "And the Lord turned and looked at Peter." (Luke 22:61). Jesus, somewhere in the movement of the trial, turns from where He stands and looks at Peter across the courtyard. No word. No rebuke. A look.
"And Peter went out and wept bitterly."
The trial of Peter in the courtyard is the trial of every disciple — the test not of the exceptional moment but of the ordinary one. Peter was not asked to die for Christ in the courtyard. He was asked to admit that he knew him. And he could not do it. The bitterest tears in the Gospel are not shed by the condemned man. They are shed by the man who loved Him and failed at the moment of his testing.
Peter will be restored — in one of the most beautiful scenes in the entire Gospel, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee after the Resurrection (John 21:15–19), when the threefold denial is answered by the threefold question: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Three times asked. Three times answered. The denial undone not by erasing the memory but by overwriting it with love. The man who wept bitterly in the courtyard becomes the man who feeds the sheep of Christ in every generation.
A CLOSING PRAYER
Lord Jesus Christ, who stood silent before those who sought false witness, who answered the truth under oath and were condemned for it, who were handed from court to court by men who feared You more than they feared injustice —
teach me what Your silence taught: that truth does not need defending so much as it needs to be lived.
And teach me what Peter learned in the courtyard in the dark: that the look You turned on him was not condemnation but invitation — the same look You turn on me every time I have denied You before a servant girl, before a crowd, in the small courts of ordinary life.
You were condemned that we might be acquitted. You bore the injustice of the world so that the justice of God could hold both mercy and truth together.
Receive the only response that such love deserves: everything.
Amen.
"For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." — 2 Corinthians 5:21
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