Free Barabbas
On Holy Week and the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
Today is Good Friday, a day many millions of people around the world spend in mourning to commemorate the execution of a Jewish preacher by the Imperial Roman government.
In two days, it will be Easter Sunday, the day these same people will celebrate his resurrection—his literal return to life from death. Something that, in nature, only occurs in Alaskan wood frogs, and sort of in African lungfish, and occasionally in some microscopic organisms with funny names I’d never heard of before Wikipedia.
If you’re not religious, but happen to live, as I do, in the Bible belt, you may celebrate regardless of your convictions. You’ll wear pastel-colored clothing, hide plastic eggs for your children, and then eat all of their best candy while they aren’t looking. If you’re blessed (or cursed) with a religious family, you may even attend church for the first time since Christmas.
I am religious and go to church most Sundays, though I struggle on Christian holidays to distinguish what I’m supposed to be celebrating from the commercial aspects of the festivities. Case in point, at Bass Pro Shop the other day, I watched as a man who’d later greet children as the Easter Bunny pulled in with a “Powered by Jesus” bumper sticker on his Dodge Ram. What is consecrated must also be commercial to make it in America, and only cultural heretics seem to get flustered by the contradiction (at least that’s what my wife, who’s normal, says when I get in a tizzy)1.
According to tradition, on the last Thursday of his life—a day Christians celebrate as Maundy Thursday—Jesus of Nazareth ate dinner in a borrowed room with his best friends, a crew of ordinary dudes he’d recruited over three years to pass the news that God had sent him to save the world from hell.
That night, while praying, the carpenter-preacher was apprehended by armed guards and brought before the occupying Roman government, to whom he was described by the local religious elite as a dangerous traitor deserving death. He was executed on a cross the next morning. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, this precise method of capital punishment was used most frequently “to punish political or religious agitators, pirates, slaves, or those who had no civil rights.” (And you wonder why it’s the poor and not the powerful who really love Jesus.)
A few days later, he picked himself up after a weekend long enough to get the job done and hung out with his friends for a while longer. Then he went back to heaven to be with Dad.
I’m not an evangelist, nor am I very wise in the ways of religion. In college, the kids from the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship labeled me a troublemaker for protesting with the Young Democratic Socialists. The socialists saw the Thompson-Chain Reference Bible in my backpack and called me Jerry Falwell. In any group I was a part of, I was either the least or most religious person. I still am, and I prefer it that way. Black and white can be so boring.
There is one character in the Holy Week story who fascinates me. His name is Barabbas. I can’t stop thinking about him, in part, because the phrase “Free Barabbas” appears in many of the songs and merch by the Louisiana rapper Aha Gazelle who I listen to when I work out.
According to four New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life, the dude was a convicted killer counting down the days until his execution. On the morning of his last meal, the guards opened the gate of his cell and, instead of feeding him, carried him out before an angry mob on the steps of the Roman judicial courts. We don’t know what he looked like, only that he’d taken up arms against the empire and was justly deserving death according to their justice system. Pontius Pilate, as a sign of goodwill, offered the people a choice: Jesus or Barabbas; kill one, free the other.
While both were considered threats to the status quo, the men were incomparable. Jesus was a rebel preacher who mobilized thousands of people in the countryside whenever he spoke. But he was not a physical threat to Roman power. When he told his buddies to gather weapons before his arrest, he was satisfied with just two swords. As the soldiers approached him in the garden, his best bro, Pete, pulled one from his waistband and sliced off the ear of a servant of the Jewish high priest (the main dude advocating for Jesus’s arrest), then was immediately reprimanded: “Put your sword in its sheath! Shall I not drink the cup my Father has given me?”
People came to Jesus seeking healing and miracles. Barabbas they went to for insurrection and bloodshed.
Despite professing faith in Christ since I was 17, I’ve never had to do it, as the newly minted Japanese believers in Shusaku Endo’s Silence had, with the threat of death or expulsion. In the South, you get street cred for going to church, even if you spend the rest of your time gambling on college football. Yet even Peter, hours after his act of bravery, watched the sham trial unfold and denied being Jesus’s friend to accusatory strangers, not once but thrice, for fear he was going to be hanged up right alongside the Messiah.
I’ll admit it; I am a coward who gets caught up in a crowd. On those court steps, Jesus posed a threat to many of the good things I believe about myself. It’s easy for me to imagine standing there, declaring that Barabbas be freed instead. Because Barabbas offered the world a real promise. He would kill for what he wanted. He’d fight until his people were free. We understand violent Messianic figures like Paul Atreides, the protagonist of the Dune novels. We welcome the returning warriors of our nations with extravagant processions. But it’s much harder to understand meekness, which can be written off as being soft, and hope for a better day that isn’t won by war—what some folks call delusion.
It’s possible that if I had been present 2,000 years ago, I would have felt compassion for the bruised and bloodied Jesus looking down the barrel of every powerful and angry person in Jerusalem. But it’s just as likely that I’d have done nothing about it, like when I drive past the homeless camps on Broadway or see a crying woman in the street and walk by, hoping she doesn’t ask for help or money.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
Hearing “Free Barabbas” is like hearing myself declare a statement I know I’ll regret but can’t keep from uttering, perhaps a little like the Mexican soccer fans who chant “puto!” in the stadiums and then go home to make dinner for their spouses, tuck their children into bed, and pray for God to heal their mothers’ cancer.
It’s much easier to believe in pastel colors and the Easter bunny.
Or to pray a magical prayer to accept Jesus into your heart and go on living as you wish. Because thinking too long about what happened to him, and why it happened, is wearying. It has the potential to change everything. Better to play it safe and go with the warlord.
Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee, order a copy of my first story collection, or listen to my stories on YouTube and Spotify.
“I have literally never met anyone who spends so much time thinking about Morgan Wallen,” she tells me when someone mentions some song his management paid another dude to write and I feel obliged to talk about the moral depravity of his popular music, the distinction between performance and creation (i.e., true artistry), and why Jason Isbell, despite going off the deep end in the past year, is much better.