"Jesus or Barabba"

 Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE GOSPELS Matthew 27:15-23 Click here to watch the sermon "Jesus or Barabba"

The choice could not appear to be any clearer. But then, that’s from this side of history. The choice could not appear to be any clearer. But how many times have we said that about any number of things, any number of choices, only to be proven wrong. Only to watch as the people given that choice succumb to the persuasion of influential voices, and the unrelenting pull of the crowd. The choice could not be any clearer, and yet it seems that human beings have a penchant for making our choices based not on what looks so clear in retrospect, but on the emotions of the moment and a desire to feel powerful, a desire to win. 

The choice in question this morning is the one presented here in Matthew’s gospel. But it is a question we face again and again. We’ve reached the part of the passion narrative where Jesus stands before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. A brief word about Pilate. Across the gospels, Pilate receives fairly sympathetic treatment. After all, Jesus isn’t arrested by Roman centurions, he’s arrested by the Temple Guard. He isn’t picked up on Roman criminal charges, but on religious charges related to blasphemy for claiming to the be the Son of God. Remember, the Trinity is a Christian conception that isn’t even articulated in a fully formed way in the bible. While the three persons are named, and the three-fold name is invoked as part of the Great Commission to make disciples baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but Jesus is Jewish. In Judaism, one of the core beliefs is in the oneness of God. “Hear, O Israel, the LORD is God. The LORD alone.” To call oneself, or to be called the Son of God was a violation of the very first commandment. They are to have no other gods than the Holy One of Israel. Son of God is what Caesars claimed to be. It was the kind of thing you heard in the pantheon of gods worshipped by Egypt, or Babylon, or Greece, or Rome. Pilate is happy to pretend that this is a religious dispute, that he’s simply trying to mediate a local conflict between Temple leadership and a rogue itinerant rabbi. But his own line of questioning gives him away. Because if the priests and scribes of the Temple don’t want God’s authority, and by extension their own, questioned, Pilate will not have Caesar’s authority and by extension his own questioned either. The first thing he asks is, “are you King of the Jews?”  That is, do you claim authority apart from, or in place of Caesar? Would-be kings tend to foment rebellion and revolution. Would-be kings have a way of disturbing the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome. Remember, Pilate is not in Jerusalem because he lives there. The Roman Governors of Judea headquartered in the port city of Caesarea Maritima. No, Pilate has traveled to Jerusalem to keep the peace, because it is the festival of Passover. Jewish believers from all over the region have traveled to the city to observe the feast at the Temple. And this wasn’t just any old feast. It is the feast celebrating Israel’s primary narrative. How a band of slaves, chosen by God, defeated the Pharaoh and the mighty Egyptian empire, escaping from slavery into freedom. That’s a dangerous story in the hands of an occupied people. That’s the kind of story that might give someone who thinks they’re some kind of new Moses, or David the idea that they can overthrow Caesar and Rome to reclaim their freedom. I think it has to be said that while the separation of church and state is a good thing and that we don’t want governments advancing religion, or religions dictating governance. Faith is always political. It was for Moses. It certainly was in the first century shadow of the Roman Empire, and it is today. The faith of our forebears shaped their desire to overthrow the British Monarchy, the faith of enslaved people gave them the hope to seek their freedom and civil rights. But the question eventually arises, who will we choose to follow in the pursuit of justice, freedom and peace? 

You see the choice that Pilate puts before the crowd is the choice each of us eventually faces. Sometimes it is a choice that we make on our own, but more often than not it is a choice that is heavily influenced by the crowds we join, the people who surround us. Nearly a century ago, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about this in what is one of his better-known works, Moral Man and Immoral Society. Please forgive the gender exclusive title, it was a different time. Anyway, he makes the point that individually we may desire unselfish love and sacrifice, but that collectively we seek to assert power. The book was written in 1932 and came to be seen as a prescient vision of the rise of fascism across Europe. When given the choice we might individually choose Jesus. In fact, many people do. Until they fall in with the crowd. Until they find themselves under the influence of a collective voice that wants power more than it wants love, wants to dominate more than it wants to serve.  

That is the choice when Pilate offers to release a prisoner for the crowd. Jesus, who is called “the Messiah,” or Jesus Barrabas. Which Jesus will they choose? The one whose good news is the ordering of life not according to the powers of the world but according to the power of God to make all things new, to open our eyes to see in a different way, to strengthen us to walk in the way of peace, to bind up hearts that have been broken by this world and offer a whole new way of life. Or the one who has already demonstrated the ability and willingness to take a life, to overthrow the existing order by force if necessary. Individually, we may think the choice is clear. It seems strange that Pilate would even offer to release someone like Barrabas. But I think it says more about us, more about the crowd, more about our desire to feel more powerful than we know we are. Whenever power is grasped for in this way, power over another, the power to assert our will- whether it’s in our personal relationships, in the workplace, or the marketplace, in the body politic, or even on the world stage- we reveal our fundamental insecurity and the weakness we hope to hide. And whether physical, or not, it is always a form of violence, Cain taking his inferiority complex out on his brother Abel in blood. In that respect Pilate’s offer doesn’t seem strange after all. Because he has all the power. Or at least all the power that we can see. All the power that this world deals in daily. We may think Pilate is trying to find a way out, trying to escape the troubling dreams of his wife who warns him not to have anything to do with this man. Matthew may even be painting a more sympathetic portrait of Pilate than history would suggest. The church to which this gospel is writing not only continues to live in the shadow of Rome, it lives in the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction by Rome in putting down the Jewish Rebellion some 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. Blaming Rome for their teacher’s execution is not a recipe for peaceful coexistence. Still, we can see Pilate and the religious authorities exercising their power in the same way that such authority still does today. It whips the crowd into a frenzy, drunk on the illusion of its own power to take down the true threat to its existence while claiming to wash its hand of the whole thing.  

We continue to be faced with this choice everyday. Do we choose Jesus, who is called the Messiah, but acts nothing like the Messiah we expect. Who comes not with the force of arms to conquer as the world conquers, but who come with arms open wide on a cross to embrace all the pain we create and endure in the hope of feeling powerful. Who knows that the only way of truly conquering the world is to conquer death itself through the power of love. Or do we choose the ones who talk tough and swing their big sticks to bully and intimidate the world into submission. Whose promises of no quarter and no mercy to the enemy may make us feel big and strong but only expose how spiritually weak and needy we truly are. You would think that the choice would be clear. But then, in the end it is God who chooses. Chooses to endure all of our pain at God’s expense, that we might see that true power lies not in who or what we can kill, but in what God can and will raise to new life.