Sermon from February 24, 2002
I don't know if what follows should be called a sermon. What follows is ver definitely a response to the events reported in Mark 15. I will let you decide whether to call my response a sermon or something else.

As I set out to write it, I was not sure at first how it might turn out. The events Mark reports awaken the dark side of my nature, because they report the dark side of human nature. It would be a misuse of your goodwill to inflict that side of my nature on you, when you have come here to pray and seek God.

I too came here today to pray and seek God, and I am charged to point us to the glory of God, to build up and not tear down. This  charge forced me to look more deeply within and to examine the powerful emotions that Mark 15 elicits. The events of chapter 15 elicited powerful emotions from Jesus. Remember! They are what caused Jesus to shrink back from doing the will of God.

That self-examination guided me in how to fram those emotions and their connection with Mark 1:1-15.  They brought back a reflection on personal security, inasmuch as the events of these verses present Jesus as having been deprived of all personal security.

Twent years ago, Carole and I rode the train from Cluj Napoca, Romania, to Oradea, Romania. We had been on the train only a short time, when we were asked  to show our passports and tickets. The man examining our passports took them and said he would bring them back later.

Later grew into hours. As we drew near to the Hungarian border, we still did not have our passports. Until the man returned our passports to us shortly before the border checkpoint, we felt terribly helpless. We did not speak Romanian. We did not know anyone. We did not know what recourse we might have to reclaim our passports. Afterwards, we concluded that they  had seized our passports in order to harass us.

Those few hours gave us a taste of what it is like to be uncertain of someone's intentions toward us, to be cut off from people who might be sympathetic to our needs, to be threatened with the unknown, and even in a small way to be deprived of some of the tokens of our identity.

Mark 15:1-15 has all those experiences, only to a greater degree. Verse one says, Very early in the morning, the chief priests, with the elders, the teachers of the law and the whole Sanhedrin, reached a decision. I described the events of Mark 14 as a kind of Grand Jury deliberation, and there the Sanhedrin deems Jesus as deserving of death. Based on that finding the Sanhedrin reach the following decision.

They bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate. "Are you the king of the Jews?" asked Pilate. Do you remember the high priest's question? "Are you the son of the Blessed?" Those questions are identical. One comes in Jewish dress, the other in Roman. The Sanhedrin found Jesus' claims to be worthy of death, becaues He was leading Israel astray. The same claim leads to the charge of fomenting political revolution, a charge deserving death under Roman law.

Pilate and other Romans had seen plenty of that sort. They had zero tolerance for most of them, and they had an especially effective way of putting an end to the absurd pretensions of these Jewish messiahs. Pilate's question is the right way to begin His inquiry. Jesus' answer is not nearly as straightforward as it seems.

"Yes, it is as you say," Jesus replied. He does not deny it. After all, He is the King of the Jews. But His answer creates more dobut than an outright denial. Pilate has no knowledge of any public, political disturbance by Jesus; there is none. On his list of suspected and known revolutionaries there is no Jesus of Nazareth. It may be that when Jesus said, "Yes, it is as you say," what Pilate heard was, "Yeah, right. And you are the King of Siam." The chief priests are not at all satisfied with Jesus' confession. So, they add their own list of reasons why Pilate should act against Jesus.

The chief priests accused him of many things. Pilate appears unimpressed, especially in light of the fact that Jesus does not say a word. So again Pilate asked him, "Aren't you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of." But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed.

Real revolutionaries, hen they know their days are numbered, are eager with the loudest voice possible to damn the oppressors and predict that the day is coming, when the oppressors will get what is coming to them. Jesus did none of that.

And isn't there something else that Pilate might find fishy? If Jesus is the king of the Jews, why are Jews turning him over to Pilate? Pilate knows perfectly well that they hate his guts. He knows that they are not in the habit of turning Jewish revolutionaries over to him. They had rather he do the hard work of apprehending them as well as the dirty work of crucifying them. Something stinks here. Pilate knows it, and, perhaps for that reason, as well as Jesus' silence, is amazed.

In the meantime here is Jesus, uncertain of Pilate's intentions, denied legal representation, cut off from friends sympathetic to Him, and facing a potentially brutal outcome. His past ahievements have no weight in Pilate's chamber. His claim to be a prophet, even more His claim to be Messiah, makes his situation, if anything, worse. Nothing that gives Him influence and a sense of personal security throughout Israel carries any weight with Pilate and His accusers. Then Pilate makes a strategic mistake.

Now it was the custom at the Feast to release a prisoner whom the people requested. A man called Barabbas (a true revolutionary and terrorist) was in prison with the inusrrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did.

All governments that operate under law, including ours, have loopholes that allow for the absure and the capricious. For reasons we no longer know, the custom had arisen in Jerusalem for the Roman Procurator to engage in a cat-and-mouse game with the Jews at Passover. In this game he offered to release a prisoner of the Romans, no doubt as one more way of keeping peace with a volatile populace. We do not know how the game was played, but if the following exchange is any indication, the pawns in the game were the lives of prisoners. Pilate (mistakenly) sees it as a way of getting Jesus off his hands without any unpleasantness.

"Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?" asked Pilate. You can feel the sarcasm in those words, the king of the Jews. It shows how unconcerned Pilate was about Jesus' being a political revolutionary. Pilate is counting on the crowd to see the humor in the situation and accept his offer. God knows what kind of abuse the crowd might have heaped on Jesus, if they had permitted Pilate to release Him. Pilate doesn't care. Pilate wants Jesus off his hands, and he wants to stick it to the chief priests.

"Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?" asked Pilate, knowing it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. Do you know what envy is, and do you know the difference between envy and jealousy? Jealousy is anger that someone is trying to take what belongs to you. Envy is sorrow that someone has something that you don't have. It is instructive that Christian morality teaches that envy, not jealousy, is the deadly sin. Envy will eat your soul away.

In the judgement of Pontius Pilate, who was no paragon of moral virtue, envy is doing its deadly work in the souls of the chief priests. I think it is worth giving credence to Pilate's assessment. People like Pilate and the chief priests, who hate each other, can see each other's faults with remarkable clarity.

The chief priests are sorry that Jesus has what they will never have. The unbought grace of life emanates from Him and draws people to Himself as a magnet attracts iron filings. He with none of their credentials speaks with eloquence and power to the consciences of their generation. They have come face to face with a wisdom greater than Solomon's, and they hate Him for it. Pilate is right about the chief priests, but he miscalculates their role in the Passover game he is playing with the crowd.

But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead. We have no idea how they did it. Mark does not say. He merely notes the undermining of Pilate's intentions and leaves us to draw the conclusion that a true terrorist and killer will be turned loose and, unless something unforeseen happens, a truly innocent man will take the punishment Barabbas deserves.

"What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?" Pilate asked them. Pilate seems to be doing all he can to absolve himself of responsibility for Jesus' fate. He knows Jesus is innocent. He knows the chief priests' motives are base. He knows the chief priests are manipulating him to do the dirty work of putting Jesus to death. He knows his ploy to get Jesus off his hands has failed. He hates them all, but he will at least put final responsibility for the fate of Jesus on the mob. They oblige him in the most chilling way.

"Crucify him!" they shouted. How in God's name did it come to that? Were the chief priests behind that? Mark does not say. It may be nothing more than the unpredictable nature of mob psychology. Pilate has one more card to play.

"Why? What crime has he committed?" asked Pilate. In a proper judicial proceeding that question would be central. This is no proper judicial proceeding. Reason and fairness have no place here. The man who can spare Jesus has abdicated his responsibility. He cannot have been surprised at the response of the mob. But they shouted all the louder, "Crucify him!"

Do you remeber what finally prompted the reluctant King Herod to put John the Baptist to death? His wife's daughter had said to him, "I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptist on a platter." The king was greatly distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he did not want to refuse her. How often do huge decisions rest on flawed motives? It is the same with Pilate.

Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. The salvation of the world turns on a moment of bureaucratic caprice. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified. Many timees, we have noted Mark's habit of understating things. To say, He had Jesus flogged, encompasses an act of inexpressible cruelty and pain.

Millions of people have experienced that cruelty. Jesus was one of them. But because He was one of them, the suffering multitudes have found in Him someone, who bore their sorrows in a way that gives Him a solidarity with them and, for other reasons, gives them hope in their terrible sufferings.

What do you think Barabbas felt as He walked free into the Judean springtime? What do you think he thought about that day, when his life lay in the hands of an unpredictable mob, and against all odds he went free? Do you think he had any interest in the Man who took his place? Do you think His thoughts deepened in later years, when he heard the story of his liberation told in the context of the much bigger story of the Man who took his place?

There is an ancient manuscript whose reliability is in question, but which claims to give a piece of most interesting information about Barabbas. It claims that Barabbas' full name was Jesus Barabbas. Several people from that generation bore the name Jesus; so it is not impossible that Barabbas' parents called him that. There is no independent confirmation that Barabbas was also called Jesus.

It is only a curiousity, but it is a suggestive one. Jesus (of Nazareth) died for Jesus (Barabbas). The name points to the reality of that day in Pilate's presence. A true terrorist and killer went free, and a truly innocent man took the punishment he deserved. Religious envy, a friend's treachery, political cynicism, and mob psychology conspired to bring about a substitution that unintentionally gives us a model of one of the deep truthst of the kingdom of God.

Ages before Barabbas, Isaiah (Isa. 53:4-6) had written these mysterious words about a figure he calls the servant of the LORD.

     Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows,
     yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.
     But he was pierced for our transgressions,
     he was crushed for our iniquities;
     the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
     and by his wounds we are healed.
     We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
     each of us has turned to his own way;
     and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Within a generation of Pilate's sentence and Barabbas' escape the Apostle could write these words: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me – not just on my behalf but, like Barabbas, in my place (Galatians 2:20).

Jesus is the great Substitute. He bore in His person the curse, the penalty that humanity deserves. The Apostle Paul again puts it in memorable language in 2 Corinthians 5:21. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

In your religious experience is there anything that feels like Barabbas felt? Do you have the sense that you have escaped a fate we all deserve, because that fate fell on Jesus Christ? As one who does, I have to say that is where an enduring sense of liberation and gratitude comes from. The statement, "God loves you," has substance, not in a passing emotion but in the events before Pilate, in the Praetorium and on the cross. "Mine, mine was the transgression, but thine the deadly pain." He loved me and gave himself for me. He is worthy of all worship and praise and adoration. Hail our great Substitute!