GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
MARK 15:6-11
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6 Now Pilate used to release one prisoner for them each feast– whoever they asked for. 7 And a man named Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder in the rebellion. 8 The crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he usually did for them. 9 He answered them: “Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” 10 He knew that it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed him over. 11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead.
Mark tells us what most of his readers would already have known, that there was a custom at that time of giving up a prisoner every year at this feast, that is, Passover. While this custom was once well-known, by the time that Matthew and Mark were writing– perhaps ten or more years later– the custom had ended. Matthew uses the rare pluperfect verb tense to tell us this. The force of a pluperfect verb is to say that something took place in the past, but that even if it was once a regular or ongoing act, it had now stopped, such as: “I used to live in Wisconsin in my childhood.” Since Matthew also says “governor” in the singular, it is likely and even probable that this had been a custom for Pontius Pilate only. The only references we have about this custom are here in the Gospels.
The man that Pilate did not expect to release was Barabbas. When we put together the details given about him in all four Gospels, we find that he was a notorious prisoner, that he had been arrested in a rebellion or insurrection along with other men who had committed murder in the rebellion, that the riot or rebellion had taken place here in Jerusalem, and that Barabbas himself was guilty of being a brigand (murderer) with the others. We have no other information about this uprising, but it must have happened recently, or else Barabbas would have been punished for murder already.
Here we are told that the chief priests themselves stirred up the crowd to demand the release of Barabbas, even though he was a murderer. Pilate was a Roman and a fairly rational man, so the blind hatred of the Jewish priests came as a surprise. Why would they want to kill an obviously innocent man, one that Pilate himself had already judged to be innocent, and to have him release a known murderer in his place? Barabbas was the very opposite of Christ in every way.
So Christ our Lord in his innocence fulfills a strange passage: “He is in the company of evildoers; he is associated with wicked men” (Job 34:8). Peter later preached: “You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you” (Acts 3:14). And we cannot help but remember Abraham’s own plea to God as he prayed for Sodom: “Far be it from you to do such a thing– to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike” (Genesis 18:25). But this is what the Father had foreseen, and this is what the Father knew that justice would demand. For a cruel government will destroy people wholesale, burn their houses, wreck their towns, their fields, and all their property, just to bring a single man to justice. A cruel government or king will think that such an act will keep some other man from committing whatever outrage brought on the war in the first place. But God was not punishing a hundred for the crimes of one. He was going to punish one for the sins of all.
“A murderer they save; the Prince of life they slay.” The Psalm consoles us: “They band together against the righteous and condemn the innocent to death. But the LORD has become my fortress, and my God the rock in whom I take refuge” (Psalm 94:21-22). It is precisely the innocence of Jesus that we take refuge in. He is the spotless lamb, guilty of nothing at all, whose blood was shed in our place. For we are not innocent, we are not spotless. We are guilty of everything! But by his blood we are spattered and cleansed, and by his blood we are made innocent, spotless, and not guilty, for all time and forevermore. Put your trust in Jesus, for in him alone you have everlasting life.
Yet cheerful he
To suff’ring goes
That he his foes
From death might free.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Mark 15:6-11 Barabbas