Like a lot of things I post, I'm not sure I completely agree with this, but it is an interesting take on a character in the Passion narrative that doesn't get a lot of attention. A quick check confirms that Barabbas does literally mean "Son of the father" in Hebrew. While there is no evidence that "the father" is YHWH, it is still an interesting piece of information. The parallel between our salvation and Barabbas (neither deserved their salvation) is interesting to me. It is entirely possible that this is something that pretty much everyone else in Christendom had already figured out and that I'm late to the party, Nonetheless, it seemed worth borrowing.
"There is something about Barabbas that just refuses to stay in the “nice, tidy Bible story” category, and honestly I think it is because his story hits a little too close to home if you actually let yourself sit in it longer than a Sunday school recap. We like to treat him like the obvious background villain, the rough-looking guy you can safely judge from a distance, the one you mentally label as the wrong choice so you can feel a little better about yourself. He is convenient like that. He makes the crowd look foolish and makes us feel like we would have handled it better, like we would have stepped in and been the one reasonable person saying hey maybe do not release the criminal and execute the innocent man, just a thought.
But then you start looking at his name, and suddenly it gets a whole lot less comfortable. Barabbas literally means son of the father, which is almost offensively on the nose when you realize who he is standing next to. On one side you have Jesus, the Son of the Father, the one who actually belongs in that title in every possible sense. On the other side you have Barabbas, son of the father, the guilty version, the broken version, the one who actually earned the sentence that is about to be carried out. And the crowd, in all their wisdom and emotional stability, looks at both options and goes yeah we will take the guilty one, go ahead and let him walk. You almost want to step into the scene like you are watching someone about to back a trailer into a ditch and say stop, stop, stop, you are about to make a very obvious mistake here.
But nobody stops it, and Barabbas walks out of there still breathing, which means somewhere in the middle of all that chaos you have a man who woke up that morning fully aware that his day was going to end on a cross. He knew how Rome handled people like him. There was no optimism, no backup plan, no last minute legal loophole where he was going to represent himself and win. His story was over, and he knew it. And then suddenly it was not. Suddenly he is being pushed out into the daylight instead of marched up a hill, and I do not care how tough or hardened you are, that is going to mess with your head a little bit. You do not just casually dust yourself off and go grab lunch like wow that was wild, anyway what is for dinner.
Because the problem is not just that he lived. The problem is that he knows why he lived. He watched it happen. He watched the crowd choose him, and he watched Jesus not stop it. That is the part that should bother us more than it does. Jesus could have spoken up. He could have defended Himself. He could have pointed out the obvious flaw in the crowd’s decision making process, which frankly was not their strongest moment. Instead He stands there calm and steady like this is not surprising to Him at all, like He knows exactly how this is going to go and is choosing to let it play out anyway. And now Barabbas is stuck walking around with that in the back of his mind, which is not exactly something you just ignore and move on from like it was a mildly awkward social interaction.
And this is where it stops being a story we can comfortably observe and starts being one that kind of corners us in a way we would rather avoid. Because we like to believe we are not Barabbas. We like categories, and we put him in the “obviously guilty” category while we place ourselves somewhere in the “generally decent human who tries pretty hard” category. We compare ourselves to people who are worse and feel pretty okay about the results, like if life were graded on a curve we are at least passing, maybe even above average on a good day. Meanwhile this story comes along and completely ignores our grading system and replaces it with something a lot less flattering.
Because Barabbas does not earn anything in this moment. He does not improve himself. He does not get a second chance because he showed potential or wrote a really convincing apology letter. He is just guilty, completely and inconveniently guilty, and still he is the one who walks free while the innocent man takes his place. Which means the entire story hinges not on what Barabbas did, but on what Jesus chose to do. And if we are honest, that is the part that makes us squirm a little, because it removes our ability to feel like we contributed something meaningful to our own rescue.
And yet that is exactly where the story lands whether we like it or not. Barabbas is not there so we can feel superior to him. He is there so we can recognize ourselves in him, which is a lot less fun but a lot more honest. We are the ones who had a sentence we could not outrun or fix or explain away with better wording. We are the ones who would have been standing there knowing full well we did not deserve to walk out of that situation. And instead, somehow, we are the ones blinking in the sunlight trying to figure out why we are still here while Jesus was led away in our place.
So yes, we can sit there and say we would have chosen Jesus that day, and maybe we like to believe that about ourselves because it sounds better and feels more heroic. But the reality this story keeps pressing on us is not about what we would have chosen, it is about what He chose. And what He chose was to take the place of the guilty so the guilty could walk free. Which means whether we like it or not, we are not the ones standing in the crowd making the right call.
We are Barabbas.
And we are the ones who walked away. "
