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Faith is an issue that has vexed people throughout our heritage and time. Given the tremendous difficulty that even we have reconciling our doubtfulness with our desire for conviction, separated as we are by two thousand years from the Biblical age, imagine how much more difficult it would have been to struggle against belief if you were one who witnessed the living Christ and encountered evidence of his miracles. I remember several years ago viewing a photograph from a magazine. It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa. They were experiencing a devastating drought and she was holding her dead baby in her arms, looking up to heaven with the most desperate expression. I looked at it and remembered my own trials through the fire and asked, "Is it possible to truly believe that there is a loving or caring God when all this women needed was rain?" Par Lankerkvist's book Barabbas portrays a much bigger picture behind the character than mearly a violent brutish man. That is, Barabbas had the heart like a disciple, but he was not public about it and lacked faith or imagination understanding the height, depth, and width of God's love. According to (Luke 23:13-25 KJ), Barabbas was not just any man, but the criminal who was spared from the cross when the mob was offered the choice of setting Jesus or one of his fellow prisoners free, that the innocent Christ quite literally died for his sins and ours. This is what Par Lagerkvist illustrates in his novel Barabbas. Barabbas is set free but not before seeing the luminescent figure of Christ and hearing him plead that Barabbas be spared and not himself. In the long hours between Thursday night and Sunday morning, those who knew Jesus or had been touched by his life were plagued by the events surrounding his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. I imagine they wrestled with the suddenness of the crisis. They ached with the part they had played or failed to play. They mourned his loss, grieved his violent end, and feared for the future. Little did they imagine that the world would be turned upside down once more by the dawn. Barabbas, too, I imagine, had much to occupy his thoughts those nights. His name in Aramaic means "the son of the father," a nickname which made him an unlikely pair with Jesus. Which of these "sons of the father" do you prefer, Jerusalem? Your harmless king or this thief and murderer? (adlived John 18:39 KJ) No one, least of all Barabbas, would have expected the call of the crowd to be in his favor.
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