Good Friday

 Is 52:13-53:12; Hb 4:14-16, 5:7-9; Jn 18:1-19:42

After parading a scourged Jesus in royal purple with a crown of thorns before the crowd, Pilot asks, as part of the paschal pardon, whom the they wants released to them, Jesus or Barabbas. 

Today when we did the passion reading those of us in this congregation playing the role of the crowd shouted release Barabbas for us and crucify Jesus. We did not want to do that but we read the script as playing a part in the story.  

Barabbas was a notorious prisoner (Mat 27:16), revolutionary (Jn 18:40) and murderer (Mk 15:7).

How could anyone have shockingly barked for Barabbas and hollered for Jesus’ death? Archbishop Fulton Sheen, in his powerful meditations on the Way of the Cross, helps us all to see how in every moral decision we are faced with a similarly momentous choice. 

“How would I have answered [Pilate’s] question, had I been in the courtyard that Good Friday morning,” Sheen asked. “I cannot escape answering by saying that the question belongs only to the past, for it is as actual now as ever. My conscience is the tribunal of Pilate. Daily, hourly, and every minute of the day, Christ comes before that tribunal, as virtue, honesty, and purity; Barabbas comes as vice, dishonesty, and uncleanness. As often as I choose to speak the uncharitable word, do the dishonest action, or consent to the evil thought, I say in so many words, ‘Release unto me Barabbas,’ and to choose Barabbas means to crucify Christ.

Every choice between good and evil, Sheen stressed, is between Christ and Barabbas-in-disguise. If Christ was crucified to take away the sins of the world, every sin, to some degree, is a choice for him to die. 

We obviously don’t like to think about sin this way. We’d prefer to think about our sins, at most, as peccadillos, as a failure in spiritual manners, rather than a betrayal like that to which Judas, Peter and the other apostles succumbed on Holy Thursday, or like that to which the crowds, five days after hailing Jesus with palm branches, yielded on Good Friday. We may be urged on by popular opinion — like those in the courtyard were swept up by the instigation of those, including religious leaders, who wanted Jesus executed in the most sadistic manner possible — but we cannot evade personal responsibility for the connection between our sins and Jesus’ suffering and death. 

On Good Friday, Pilate asks, “Whom do you want me to release to you?” Christ and Barabbas stand before us. To choose Christ means to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow him, metaphorically chopping off our hands and feet and plucking out our eyes if they lead us to sin and embracing his call to virtue and holiness. To choose Christ means to reject sin.

 

For the wrong choices we already made against Jesus he prays on the Cross: Father forgive them for they do not know what they do. Let this good Friday help us to embrace Jesus’ forgiveness and gain the courage to reject Barabbas and choose Christ.