Word of Salvation – Vol.34 No.10 – March 1989

 

Barabbas!

 

Sermon by Rev. A. I. DeGraaf on Matthew 27:15-26

Reading: Isaiah 53, Matthew 27:15-26

Singing: Ps. H. 126; 351; BoW.301; BoW.307

 

Dear Congregation,

There is an old Latin saying: “Vox populi… vox Dei!”
“The voice of the people… is the voice of God”.
That was – and is – the motto of democracy: the majority of the people decide and the laws they make turn out the best.  Well… is that right?

We know that in a sinful world the alternative to democracy is often too gruesome to contemplate.  When a dictator has the power to make all the laws and decisions, that power corrupts the man and most dictators turn out cruel men… even if they didn’t start that way.  But a democratic vote can turn out wrong too!  Then your union can vote for a strike on the wrong grounds, and the majority of a nation can vote for killing new-born babies in the womb.

The democratic way of life can turn out to be the democratic way… of death.  Then the vox populi, (the voice of the people) can turn out to be, not the vox Dei (the voice of God) but the vox diaboli (the voice of the devil).

That has happened a lot, too.  And is happening even today.  You’d say there is hardly clearer example of that happening than that vote taken on the square before Pilate’s Court House on that Good Friday morning… where the people cast their vote… and they chose a murderer, a guerrilla fighter like that girl in Ireland, (and we know too that guerrilla fighters often turn out murderers of innocent bystanders… anything to make that Political Point!).  And they chose him to live and Jesus to die.  Jesus who had been a healer instead of a killer, who had comforted the poor and been a helper for the helpless, yes, who had even done the opposite of murder raising dead people to life again.  That Judge never should have done that, should he?  Instead of acquitting Jesus he allowed the people to vote on who should be to condemned.  To let everybody have a vote on whom to free and whom to send to the gallows?

Let’s look at that at that first: to that crucial vote!  Democracy gone berserk!  Surely the judge was wrong to do that.  God had given this judge the power to do justice.  Instead he perverted the cause of justice.  In fact, that judge, looking at the evidence, had come to the right conclusion: Jesus was innocent!

That needed no jury to mull over for days and days!  It was as clear as daylight.  Pilate thought that to everybody this thing would also be as clear as daylight!  Let the people vote about it!  But you see, a mob has more things to influence it than just the evidence.  Even when the media were not as powerful as today in influencing popular opinion, there were other factors at work.  Religious leaders saw in Jesus a competition they did not want and so they went about buying votes.  And a large crowd of people can get into strange moods: when a herd instinct can bring them into a mood of violence!  That still happens today.  You can already see it when a bunch of nice boys get together into a gang and the one dares the other, and they get into awful mischief.  In a gang a strange instinct takes over.

Mind you, there on Pilate’s court-yard it was not just a gang of people, not just a mindless mob.  They were all God’s people!  Israelites who had Bible verses in their memory and who were about to celebrate God’s great doings as He had set them free from tyranny long ago.  They were about to celebrate Passover!  And yet it is they who got into that mob violence thing that made them cry, “CRUCIFY!” while they had sung “HOSANNA!” to the same Jesus only five days before!

I am sure there were decent fathers there and nice Jewish boys and girls; people whom you could meet and say: “What a lovely upstanding citizen!”

You see?  When we say – as the Bible says – that it is our sin that has nailed Jesus to the cross, you may look around you here in this church, or on the Blacktown Main Street on a sunny Thursday afternoon before the banks close, and think: “Really, it can’t be that bad!”  You can watch your neighbours here in this church or look up to the fellow in the pulpit and think: “Anita Cobby would have been safe with me…!”  I wouldn’t think of murdering like that.  I have been scrupulous with my last tax return, really, I take a dim view of stealing – even from the government even when they, in my opinion, mismanage taxpayers’ money.

And I wouldn’t dream of going to bed with someone else’s partner… oh well, dream maybe but then I’d call that a bad dream when I talk to my wife about it.

And aren’t we glad we live in a democratic country where the majority wants the right things… so far?  Well my friend, look again.  The people who cried “CRUCIFY” were decent members of God’s own people.  Church people. They were fired up by a wrong sort of democracy.  They agreed with everyone else and instead of fearing God they were afraid of “being different”.  Everybody did it so it couldn’t be wrong could it?  Just go along.  And yet that way decent citizens became a mob of murderers and justice-perverters right there.

Then decent little citizens can keep silent like they did in Germany in the ’30’s (sure they were not all Nazi’s), but after the war they discovered what happened in Auschwitz.  Martin Niemoller, the German pastor who was in a concentration camp himself for his battle against Nazism – said to a church full of people in the Netherlands shortly after the war: “May God forgive us, that’s what we did”.  I was there and have heard him say it.  Just as many Americans felt guilty about what happened in Viet Nam… afterwards.  The Bible says: “YOU TOO”.  All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

That the world still is not a dirtier place to live in is only by the restraining mercy of God.  Democracy in a nation of rebellious sinners who do not let themselves be ruled by God is as much a way of death as the rule of men like Hitler, Idi Amin or Marcos.

The voice of the people is not the voice of God when it allows itself blindly to be manipulated by the media or follows leaders unthinkingly.  Our leaders were Adam and Eve already and the Bible says that when they chose to go it alone without God, and find out good and evil just by their own reason, they led us all into disaster.  We too follow Adam and Eve in that and only by a miracle of God can we get out of that bind.

Neat middle-class rebellion and hatred against God and unwillingness to let Him rule you is rebellion just the same.  Just wait for the right (or rather: wrong) circumstances and you see what comes out.  “Hosanna!” becomes “CRUCIFY!”, whenever God’s will crosses our designs.  Then we rule Him… VOTE Him!… out of our lives.  And it does not make much difference whether we do that by a raucous mob scene crying, “Crucify”!  “Away with Him!” or whether we use the evolutionary theory or the scientific method to declare Him dead.

And you can do that by just going along.  The Bible warns in Exodus 23: “Do not follow a crowd in doing evil”.  Peer pressure is no excuse before God.  What helped bring Jesus on the cross is the usual human unwillingness to be different from one’s mates.  The decisions may be taken by others but you go along because you think: what can I do on my own?  That’s in fact how most of us do our sinning anyway.  I said before: unless a miracle happens, we are all in that bind!  But, you see: that miracle has happened.  The miracle is that the vox populi strangely turned out to be the vox Dei after all.  God Himself voted… against His Son and for Barabbas.

That is my second point:
The first was: (1) The crucial vote… democracy gone berserk…!

Now the second is:
(2) the curious freedom
in which a murderer may go walk in the sunlight.

The holy one dies… so that the guilty may go free.  You can imagine there are a lot of stories around about this man Barabbas.  But they are all pious fiction.  None of it is in the Bible.  At the most we can ask some questions.

Like, “did he also go to Golgotha to look at the cross where Jesus bled to death and whose death gave him life and freedom? … Did that change his life?  Did he come to believe in Jesus?”  I hope he did… for otherwise his freedom was only short-lived.

What good does it do you if an earthly judge sets you free but you still have to – as we all must – face the heavenly Judge, whose condemnation for sin is everlasting death?

And yet Barabbas is for us a symbol!  His name already: it is a curious name: “Bar-abbas’ means “Father’s son”.  Of course that’s what we all are: our dad’s kids.  In that way he could have been named “EveryMan” like that person in that medieval play who stood for Mankind.  Every sinful mother’s son… or every father’s kid.  But there is more to it.  As I said before and I say it again with deep wonder and joy: the Voice of the people there on that court-square became the Voice of God!

The Innocent had to die and wanted to die so that sinners – also sinners-by-association, just running along with the crowd, might go free and receive and eternal life out of Jesus’ new death.  He took our sins upon Himself, and paid the penalty for them all.  He died for murderers and prostitutes, for people who wanted God dead.  People who had nothing to wait for than death and judgement after that.  People on the death row of hell.  The miracle is that the prison warder comes and his key opens your cell, and like Barabbas you may walk out into the sunlight blinking your eyes in wonder.  Someone innocent died that you may life for ever.

This way Barabbas became the symbol for everyone who sees in Jesus’ death his own death, and receives life and everlasting freedom because of that blood shed for him.  To hear God say to you – and all you need do or even can do is accept this Free Gift in faith! – to hear God the Heavenly Judge Himself say to you: call me “Abba”, call me “Daddy” YOUR FATHER; to become a Bar-Abbas in that glorious sense that you are forever The Father’s Child, set Free – because the Holy One took your place under His judgement; that is Good News indeed.

That is the gospel: the doing and the dying of Jesus Christ.  And it is that marvellous doing of God and His Son that makes this Friday a GOOD Friday forever.  The best there ever was in all the history of the world.  If you accept this in faith, it’s good for you too.

Jesus died.  You may live forever.  Free!

AMEN.