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JESUS, BARABBAS and PILATE: THREE VIEWS of PEACE and Mstice

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JESUS, BARABBAS and PILATE: THREE VIEWS of PEACE and Mstice NOVEMBER/ DECEM BER, 1974 Vol. XX IV , No. 8 LIBRARY Broadway (at 120th Str eet), New York , N.Y. 10027 Subscription: U. S. $4 a year; Telephone: (Area 212) 662 - 7100 overseas, $4. 50. EDITORIAL A ND CI RCULATION OFFIC E 1-15 co pi es, 50¢ each; 16-50 copie s. Room 678. 475 Riverside Drive . New York. N. Y. 10027 35¢ each ; m ore than 50 copies. 25¢ each Telephone: (Area 212) 870- 2177 JESUS, BARABBAS AND PILATE: THREE VIEWS OF PEACE AND mSTICE Howard Schomer "Pilate addressed them again, in his desire to release Jesus .....but their shouts prevailed He released the man they asked for (Barabbas), the man who had been put in prison for insurrection and murder, and gave Jesus up to their will .... There was an inscription above his head . : 'This is the king of the Jews '." Luke 23: 20, 23, 25, 38. This is not the usual time in the chur ch year t o preach about the trial, condem­ nation and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. The rhythm of the ecclesiastical seasons has its point, helping Christians across the centuries not to neglect any a s pe c t of their faith. But I have just come through an extraordinary experience that has led me to look with heightened awareness at these decisive Gos pe l events. I want to share with you certain special features which I now see in this familiar but ever awesome story. The personal experience I refer to is eight days of soul-searching in the company of brothers and sisters from all the major religions of humanity in the World Conf e r ence on Religion and Peace , at Louvain, Belgium. When it was f i r s t announced that a great meeting of representatives of the world's religions was going to be held in Europe this summer, focussed on the sensitive issues of peace and justice, the initial reaction of many European Chr i s t ian leaders was, quite frankly, FEAR. Solemn Ge rma n Protestant theologians, for example, were uneasy about the dangers of "syn cretism" - i.e. of making some kind of undesirable goulash of religious elements so incompatible that it would be preferable to keep them safely apart. In this issue we print a sermon by Dr. Howard Schomer, World Issues Secretary ­ United Church Board for World Ministries, preached on September IS, 1974 at t he Riverside Church, New Yor k , New Yor k . 2 Other traditionalists were afraid that the only way people as diverse as Buddhists, Shintoists, Christians, Confucianists, Muslims, Jews,Hindus and the rest could achieve a meeting of minds, and not merely polite fellowship, would be by reducing their historic teachings to a lowest common denominator as meaningless as "Peace is wonderful!" and "Justice is just fine!" People of many religions, on various continents, wondered if serious interreligious d i a logue about such critical themes as peace and justice could be undertaken without compromising the integrity of each of the religions involved. None of these fears proved justified. The hundreds of religious leaders gathered in the mediaeval Belgian university town of Louva i n examined unflinchingly many of the bitterest conflicts and injustices that today set one people, race or class against another. The interaction was intense, b u t s o were the moments of quiet listening to each other's acts of prayer, of meditation and of worship. At the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches, in nearby Amsterdam in 1948, historically separated Christian denominations vowed "to " t a y together." At Louvain in 1974, individual leaders of most of the religions o f the earth "resolved henceforth to serve humanity together, each in the way most in keeping with the convictions of his spiritual family and local circumstances." After many hours of debate, the World Conference on Religion and Peace agreed on a message that - shunning vague generalities and pointing toward the specific recom­ menda tions contained in Commission reports - constitutes a solid commitment by religious leaders and a fervent call to their varied constituencies around the world. I wish that all of you could have been present in the crowded Gothic church of St. Peter's in Louvain recentiy as this appeal to the religious communities in every land was read in a televised service of celebration. The Louvain Declaration, unani­ mously adopted by standing vote in an earlier business session, was released to the world in a colorful ceremony. Selected portions were read by members of all the major religions of mankind, each in his tongue, and each wearing his traditional garb. In the concluding session of the Conference Board of Directors, various participants spontaneously indicated their intention to publish this message of common conviction in their own tongues as soon as they reached home - specifically in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Cingalese, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Portugese, French , Dut ch , German, Polish, and still others. In this rich Conference context, I found my Christian searc h for the meaning of peace and justice leading ever and again to the revealing sh owdown scene which climaxed the life and ministry of the Master. What do > this collision between the divergent social visions of Jesus, of Barabbas and of Pilate mean for my own Christian work for peace and justice in this twentieth c e n tur y of the Christian mission in the wo r Ld ? The Rightfulness and the Insufficiency of Li b e r a tion Movements I find Barabbas, the zealous insurrectionist, as important a Biblical symbol as Abraham, the pioneer of faith, and Moses, ~he giver of law. He stands for the indomi­ table will of the Jewish people to achieve their national liberation from all foreign rule, and the establishment of their own political order in accordance with God's revealed plan to Israel. Barabbas was in the Roman prison in Jerusalem because of his part in a recent uprising in the city, in whic h he had been charged with murder. In the language of threatened city officials in our da y, Barabbas was a bold urban terrorist, perhaps an urban guerilla leader. 3 Until quite recently, New Testament scholarship laid all too little stress on the significance of the crowd's outcry for the release of Barabbas rather than Jesus. But hear Professor Cullman's words written in 1970: "The rebellion against the Roman occupation forces presented .... in the time of Jesus the great problem of Palestine, and it was simultaneously a religious and politic~problem .. .. TIle Zealotist agitation, which was increasingly well organized, pressed ... like a nightmare on the Roman officials in Palestine ... \{hen the Apostle Paul appeared before the Roman tribune, he was asked whether he was not the .. , leader who had plotted the revolt of the 4,000 'Sicarii' (Ass a s s i.ns ) .... Eve r y Jew in New Testament times was forced to take a stand regarding this (resistance) problem. It was an especially burning issue since it concerned not only politics, but also faith and the Hessianic hope. H Cullman believes it likely that three of the Twelve Disciples (not only Simon the Zealot, but also Peter "Barjona" and Judas "Iscariot," "Barjona" probably meaning "Terrorist" and "Iscariot" "Assassin") were recruited from the ranks of the freedom fighters. We must keep in mind the broad outlines of this Jewish struggle for national liber­ ation from Roman rule. At the outset of the reign of that Quisling king, Herod the Great, some forty years before the birth of Jesus, the first serious challenge oc­ curred. Herod readily crushed the resisters and executed their leader. The party went underground, adopting as their slogan, "The sword, and not sparingly; no king but Jehovah!" A second important uprising occurred ~t the time of a Roman census, when Jesus was about twelve years old, and it was lead by a certain Judas of Galilee. The bloody repression of this offensive was long remembered. Ne v e r t h e l e s s , the resistance spirit grew through another sixty years, ending in full-scale rebellion in 66 A.D. The tragic culmination is well known: in four years of strife and siege, the Temple was burned, the Sanhedrin or Jewish political Co un ­ cil ended, the whole city of Jerusalem turned into a heap of ruins. When Zealot­ led Judea was finally vanquished by the Romans, a contemporary historian wrote that 1,356,460 Jews had fallen, and 97,000 were taken as prisoners. In another sixty years, the Emperor of Rome built a stately pagan city on top of the Jerusalem ruins, with a temple of Zeus where the Temple of Jehovah had stood for a thousand years. Still another insurrection then aborted. Henceforth, Jews were barred from the city save one day a year, when they were permitted to approach the Wailing Wall, mourning for glories past and dreaming of a better time to come. Thus ended the noble Zealot liberation movement, with Jerusalem under Gentile rule for nearly two thousand years, until the new and zealous Zionism issued in the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948, all of Jerusalem coming under its rule only seven years ago. As we ponder the poignant failure of the ancient zealot national vision, the head of today's Israel government is pleading with United States leaders for still greater arms shipments in order to defend the present precarious armistice in a Middle East which still knows no peace and little justice. What shall we say then about the Barabbas stance, or today's violent liberation movements on several continents? Over against the systematic, built-in institutional violence of every kind of foreign domination or domestic t yranny, who can question the rightfulness of the goal of national, racial or class liberation? Who can condemn the murderous attacks of the Barabbas-like freedom fighters when they are confronted with Herod-like massacres of the innocents, whether these massacres are committed with napalm and tanks or through the ruthless economic exploitation of forced labor, rigged market prices, and the trickery of ideological subjugation? 4 Only ...
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