Excerpt from Samuel Wells's Power and Passion: Six Characters in Search of Resurrection (eBook). 

[A Man Who Changed too Little and a Man Who Changed Everything]

The choice between Barabbas and Jesus, a choice that I am suggesting is a central choice in the whole gospel story, is not a choice between a man who took a political route and a man who took a spiritual route. It is not a choice between a man who wanted outer change and a man who called people to inner change. It is a choice between a man who changed too little and a man who changed everything.

Barabbas changed too little. Yes, he had weapons. Yes, he had plans — to unsettle the cozy alliance between the Romans and the Jerusalem authorities. Yes, he had supporters. Yes, in his wake people lay dead, tensions grew, national resurgence seemed a possibility. But fundamentally Barabbas … still believed that what mattered was who the government was. They still believed that armies steered the tiller of history. They were still in thrall to what they took to be the forces that shape reality.

And those forces were exactly what Jesus changed. Jesus did not come to underwrite the forces that everyone understood to shape reality. He came to change them. Yet even today people assume that Barabbas was right: that government is the veil civilized societies put over the fist of naked power, that hidden forces such as markets and economics use their unseen hand to determine the course of history, and that Jesus was a bobbing buoy for truth and virtue who was swept out to sea by the surge of these irresistible waves. But to believe in Jesus is to perceive how profound was the change that Jesus brought. After Jesus, history swung on a new axis. The center of the universe became cross and resurrection.

Barabbas or Jesus. Who do you choose?

The cross was for Jesus something it could never be for Barabbas. For Barabbas, the cross meant the rubbing out of opposition, the confrontation with the ruthlessness of Rome, and the personal cost of what he must have hoped would be a national triumph. For Jesus, the cross was the place where God took into and upon himself the whole ghastly horror of human sin and folly. In the resurrection of Jesus, God turned this horror into glory. Just as Jesus took the woman's twelve years of bleeding into himself and emitted healing and salvation, so through cross and resurrection God took sin and death into himself and emitted joy. Jesus wasn't changing just the government; he was changing the very heart of reality.

This is the transformation of reality. This is a change Barabbas could not even imagine, let alone bring about. Barabbas represented an endless sequence of violence. He was a man of some desire to set Israel free and some desire to make something for himself, a man whose story offered yet another element in an endless catalogue of injustice, resentment, recklessness, and punishment. Jesus represented a fundamental transformation of the forces that seemed to make lives like Barabbas' inevitable, an inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven, a shower of grace. The crowd chose Barabbas. And, most of the time, they still do.

- Samuel Wells

Q: What's one area of your life where you once followed Barabbas but now follow Jesus?

-Adam Forrest, Zondervan

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(Images and some styling above is a web-exclusive feature not included in the text of Power and Passsion. Image attribution: Inset of "Barabbas" by James Tissot, c. 1886-1894, via Wikimedia Commons, courtesy Brooklyn Museum [Public Domain]. Inset of "Christ before Pilate" by Mihály Mukácsy, 1881, via Wikimedia commons, courtesy cgfa.sunsite.dk/munkacsy [Public Domain]. This post does not represent the views of Zondervan or any of its representatives. The writer's personal opinions are shared only for information purposes. To receive new Zondervan Blog posts in your reader or email inbox, subscribe to Zondervan Blog.)