I am writing on that day of the year which, with a cunningly straight face, many people call Good Friday. Today marks the moment of vicarious redemption, the sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth whose death by crucifixion determines the point at which time as we know it runs either in reverse or runs forward, away from the zero hour of his bloody sacrifice in either direction.
Subsequent to his arrest, scriptures inform us, Jesus was taken before the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. We are told that it was a custom at the time of Passover for a one prisoner to be chosen for release, and Jesus found himself weighed by the people against Barabbas, variously a “notable prisoner” (Matthew 27:15), a rebel “who had committed murder in the insurrection” (Mark 15:7), “a robber” (John 18:40), or condemned for “sedition” and “murder” (Luke 23:19).
Barabbas is a literary, psychological requirement of narrative, not to be sought out in historical record, but understood in a particular plexus of allusions playing out among the disparate authors of scriptures across hundreds of years.
The Passion narrative depends, of course, upon the crowd choosing to release Barabbas, so that Jesus of Nazareth is not pulled from the suicidal furrow in which he has trapped himself. Choosing to free Jesus would defeat the object. The choice of the Jews to free Barrabas seems like oglocratic justice, the ambivalent King of the Jews condemned by a mob of his fellows, and it becomes a taproot for anti-Semites. But in narrative terms, no choice is made. Instead, a poetic inevitability is confirmed. Pilate, the superego, perhaps the one man who can see the pathology of the moment, objects and washes his hands of the whole sordid affair.
Earlier, to his critics, Jesus had declared, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). What he is fulfilling in crucifixion is the brutal apotheosis of the ritual of the scapegoat laid out in that pernicious book of Leviticus 16:7-10. This Atonement ritual of scapegoating requires two goats. Lots are drawn to determine which of the two is to be sacrificed to God, and which is to be the less lucky goat to be cast into the wilderness with all the inequities of the people of Israel upon his head. It is clear which goat has been found with the short straw. There is no doubt which, in its slow death, has it worse.
In William Holman Hunt’s haunting renderings of “The Scapegoat” (1854-56) the horizontal horns of the scapegoat in his nightmarish cosmic wasteland, adorned with their blood red totems of sin, represent the crossbeam of the crucifix upon which Jesus is spread and upon which his blood is sacrificed for the redemption of the community. Jesus determines himself to be the terminal scapegoat. I used this in my first novel, I, Judas (2011).
In the Bible as psychological literature, Jesus perhaps fulfills the double role of the Atonement goats: he is both the sacrifice to God, and the goat driven into the wilderness of the psyche during his slow, agonizing death. Crucified, he finds himself abandoned, forsaken. Momentarily, he is, in his own mind, a man at last. Indeed, he is in his own mind for the first time. Or perhaps of the two goats Jesus assumes only the one depicted in Hunt’s painting, while Barabbas is the other, the luckier goat whose death comes quick, off-stage, Pilate having had enough. In early renditions of the narrative, Barrabas is actually named Jesus Barabbas. This, it seems, proved too much Wildean irony.
All that we can say is that as the blood of an innocent is spilled with the perverse promise of cleansing the sins of the community, Barabbas skulks or perhaps struts - it is not clear - away from the narrative.
To the extent that all good Christians affirm themselves to be inveterate sinners, Good Friday is the opposite of an “I am Spartacus” moment with all crucified in solidarity with the culture hero. Instead, on this ironic Good Friday, the unconscious role assumed is that of Barabbas, the one who escapes by arbitrary means and at unspeakable cost to another. And Barabbas is no less guilty than he was the day before.
As Christopher Hitchens was fond of pointing out when he condemned this delusion of vicarious redemption “I would submit that the doctrine of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is utterly immoral…I could take your place on the scaffold, but I can’t take away your responsibilities.” Sending an innocent to die for one’s crimes cannot erase the facts of their commission.
To believe otherwise would be the worst existential bad faith.
To believe otherwise would be bumper sticker grace.
And we should all reject such ideas, or at least be profoundly skeptical and independent of people who would make such a claim for themselves.
The point was well made by William James in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891). Recall his critique of “millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture” and his question, “what except a skeptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
Have a good weekend.
— James Reich
www.jamesreichbooks.com
And a late Happy Good Friday to you.
The Barrabas narrative can also be seen as film noir. The crowd who gathered to yell for Barabbas were his local buddies and Jerusalem low lifes. Jesus of Nazareth, the rural out of towner, had disciples who were too cowed by the south Los Angeles crowd of that time to show up and cheer for Jesus. I think Philip Marlowe obtained this guilt ridden admission later from Peter, right?