Pilate asks Jesus 11"Are you the King of the Jews?" and Jesus answers 11"You have said so." To the accusations of the chief priests and elders he gives no answer, so that the governor is 14"greatly amazed." Pilate sees what drives the accusers: 18"it was out of envy that they had delivered him up." Matthew's Gospel has used dreams to protect Jesus before (Matthew 2:13), and now a dream comes from the household of the Roman governor. His wife sends word into the middle of the trial: 19"Have nothing to do with that righteous man." Every voice reaching Pilate points the same way, including his own conscience. He proceeds anyway.
At the feast the governor customarily released a prisoner the crowd chose, and the prisoner on hand is notorious (verses 15-16). The name Barabbas means son of the father, and some manuscripts give his name as Jesus Barabbas, so the crowd may have been asked to choose between two men called Jesus. One was a notorious prisoner. The other was the Son of the true Father. They ask for Barabbas. The guilty man walks free because the innocent one is about to take his place.
Pilate asks 23"Why? What evil has he done?" and the crowd shouts all the more 22"Let him be crucified!" When he sees that he is gaining nothing and that a riot is beginning, he washes his hands: 24"I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves." The gesture comes from a ceremony for a death whose killer could not be found (Deuteronomy 21:6-9), and Pilate applies it to a case he has just solved himself. The ritual confesses what it claims to deny, since he has the authority to release Jesus and knows whose blood is about to be shed.
The crowd answers 25"His blood be on us and on our children!" These words have been twisted for centuries into a pretext for hatred they were never meant to carry, and that history deserves to be named. Matthew was a Jewish writer, and nothing in his Gospel treats a whole people as cursed for one crowd's cry on one morning under pressure from their own leaders. The same chapter places guilt on a Roman governor who knew better and signed anyway, and on Roman soldiers who will mock and beat an innocent man. The guilt belongs to particular people making a particular choice, and in the end to every heart that has preferred a comfortable lie to a costly truth. That same blood is the blood Jesus called poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins (Matthew 26:28).
Pilate releases Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, delivers him to be crucified. Barabbas walks away. Matthew never tells us what he did with the rest of his life. His story ends where every reader's could begin: guilty, sentenced, and suddenly released because Jesus who is called Christ took his place.
Pilate's question is still open, and each of us answers it.
Prayer
Father, we are Barabbas more often than we admit, guilty and quietly released while someone else bears what we deserved. Forgive us for the ways we have washed our hands of responsibility without ever facing it. Thank you that Christ's blood, poured out under such injustice, became the mercy that reaches us. Help us answer Pilate's question with our lives. In his name, amen.