Passion Sunday, morning after thoughts

Good morning!

Well, I have to confess that even my 'morning after thoughts' are still hung up on the irony & interplay between the 2 men standing before Pilate in Matthew 27.......Yeshua Bar-Abbas.....and Yeshua of Nazareth. So many similarities. As I mentioned yesterday, Bar-Abbas literally means "son of the father," and we know that Jesus revealed himself as *the* Son of the Father. It's so thick with irony that I'm sure the evangelist wants us to notice.

But beyond that, have you ever thought further about who it was that Jesus was crucified with? We commonly call them the "two thieves".....but this is misleading. In our minds, a thief is someone who breaks in & steals our television while we're not home. That's not who these guys were. These guys were the same type of person that Bar-Abbas was. They were BANDITS. Historians tell us that banditry was common in these days, due to oppressive economic conditions. Cut-throat lending practices would often, if not always, refuse to assign interest on a loan--usually out of pious-sounding dedication to the Torah. But then if the borrower couldn't pay the loan back, the lender would confiscate whatever meager piece of land the borrower had to his name--turning the borrower into a serf. Some eventually refused to travel the road of increasing serfdom and slavery, and instead turned to the innumerable caves that dotted the Palestinian countryside and took up a life of banditry. When Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers in Matthew 21, he says in vs 13: "you have made my Father's house a cave/den of thieves/bandits," he was talking about the sort of place & life that Bar-Abbas would call "home."

There's a further element to banditry, though. Some bandits, it's true, were simple pirates.....merely trying to survive and even thrive at a life that was preferable to the life they could have inside the law. But others were more like folk heroes; striking out at the pagan Roman occupiers, and the despised Jewish social elite that collaborated with them. Such men were wanted outlaws not simply due to their thievery, but also because they were insurrectionists. Their actions were INTENDED to disrupt the political status quo, and even, perhaps lead to open rebellion. This is why Pilate is so curious about Jesus' title "King of the Jews," and in the end, this is why Jesus is executed as an enemy to the Roman state. The sign above his head, listing the charges, is clear......if you're going to set yourself up as an alternative "king"......if you're going to go against Rome.....this is the fate that awaits you.

I wonder if the 2 guys crucified with Jesus were part of Bar-Abbas's gang? I guess this is just one of millions of questions we'll never really know the answer to.

Cheers,

TM