Barabbas: Beautiful Exchange
Beautiful Exchange
(YouTube Reading available at the end of post)
It is dark. The streets are deserted and market stalls are closed for the night. The air is still. My breathing—steady, shallow, paced.
The kofir’s sandals scrape against the cobble stone in haste. I watch his shadow slither on the stone walls, his panicked dark form hurrying ahead of it. It is one of those nights bad things happen. Death is here, she is present, hard pressed along the walls of the narrow alleys. Peeking. Waiting. Thirsting. Her breath is stale. Her stench, putrid.
An early riser will discover a body at dawn. Blood. Insides on the streets, exposed. Secret, personal things now laid bare to eyes, to birds.
My face stretches into a smile, but there is no mirth. The cold hilt of the dagger cools my palm. I follow. He glances behind him, not slowing down.
Easy now.
Was he going to the playhouse? To play their games? To frolick with the soldiers? To do things that bring the spit up a person’s throat. He smells of spices. Strange foreign spices. Of the heathen. Not ours. It is mixed with his sweat, the odor is maddening. It causes me to leap, and I grab him by the back of the neck. We land on the stone streets—him beneath. His strength is small. The blade thrusts. Deep. Into his side. His screams are familiar. They are awful. It is like a song, an awful song. My heart pounds. The blade comes out and pushes in again, breaking another layer of skin, and another. I am screaming too. We make a horrible medley. He stops first. He isn’t moving. I bring my hands to my face and they are red. The warm liquid trickles into the lines and grooves of my palm, running over the hilt to my sleeves. A light wind carries around my feet. An unrushed breeze. It whispers, faint but sure.
Murderer. It says.
My breathing is heavy now. I stare at my hands, already the blood was beginning to crust underneath my nails. The air I breathe tinged lightly with the metallic smell of blood and spices.
I look down at the boy. At once, his face is of the kofer—the betrayer—then again, it is of my child. My son.
Abiel?
A cry tears through the still night from a strange place. It is my voice.
Abiel.
My eyes snap open. It is dark and my yell echoes in a small room. Slowly, the room takes shape. I am here. I never left. I sit up on the cloth which separates me from the stone floor of the dungeon. My chest heaves in pants. The breeze around my feet ceases. Mice scurry away from my toes, climbing over one another to scamper into their holes in the prison walls. The air is heavy with dung and urine and some vomit.
The chill I escaped in my slumber returns and my teeth chatters. The shackles around my ankles are like an ice vice. The shuddering can not be tamed. The ropes around my wrists cut into my skin.
I still remember his eyes—grey and deep, like an overcast sky over the sea. He was a boy, barely growing his first chin hair. I still hear the cry, I see the veins about his temples as they strain in shock. The foul odor of excrement filling my nose as his body jerked in spasms.
Excrement and foreign spices.
Murderer.
The end of you is near.
The image of Tovi, who led the last revolt flashes through my mind. The birds pecking at his decomposing face, the wild dogs jumping to nip at his legs as he hung on the tree.
My shoulders quake as the fear slithers down my back. The chains rattle. The quake spreads to my hands, my feet, my lips tremble.
“Surely God is my salvation”, I mutter. “I will trust and not be afraid.”
But I am afraid.
The price for joining the revolt is crucifixion. The brothers tell you this at initiation. It is a life of sacrifices, of purity, of hunger strikes until every last one of the unfaithful—the kofers who corrupt the people of God with their detestable ways were removed. It is a life of death. It was the brotherhood who would prepare the way for the Messiah.
My teeth chatter. I rub my hands over my arms in a hug.
“ The LORD himself, is my strength…”
The voice snickers.
“He is my strength, my defense….”
Murderer. You have no defense.
The boy deserved it. Him and all the others. A Jew who knew not who he was, deserved whatever came at him. A Jew who played the Roman games, and worshipped the Roman gods; who stroked Roman soldiers; who reeked of foreign spices; who knows not his God. He deserved it.
It was the fifteenth day of the fast. We would not eat until all the traitors were dead.
When Tovi was arrested, the brothers had made an attempt to rescue him. Twelve of them had been caught. Thirteen bodies hung off the city walls. All for one.
There was nothing as glamorous in the days after my arrest. And nothing now. I would die. Alone. One for One.
Suddenly I look up at the ceiling. I catch my breath. There is a low rumble. Like a thousand bees swarming. There is Thumping. Rumbling, a quaking. An earthquake. I still myself. No, not an earthquake. It is distant and from the ground above.
Ra-ra-ra.
That is the sound.
The mice squeak in the walls.
Ra-ra-ras.
Now it sounds like the rumble of thunder.
A door above opens and lets in the sound.
BARABBAS! BARABBAS!
It's voices.
A crowd is chanting.
BARABBAS.
Why is a crowd out there? Why do they call my name?
They are calling for your head.
My bowel comes loose. A warm dampness spreads across my undergarment.
I sit there, like prey.
They want your head.
BARABBAS.
I hear footsteps. Unhurried, unified, precise—the march of Roman soldiers. They stop at my cell door and the door flies open. Hands throw me to my feet.
“ The Lord has become my salvation." I whisper as I step into a formation of six soldiers, two at my side, two before and two behind. They walk in perfect pace, carrying me along in rhythm. I must be strong. The end is near. The corridor is dark, the brisk stomps of the soldiers feet strike the ground in determined unison. ***They seem only too eager to get me to my place of retribution.
Maybe the brothers have planned an escape. My heart beats faster in hope.
BARABBAS!
The crowd yells as we approach the upper corridor.
The morning sun is blinding, and at first, all I see is a dark circle in form of the sun behind my closed eyelids. A roar of cheer erupts as I emerge.
Men. Women.
They scream BARABBAS.
A few fights break out in the crowd and the soldiers push them apart.
GIVE US BARABBAS.
The high priests are here—vultures. Bribe lovers. They are all we have left of our truth. They stand dressed in black close to the stairs, hurdled together, whispering. The air is cloudy with dust. More people join the crowd. Another fight to the right. The brothers? Was it a diversion? I stay ready. I search the crowd. For Yavi. For Gabvriel.
“Should I release the king of the Jews?” The voice comes from my left. It is Pontius Pilate, the Roman. He is sitting on a stool. Soldiers flank him—three on each side.
GIVE US BARABBAS!
It is then I see him on the right hand of the Roman prefect.
A man. His hands are bound. He stands surrounded by soldiers, like me. A soldier hurls a stick at the back of his head. Another spits at him. They cackled as he lunges forward.
He gains his balance. He is silent.
A man speaks into the ear of the Roman and he looks at the bound man on his right.
GIVE US BARABBAS!
This man…Surely he isn’t of the brotherhood. Then he looks at me.
All cease.
The cries fade into the background. I hear nothing. I see nothing. Just his eyes. His eyes…Did they glow like a flame or had I been in the dungeon too long?
He does not smile but his face is kind. There is something else. A calm. A gentleness. A Peace. All peace. What manner of man is this? To be at peace in chaos. For a moment, I doubt if he is a man at all.
Wait! I know him. He is the miracle man. The healer from Nazareth. What is his name? It escapes me.
The one who healed old Amar at the temple.
“He heals anything,”Old Amar had said, “Even those who dream bad. The ones sick in the mind.” Old Amar eyed me.
Those eyes.
Flame.
Fire.
I blink. He winces.
The soldier hits him again.
The sound of the crowd rushes back.
“Take him away! Have him flogged.” The Roman says loudly more to the crowd than his soldiers.
CRUCIFY HIM! They crowd yells.
CRUCIFY HIM!
The Roman speaks in rapid Latin. He looks at the man again, his palm catches his chin in thought. But the man is looking at me.
“Take him away to be crucified. I will have no part in this.”
They push him away, tearing his gaze from mine. A soldier kneels to remove my shackles and another cuts off my ropes.
They push me down the stairs. My hands are free. My feet are free.
Now I see them—my brothers: Yavi, Gavriel and Simon. They are in the crowd. I am glad. I walk towards them. I stop. Yavi stands between the other two, he covers his head with his hood, the other two do the same.
The sign is simple.
I am no longer a brother. I had been caught. Yavi had spoken.
They blend into the crowd, their cloaked forms soon vanish.
I stand frozen.
None for one.
The crowd begins to follow the soldiers and the one who is like a man—what is his name?
The Roman Prefect gazes after them.
“Get out of here”, A soldier swears at me, “You are free.”
Free.
At the cost of a life.
“The Lord has become my salvation.” The words escape my lips.
I begin after them, out the city gates to a place they call the Golgotha. I keep my distance, threading the crowd, watching him carry a wooden beam. The whips of the soldiers eat his flesh, breaking it open with every lash. I want to rush out and help him, to carry this beam but I can not. I am free but the soldiers could grab me again. I follow close behind and watch them nail him to the beam with other offenders. I stand afar off in the noon sun, but close to his cross where again I will smell that sweet, metallic scent of blood—raw, pure, divine—and where one has been crucified in my stead. His skin broken, his blood poured out as an offering.
Jesus.
That is what they call him.
The Saviour.
The Ransom.
Me for him.
Him for me.
One for one.
One for All.
