Mark 15 - Who Crucified Jesus?


6 Now it was the custom at the festival to release a prisoner whom the people requested. 7 A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. 8 The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did.
9 “Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate,10 knowing it was out of self-interest that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. 11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead.
12 “What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.
13 “Crucify him!” they shouted.
14 “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.
But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”
The irony in this passage is chilling.  Barabbas was in prison for doing something wrong.  He had killed a man.  Jesus is on trial for claiming to be the king of the Jews, but did not harm anyone.  When Piliate went to make the right decision to let Jesus go, as he knew he had been arrested on "trumped up" charges over religious matters, the people were not sympathetic.  Instead of wanting an innocent man to be released, at the chief priests' bidding the people shouted "crucify him".  
Call it a "mob mentality", or whatever you like, but the bottom line is they demanded an innocent man be crucified.  This did not happen in a vacuum.  God allowed all of these things to happen to allow His good purpose to come about.  But this also reminds us that it was not only the religious leaders who had a hand in crucifying Jesus. The people did too.  Even though the chief priests stirred them up, you still wonder why they wanted to crucify an innoncent man.  Here is Barabbas who tried to overthrow the government, and Jesus a man who preached God's love and healed the sick and downtrodden.  What caused such anger at him?  
During Lent we sing the song, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord.  Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord."  The question is were we there?  Maybe not physically but in another sense.  Maybe we were there in the sense that it was our sin that Jesus died for.  Barabbas was the guilty one, but the people chose Jesus to die.  The guilty one was set free.  The one who was without sin was crucified.  During Lent we contemplate our Lord taking on our sin, so like Barabbas we might be set free even though we deserved to die. 

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