Catholic Commentary
Barabbas Released; Jesus Condemned (Part 1)
6Now at the feast he used to release to them one prisoner, whomever they asked of him.7There was one called Barabbas, bound with his fellow insurgents, men who in the insurrection had committed murder.8The multitude, crying aloud, began to ask him to do as he always did for them.9Pilate answered them, saying, “Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?”10For he perceived that for envy the chief priests had delivered him up.11But the chief priests stirred up the multitude, that he should release Barabbas to them instead.12Pilate again asked them, “What then should I do to him whom you call the King of the Jews?”13They cried out again, “Crucify him!”
Mark 15:6–13 depicts the Passover custom of releasing a prisoner, which the chief priests exploit to incite the crowd to demand Barabbas's release instead of Jesus's, despite Pilate's awareness of their envy-driven motive. The contrast between the guilty insurgent Barabbas and the innocent Jesus underscores the substitutionary nature of Christ's impending crucifixion, as the crowd's initial customary request is weaponized by religious leadership into a call for Jesus's execution.
A murderer walks free and an innocent man is condemned to crucifixion—and in that reversal, Christ takes the sentence we deserve.
Commentary
Mark 15:6 — The Passover custom: Mark introduces the practice of releasing a prisoner at the feast (the Passover), a custom likely designed to curry favor with the Jewish population under Roman occupation. Whether attested in Roman legal records or not, Mark presents it as an established expectation ("he always did for them"), giving the crowd a legitimate platform to make their fateful demand. The Passover context is not incidental — it is the feast that commemorates Israel's liberation from slavery in Egypt, and it now frames a far deeper drama of liberation through substitutionary sacrifice.
Mark 15:7 — The figure of Barabbas: Mark is specific: Barabbas is not merely a common criminal but a participant in a stasis (insurrection), and personally guilty of murder. The name "Barabbas" is Aramaic: Bar (son) + Abba (father), meaning "son of the father." This is almost certainly not coincidental for Mark's theologically attentive audience. The one who is truly the Son of the Father (cf. Mark 1:11; 9:7) will die so that a man whose very name parodies that title goes free. Barabbas is bound — he is, in the most literal sense, a prisoner deserving death.
Mark 15:8 — The crowd's initiative: The multitude anabas (crying out, surging up) begins to press their customary claim. This is not yet a mob baying for Jesus's blood — they are simply exercising what they regard as their Passover privilege. The drama lies in how this legitimate request is about to be weaponized by the chief priests.
Mark 15:9 — Pilate's gambit and the title "King of the Jews": Pilate seizes what he hopes is a politically clever maneuver. By framing Jesus explicitly as "the King of the Jews," he seems to think popular sentiment will be on Jesus's side — perhaps the Galilean pilgrims among the crowd would favor their prophet-king. This title, which will reappear on the titulus of the cross (Mark 15:26), is Pilate's own ironic testimony to the truth about Jesus. He intends it mockingly, but Mark's readers understand it as a proclamation.
Mark 15:10 — Pilate's perception: In a remarkable aside, Mark tells us that Pilate knew the chief priests had handed Jesus over out of phthonos — envy. This is a morally significant detail. Pilate is not simply ignorant; he perceives the injustice clearly. His subsequent capitulation is therefore not a failure of understanding but a failure of will and courage — a sin of human respect that will echo through the Creed every time Christians profess that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate."
Mark 15:11 — The instigation of the chief priests: This verse is the narrative pivot. The crowd was asking for Barabbas as a Passover custom; it is the chief priests who actively seisō (stir up, agitate) the multitude to demand Barabbas instead of Jesus. The religious leadership, who should have recognized the Messiah, become the instruments of his death. Their motive — envy — is the same vice that drove Cain to murder Abel (Genesis 4) and Joseph's brothers to sell him into Egypt (Genesis 37).
Mark 15:12 — "Whom you call the King of the Jews": Pilate's phrasing is careful and slightly distancing — "whom you call." He is already washing his hands (though that gesture belongs to Matthew's account). He is trying to deflect responsibility while still making one last attempt to release Jesus, perhaps hoping the crowd will relent.
Mark 15:13 — "Crucify him!": The first cry of staurōson auton — "Crucify him!" — falls like a sentence of doom. Crucifixion was the Roman punishment for slaves and violent criminals; it was the death of the utterly condemned, the socially annihilated. That the crowd calls for this, for one they had days before welcomed with palms, marks the radical reversal that is the Passion. The innocent is handed the sentence that belongs to Barabbas — and to us.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition reads the Barabbas exchange as one of Scripture's most concentrated expressions of substitutionary atonement and what the Catechism calls the "redemptive exchange." The Catechism teaches that Christ "redeemed us" precisely by taking our place: "He loved us and gave himself up for us" (CCC 614, citing Ephesians 5:2). The release of Barabbas makes this abstract doctrine viscerally concrete: a man who actually deserved death walks free because an innocent man takes his place. St. John Chrysostom saw in Barabbas a type of sinful humanity, noting that "as Barabbas was released, so we were released from the bonds of sin by the death of Christ."
The name "Barabbas" (son of the father) has drawn sustained patristic attention. Origen noted the bitter irony that the crowd chose the false "son of the father" over the true one, prefiguring every substitution of a counterfeit god for the living God. St. Ambrose connected this scene to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53:6 — "the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."
Pilate's knowledge of Jesus's innocence (v. 10) is significant for Catholic moral theology. The Catechism (CCC 597) explicitly states that "the Church does not hesitate to impute to Christians the gravest responsibility for the torments inflicted upon Jesus," not because all Jews were responsible (a charge the Church firmly rejects following Nostra Aetate §4), but because it is our sins — the sins of all humanity — that sent the innocent Son to the cross. In this sense, every Catholic is Barabbas: guilty, bound, deserving of condemnation, and set free by grace.
Pope Benedict XVI in Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week reflected on Barabbas as representing a distorted messianic ideal — the violent revolutionary rather than the suffering servant — and the crowd's choice as a perennial temptation to prefer a Christ who conquers by power rather than one who redeems by suffering love.
For Today
The Barabbas scene confronts the contemporary Catholic with the uncomfortable reality that Pilate's failure was not ignorance but cowardice — he knew the truth and still capitulated to social pressure. This is a mirror for anyone who has compromised a moral stand to avoid conflict at work, in the family, or in the public square. Pilate's question, "What should I do to him whom you call the King of the Jews?" (v. 12), is a question every Catholic must answer personally, not in theory but in daily choices. Do we confess Christ before others, or do we soften, deflect, and distance ourselves as Pilate did?
Additionally, knowing that we are Barabbas — the guilty one who goes free — should reshape how we approach the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We do not come to confession as people who have made minor administrative errors; we come as people who deserved condemnation and receive, astonishingly, freedom. The Passion is not background theology; it is the price tag on every absolution we have ever received.
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