dry grass singing

a man for our time

‘Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord,
and our hearts are restless until they find rest in thee.’

(St. Augustine)


There is a restlessness that cannot be stilled by any peace the human heart can know on its own, a thirst that cannot be quenched by any water we can drink. More than any other novel I know, Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas tells of that restlessness, that thirst. And it is this novel that prompted me to begin the journey that would bring me, eleven years later and almost to the day, to the altar rails of a small church in an obscure corner of Singapore, against all I had ever known of myself, to be baptised into the life offered by the only Person who has ever been able to satisfy that thirst.

It seemed innocuous enough, the slightly grubby paperback half-hidden beneath other similarly battered books in the ‘For Shelving’ book-bin at the Geylang East Community Library. It was the week before Easter. The stylised picture of a man’s face, his beard a dark angry red set against the dirty-white background of the book cover, caught my eye. As did the fact that its author was a Nobel Prize winner. But most of all, I was intrigued by the title. Barabbas. The acquitted. The one who should have died. I knew enough of the Gospel to know the name and what it stood for.

Of course I had to read it. It was almost inevitable. The novel’s premise is simple. Told from the perspective of Barabbas, the criminal who escapes death when Jesus of Nazareth is crucified in his place, the novel follows the life of the eponymous anti-hero as he struggles to find rest, acceptance and faith in the wake of his unexpected and undeserved release from punishment. But Barabbas never finds rest. Instead, he spends the rest of his life haunted by the memory of the cross, unable to forget, yet unable to believe. In the stark, spare language of the novel, there is a thirst that is never slaked, an intense longing that whispers in the dry spaces and silences between the words. There is also a terrifying emptiness – the emptiness of not belonging to anything larger than one’s self, of being unable to love, of living without God.

So Barabbas wanders from prison to robbers’ den, desert to metropolis, slave-pit to palace, his life seemingly dogged by a sort of blessedness, a kind of grace. Is it grace that orchestrates his meetings with the man who turns out to be the apostle Peter? Is it grace that has him chained next to Sahak, a devout Christian, when they are both working as slaves in the dreaded Cyprian copper-mines? If it is, why then does this same grace not work deep enough? Why is it that, when asked to explain the ‘Christos Iesus’ carved on the slave-disk hanging from his neck, Barabbas can bring himself to say no more than, “I want to believe”?

Lagerkvist was wise enough to leave these questions open. The modern mind resists pat answers, and when the questions touch at the very heart of mystery, it takes a certain wisdom and humility to admit that the answers may simply be beyond the reach of even our human capacity for reason and discovery. This humility is something that many Christians would do well to learn in our ongoing discussions and debates with non-Christians who demand irrefutable evidence for our faith. We may offer historical records, logical proofs, personal testimonies; but ultimately, there is no irrefutable evidence. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. This is at once the easiest and the hardest thing about the Christian faith that non-Christians have to come to terms with.

One need not be a Christian, however, to appreciate the novel’s almost prophetic insight into the human condition. The novel speaks urgently to our world today, as the foundations of even our most basic beliefs about our identity and our place in the universe are shaken with each new scientific discovery, each new philosophical speculation. Those of us who struggle to find meaning and truth will see our own lurching, homesick wanderings mirrored in Barabbas’ geographical wanderings; those of us who have stood, paralysed, on the knife-edge between knowledge and faith, will find ourselves empathising with this all-too-human man who cannot find faith. In fact, I dare say that it would be almost impossible for a Christian to truly understand and empathise with the novel’s troubled core. A faith that has always been secure cannot possibly know what it means to long for faith in vain. Yet this is why Christians need to read this book, if only so that we can better understand what it means to want to believe, and in doing so, to be more sympathetic in our approach when we reach out to our non-Christian friends.

And, beyond all that, we would do well to remember that, in a sense, we are all Barabbas: guilty as hell, deserving death, yet somehow miraculously acquitted and given the gift of life, because Somebody else has already died in our place, on a hill at Golgotha almost two thousand years ago.
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posted by eothen @ 4:18 PM