Barabbas

Faith is an issue that has vexed people throughout our heritage and time. Given the tremendous difficulty that even we have reconciling our doubtfulness with our desire for conviction, separated as we are by two thousand years from the Biblical age, imagine how much more difficult it would have been to struggle against belief if you were one who witnessed the living Christ and encountered evidence of his miracles.
I remember several years ago viewing a photograph from a magazine. It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa. They were experiencing a devastating drought and she was holding her dead baby in her arms, looking up to heaven with the most desperate expression. I looked at it and remembered my own trials through the fire and asked, "Is it possible to truly believe that there is a loving or caring God when all this women needed was rain?" Par Lankerkvist's book Barabbas portrays a much bigger picture behind the character than mearly a violent brutish man. That ...