Barabbas

His family did not lose their olive terraces to a sword. They lost them to a ledger — a soft-handed man with a wax tablet who proved in figures that the land had already been gone for some time. He watched his father stand in the dust of his own ground in the posture of a beggar, and something happened in his chest that did not unhappen for forty years.

Shame became rage; rage found the short daggers of the sicarii; and a boy with a hopeful name buried it under son of the father until he half forgot it had ever been his. He became a name Rome was nervous about. Then a rising failed, a brother was lost, the rage ran out, and what was underneath was not peace but the hollow the rage had filled.

He was in a cell doing the arithmetic of his own life and getting the same answer the man with the tablet had got — already gone — when a crowd outside chose a name.

He walked free through the light, past the man taking his place. And he could not, in all the year that followed, stop staring at the substitution — until the asking led him to a widow’s open door in the lower city, with a lopsided pomegranate carved into the lintel.