Sometimes illumination comes to us from a single word. This recently happened to me when I was reading the Gospel of Luke and encountered this verse from the Passion narrative, about Pilate, Barabbas, and Jesus:
And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will. (KJV 23:25)
It’s the deadly precision of “will” that makes the sentence disturbing. That’s the choice here in the King James text, and it’s more compelling than the translation given in the New Jerusalem Bible, “handed Jesus over to them to deal with as they pleased,” and in the New Revised Standard Version, “handed Jesus over as they wished.” Jesus is defenseless before the crowd, its collective will, its fierce determination to do to him whatever it wants. This is mass hatred projected at a single defenseless person, a force-field of destructive energy.
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