This is a continuation of a story that started here (Part 1) and continued here (Part 2)

Silence.

Why won’t they speak, Pilate wondered to himself.

‘I ask you again to choose. Barabbas or Yeshua?’

Nobody moved and nobody spoke and then one quiet voice said tentatively ‘Yeshua!’

Now he’d said it, he found his strength and repeated it more assertively. When he said it a third time he was joined by a few of those who were standing near him and within minutes the whole crowd were shouting “Yeshua” at the top of their voices. What had started as barely a whisper had become a hurricane of voices all shouting in unison.

Pilate was left in no doubt. ‘So the decision is made. You, yourselves, have done this. Not me. His fate is of your choosing and I wash my hands of this man’s blood.’

The crowd were now shouting so loudly that they paid him no heed, assuming that they even heard him.

He raised his hands in the air in an attempt to quell the crowd and eventually, after a few prods and pokes by the legionnaires, they settled.

‘So now you have called judgement on him.’ Pilate declared to the largely uncomprehending crowd, ‘should he face Roman or Judean justice?’

He paused and he winced almost as though in physical pain as he added, ‘Do you want us to crucify him?’

A flicker of recognition flashed across the faces of the assembled crowd. To be crucified was something that they all understood, but again nobody spoke for fear of being first.

‘So what is it to be? Crucify?’

Just as before, it started with a lone whisper that was almost lost in the moment. It may well have been the same person for all anybody knew and again that lone voice said it just a little bit louder and, before anybody knew it, the cry went up from the whole crowd.

‘Crucify! Crucify! Crucify!’

Voices echoed loud and strong and only got louder with each call as they became more rabid and excited.

Pilate looked like a trapped animal, but for fear of a riot he acceded to the crowd before it turned into an angry mob.  

‘So it is declared on this day that Yeshua, the so-called King of the Jews, is to be crucified just outside the city at the place you call Golgotha.’

With that, Pilate was gone and he took his legionnaires and the two prisoners, one soon to be freed and one to be crucified, away with him.

The two hundred looked at each other awestruck by what they had just witnessed. Was this the most powerful moment in history or the prelude to something even greater?

The girl, they all knew now to be the senior guide, walked into the midst of them and after carefully checking around she beckoned for each and every one of them to close in on her.

As they gathered, the crowd in the opening thinned until there was not another living person left where they’d all gathered.

Some of them started looking around and a terrible dawning fell upon many of them. Nobody else had been there. They were the crowd in its entirety, not another single person had been present. Some broke down in tears and others just stared at each other and the ground, shellshocked at the enormity of what they had just set in motion.

‘Do you know what we have just done?’ Somebody had to voice it, and it came out as a question, but nobody had chance to answer before the self-same person added. ‘We have just crucified Christ. What have we done?’

A great cry of despair went up among the whole assembly, but one or two were desperate to cling to the denial they hoped to be true. ‘And what of the people of Jerusalem? Where are they?’ one person asked. ‘We weren’t the whole crowd were we?’ another asked and yet a third added, ‘It can’t have been us? Can it?’

The guide, also horrified, because while she had travelled through the portal a few times during testing, she had never witnessed anything even close to this magnitude and could not have foreseen it coming.

They had been so careful and yet…

‘We were the only people who were here. Everybody else stayed at home in fear of divine retribution. Something to do with the bad dreams they were having. The same dream of impending doom plagued Pilate last night and yet he still carried out his role.’

‘So Pilate ordered the crucifixion then?’ a voice said, clutching at straws.

‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘We did!’

With the sure knowledge that each and every one of them had crucified Christ they as one decided not to go to Golgotha to see the face, that beautiful innocent, but tormented, face that they had condemned. To see him would have been too much.

And so it was with heavy hearts, great anguish and a sense of condemnation that each and every one of them stepped back through the portal later in the afternoon just as a great storm was breaking over Golgotha.

Makes you think doesn't it?

As always stay safe and well my friends