My sins were painted clearly. The indictment ran for miles, every man and woman in the city radius and every international visitor to the Festival knew the charges. For this was Festival year and the home crowd as well as the international crowd jammed every venue.
I think it was a Jubilee year like when the Olympics come to town.
My sins were laid bare to the nations – thief, murderer, racist – you name it, it’s me.
The headlines were vivid and believe me, they were true.
But you – you lined up with me for the sentence of justice – you are another story. You had it all, your father a universal champion, a land owner with a thousand cattle on the hills, a mining giant with the world’s largest diamond mines.
My father, a worker, bought and sold by the consumer market, a man with broken nails, broken dreams and thoughts kept to himself.
Your father could read and expound law, my father could barely read the day’s temperature; your father could travel east to west and up and down, my father could travel to the workshed; your father could bestow presents to make a man drool, my father had a little jar of coins to buy bread and milk.
Even at the trial they spoke well of you, they recognised Quality. They nearly acquitted you! They didn’t really have a case. But in the end, the rent-a-crowd chanted and gestured your condemnation and the judge let them have their way. They sentenced you to the same fate as me.
So how is it I say, ‘Lord, remember me when you come to your throne,’ and they don’t?
In one thing, I have to agree with Pilate on this, ‘For my part I find no case against him.’ (John 18:38).
Elizabeth Price