John 18:39 · World English Bible
John 18:39 Meaning But You Have a Custom
But you have a custom, that I should release someone to you at the Passover. Therefore, do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?
What does John 18:39 mean?
Two prisoners stand for release, and a person is always choosing between them. Pilate is reason, the mind that questions and weighs.
From the Manifestation reading below.
John 18:39 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
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Two prisoners stand for release, and a person is always choosing between them. Pilate is reason, the mind that questions and weighs. The King of the Jews is the I AM, the awareness of being that saves a person from his problem. Set beside him is Barabbas, the senses, the crowd of facts that rob a person of the self he wants to be.
At the passover, the moment of passing from one state into another, only one can be freed. Reason offers the choice, but the choosing is the person's own. To release the King is to let the awareness of being rule over the evidence. To release Barabbas is to let the senses rule and keep the desired self imprisoned. Everyone makes this exchange constantly. A person sets free whichever he trusts more, and lives from the one he freed.
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Live John 18:39 today
- At some point today you will have a choice between what the facts say and what you have decided to believe. Pick deliberately, out loud in your head, so you know which one you let out.
- When someone offers you a reason to shrink your hopes, a kind warning, a realistic take, say thanks and quietly do not take it. Let the better version of the story be the one you keep.
- In the moment things look worst, when the screen or the voice on the phone gives you the hard number, hold the self you want for ten more seconds before you react. That pause is the whole exchange.
Which of the two did I set free the last time I had to choose, and which one am I still living with?
The same truth in other traditions
Hinduism · Katha Upanishad
Two paths are laid out, the pleasant and the good, and they are never the same road. A person's whole life turns on which one they pick when both are offered.
Buddhism · Two Kinds of Thought
The Buddha said whatever a person dwells on again and again is what the mind bends toward. Feeding one line of thought is already choosing which self arrives.
Stoicism · Epictetus
Epictetus said events arrive as they arrive, and the only question left to us is which judgment we release into them. We free one and imprison the other, all day long.
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