Day 266: Son of the Father (2026)

On the cross, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — quoting Psalm 22, a prayer of desperation that ends in hope. Fr. Mike Schmitz, in this episode of The Bible in a Year, walks through the final chapters of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 27–28) and draws out a single, organizing contrast: the crowd chooses Barabbas — whose name means “son of the father” — over Jesus, the true Son of the Father. That choice, Fr. Mike argues, is not ancient history. It is the pattern of every human heart.

The False Son vs. the True Son

Barabbas is a murderer and an insurrectionist, guilty of the crimes the people project onto Jesus. Yet the crowd demands his release. Fr. Mike connects this to the Old Testament pattern of trading a birthright for something lesser — Jacob and Esau, Esau selling his inheritance for a bowl of stew. “Here we are willing to trade our birthright,” Fr. Mike says, “the gift God has given us, for whatever sin we want or whatever — my own will, not God’s will.” The episode’s central mechanism is this: we are all tempted to choose the false son over the true one, the broken over the whole, our own desires over the God who gave them. The Passion narrative is not a story about other people; it is a mirror.

Reading the Hard Passages in Context