Peter: [Arrested for arson, Barabbas has been brought to the dungeons housing the Christians falsely accused of the act] This burning city is no work of ours. This isn't how the new kingdom is going to be made. You were wrong.
Barabbas: Who are you to tell me I'm wrong?
Peter: Many years ago, we spoke together. Do you remember?
Barabbas: No.
Peter: You asked me why I was making a net so far from the sea.
Barabbas: Jerusalem. The street of the potters.
Peter: You were as mistaken then as you are again now.
Female Christian: We didn't set fire to the city.
Male Christian: You've done the work of the wild beasts of the emperor.
Female Christian: Are you a lunatic?
Male Christian: It was his fire, you fool. Not God's.
Barabbas: [the realization of his error sinks in] Why can't God make himself plain? What's become of all the fine hopes, the trumpets, the angels, all the promises? Every time I've seen it end up in the same way, with torments and dead bodies, with no good come of it. Huh? All for nothing.
Peter: Do you think they persecute us to destroy nothing? Or, for that matter, do you think that what has battered on your soul for twenty years has been nothing? It wasn't for nothing that Christ died. Mankind isn't nothing. In His eyes, each individual man is the whole world. He loves each man as though there were no other.
Barabbas: I was the opposite of everything he taught, wasn't I? Why did He let Himself be killed instead of me?
Peter: Because being farthest from Him, you were the nearest.
Barabbas: I'm no nearer than I was before.
Peter: Nor any farther away. The truth of the matter is, He's never moved from your side. I can tell you this: there has been a wrestling in your spirit back and forth in your life which, in itself, is knowledge of God. By the conflict you have known Him. I can tell you as well that so it will be with the coming of the kingdom. A wrestling back and forth and a laboring of the world spirit, like a woman in childbirth. We are only the beginning. We won't see the time when the earth is full of the kingdom. And yet, even now, even here, the hour at the end of life, the kingdom is within us. There's nothing more to fear. Upon us, the years will be but many years, many martyrdoms. The ground of men is very stubborn to mature. But men will look back to us in our day, and will wonder, and remember our hope. It is the end of the day. We shall trust ourselves to a little pain, and sleep, saying to world, "Godspeed."
