Pilate teased further. “You wish to set a murderer free?” He looked askance at Jesus and saw the color drain from the condemned man’s face. All of his supporters, it seemed, had fled.

“Give us Barabbas! Give us Barabbas!” the crowd shouted.

Pilate smiled. He turned toward Jesus. “What, then, should I do with this man?” he asked the crowd.

Furious, the people roared, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

Unable to stand the crowd’s rising violence, Pilate’s betrothed lifted a kerchief to her face and fled.

Peter struggled against his chains, his eyes wide with terror, as the soldiers prodded him with spears toward his crucifixion. Stripped of his clothes, his skull gouged with a crown of thorns, he frantically searched the crowd through stinging spatters of blood. Nowhere could he find the faces of Saul or the others. To his utter shock, he had been abandoned.

“I am not he! I am not he!” he cried out to his tormentors, stumbling beneath the weight of a wooden cross.

But his denials only brought more lashes from the soldiers and angry cries from the crowd.

The lone olive tree stood tall in a gentle field. A light breeze rustled its narrow leaves.

Judas knelt beneath the tree, weeping. Unable to endure his grief and guilt. Not only had he failed those he loved; he had betrayed the very tenets he had claimed to cherish—and had encouraged others to do the same. Images of violence flooded his mind—the violence he had wrought with his own hands, and that which had befallen his family and his friend. At the recall of such senseless loss, he felt the hope leave him.

Twisting a rope around his palm, he cut a length with his dagger. Stepping to the tree, he threw his blade to the ground. He braced a foot against the trunk and, in one quick motion, lifted himself into the branches. There, balanced along a limb, he made a loop in one end of the rope and threw the other over a branch, securing it with a knot.

He then slipped the loop over his head, looked up into the tree’s green canopy, and wished ardently to be rejoined with his family. Thinking this, he leaned out, and let go. The rope snapped taut and the olive tree shook with sudden weight. After a moment, a pouch of coins dropped from the branches, landing with a clink atop the dagger’s sickle-shaped handle.

In his final moments, he thought he heard the rush of footsteps.

Plodding along the road and trailing his donkey, Saul wagged his head in disappointment. With Peter captured, all his dreams of power and riches had vanished.

Only a miracle could save the healer from certain death, he thought. Though, truly, he did not care.