All my life I have lived with a basic distrust of the crowd mentality. I am biased against large groups of people who are all thinking the same way. I tend to assume that if it’s a large group and they are all saying the same thing, there’s a pretty high likelihood that they are wrong. I probably got that from my dad. During my growing-up years my dad always used to tell his children “Don’t follow the crowd”. He wanted us to learn how to do the right thing, even when it was unpopular, even if it might bring scorn and ridicule upon us. It’s better to do the right thing and be ridiculed than to do the wrong thing and be popular and accepted. The crowds of popularity are not to be trusted. Go with your conscience, not with the crowd. My father was a wise man, and he knew what his children needed to hear. He lived what he taught, and I hope that my siblings and I have consistently followed in his footsteps.
When I read the Palm Sunday narrative in Scripture, it tends to reinforce my distrust of the crowd mentality. It was the crowd that celebrated the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem, and it was the crowd that demanded his crucifixion five short days later. How could the crowd be so fickle? Did they love Jesus, or did they hate him? What caused them to change their mind? I think it had to do with the quest for power. The citizens of Jerusalem wanted power because they had been pushed around for too long. They and their ancestors had suffered under oppressive regimes for centuries—the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Medes and the Persians, the Greeks, the Ottomans, and now the Romans—and their frustration had reached the boiling point; there was no turning back. An oppressed people can be kicked around for only so long before they start to fight back. Into that turbulent atmosphere rides a man on a donkey, and there are rumors spreading throughout the city that this young man might be the promised Messiah. They wanted power. They wanted control. They wanted a good fight, a battle, a war, an insurrection. They wanted to get rid of the bad guys and bring in the good guys. They wanted to regain control of their country, and they were hoping that this young peripatetic rabbi from Nazareth might be just the man for the job. And many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches which they had cut from the fields. And those who went in front and those who followed were shouting: “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord; Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David; Hosanna in the highest!” (Mark 11:8-10) While they are cheering and waving their palm branches, they might be asking themselves some questions that they dare not verbalize. “Why the donkey? Shouldn’t a warrior-king be striding into the city on a white horse? Could this have something to do with Zechariah 9:9? Where are the armies? That embarrassingly ordinary-looking bunch of unarmed “disciples” who insist on following him everywhere he goes doesn’t exactly look like the kind of militia that could march in and take over a city, let alone push back an empire. Something is not quite right about this turn of events. Something is not going as planned. This young rabbi seems to be departing from the conventional script. Why this talk about ‘love your enemies’? What kind of king is this? What kind of man is this? He talks of God as though he really knows Him. Could anyone know God that intimately? He speaks of God as being his Father in a way that seems almost scandalous. His way of dealing with people is not that of a warrior-king. He relates to people as though he really loves them. Can a warrior-king love his people? How can a conqueror allow his heart to be touched by the needs and concerns of his people, and even of his enemies, and treat them as his friends? He seems too gentle to be a warrior and too loving to be a king. His authority is won not by his harshness, but it’s somehow tied to his gentleness. He acts more like a servant than a king. He gathers his followers neither by threat nor by coercion but simply by being who he is. His people are his willing followers because at a place deep within themselves they know that there is something about him that’s worth following—or so they say. He teaches, but not as the other rabbis. He’s different. He’s a son of David, perhaps, but a different kind of son. Who is the man?”. The people are perplexed but they dare not give up their hope, so they continue to cheer, waving their palm branches as the entourage enters the city. Perhaps something good will come of this; perhaps not. If he is the long-awaited Deliverer, the strong man who will set right all that is wrong with the world, then they are in the right place at the right time, following the right man. Rome is about to fall, and they are getting a front-row seat. Some day they will tell their children and their grandchildren that they were there on that historic day when the king came into Jerusalem, turned the tables on Rome and restored the Kingdom of David. If he is not the Deliverer then they have nothing left to lose, and so they continue to cheer. It took five days for the crowd to realize that this man had no intention of starting an insurrection and getting rid of Roman rule. The “What’s in it for me?” mentality kicked in. This man was not what they were expecting, and as far as they were concerned, there was nothing in it for them. They must have decided that they had made a huge mistake. They no longer wanted this man to be their ruler. With this man in charge, the Romans would have even more power than they already had. That’s not what they had signed on for by cheering him into Jerusalem. He was now a threat to them, and they had to get rid of him, so the crowd did the unthinkable. Changing sides, they crossed over to the side of their enemies. They colluded with the despised Romans to get rid of the offender, and the offender was not a pompous uniform- and weapon- bearing Roman official but the robed and sandaled rabbi from Nazareth whom they had cheered and celebrated five days earlier. We need to understand this narrative from two perspectives: the eschatological perspective and the motivational perspective. From the eschatological perspective, what the crowd failed to understand is that Messiah comes twice. He comes the first time to die as a substitutionary atonement to pay for the sins of the world as the Lamb of God, as prophesied in Isaiah 53. He will come a second time to establish God’s reign upon the earth. The crowd didn’t get it. He wasn’t what they thought they needed. In their defining moment, the crowd got it wrong. From the motivational perspective, the crowd wanted power, but Jesus was all about abdication of power. Jesus surrendered his power. He gave all that he had and all that he was by dying for those who killed him. The way of Jesus is the way of self-sacrificial love. Jesus conquers evil not with guns and bombs and wars and violence in a quest for political and military power, but by loving his enemies enough to die for them. The crowd didn’t understand the concept of a suffering Messiah. The crowd got it wrong. They were motivated by a religious nationalism that confuses the pursuit of national strength with devotion to God, as though God could be used as the means to an end. They had no use for a Messiah who would continue to let Rome rule them seemingly unopposed while he advocated a quieter and slower method of conquering his enemies by loving them. There was nothing in it for them, or so they thought, so the citizens of Jerusalem threw away their only hope for an enduring peace and instead continued to dig into their misguided pursuit of religious nationalism. Today here in the US, we have our own brand of religious nationalism, Christian Nationalism, that closely mirrors the religious nationalism that surfaced on that first Palm Sunday in Jerusalem over 2,000 years ago. If Jesus were a Christian Nationalist, the story would have ended very differently. Jesus would have said “So you want a king who will make your nation great again? Fine, I’m here, let’s do it”. They would have put together an army, or at least a very strong coalition of religious and political leaders who were willing to work with each other toward the accomplishment of some mutual goals, with an army to back them up. They would have gotten rid of the Romans and set up their own government. They might have accomplished the task of making Israel great again, but by side-stepping Isaiah 53 they would have accomplished nothing of eternal value. Israel would have become a superpower, and the tables would have been turned against the Romans. Through a powerful alliance between what we would now call Church and State, with the religious leaders legitimizing the power plays of the political establishment and the political establishment providing special status and protection to the religious realm, Israel would be a force to be reckoned with. That’s not the way the story ended, because Jesus was opposed to what we today would call Christian Nationalism, and he refused to become a king under the terms set up by a coalition between the security-seeking religious establishment and the power-mongering political leadership. Jesus would have nothing to do with that kind of an agreement. He wouldn’t dance the dance of “I support you, you support me, and together we’ll make Israel great again”. His goal was not to build a powerful world-dominating empire. His goal was to die on a cross, and to invite his followers to be willing to do the same. He allowed himself to be killed by the very sort of political and religious coalition that the religious nationalists of his day would have wanted him to spearhead. Jesus didn’t say “pick up your flags and guns and follow me”; he said “pick up your cross and follow me”. The way of Jesus is not the way of flags and guns and political might. The way of Jesus is the way of compassion, self-surrender, and self-sacrificial love. Christian Nationalism leads to the building of an empire that is characterized by flags and guns and the pursuit of political and military power. The way of Jesus leads to a cross. On that original Palm Sunday there were two groups of people in Jerusalem. First, there were the cheering palm-waving crowds who were surrounding Jesus. These were the religious nationalists, who wanted to use Jesus as a tool to make Israel great again. Second, there were the disciples who were following Jesus, though it would lead him (and eventually many of them) to a cross. Today we need to declare ourselves. Either we are standing with the crowd, waving our palm branches in hope of building a Christian America, or we are surrendering our quest for power, and we are following Jesus all the way to the cross. We can’t have one foot in each camp. After showing us the way to the Father and teaching us how to live, Jesus died on the cross to provide atonement for our sins, he arose victorious over sin and death, he ascended into heaven, and one day soon he will return to set up his kingdom on the earth. It will be a peaceable kingdom that will be characterized by love, compassion, justice, and freedom from oppression. Let’s not make the same mistake that was made on that first Palm Sunday on the streets of Jerusalem. When Jesus returns, let’s not be found cheering for and working toward the wrong kind of kingdom. My dad was right. The crowd is often misguided. Don’t follow the crowd. Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 16:24-25)
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