From Alleluias to Crucify Him

A Sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III

St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church

Tucson, Az. March 16, 2008

Throughout this season of Lent, our Adult Education class has been doing a study of the new book, the Last week by Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan. This remarkable book gives fresh and sometimes startling insight into the last week in the life of Jesus. Going day by day through the Last week the book begins with Palm Sunday and Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem riding on the back of a donkey. We reenact this scene on Palm Sunday with our palm branches and our alleluias.  I am grateful to the authors for a number of insights that have made Palm Sunday come alive for me. We are reminded that this is the first time the adult Jesus had been to Jerusalem. His ministry had up until that time been confined to the rural villages of the hill country in Galilee.  In setting his face toward Jerusalem, Jesus must have known that the healing of his people could never be complete until he took his prophetic message from the rural hinterlands to the center of power in Israel’s national life.  And so Jesus joined the mass migration of Israelite pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem to celebrate the high holy days of Passover. Jerusalem considered to be then and now one of the most beautiful cities of the Middle East had an estimated population of around 40 -50 thousand.  But on high holy days when Jews made pilgrimage from around the nation and from all over the Mediterranean world, Jerusalem’s population could swell to as many as 200, 000.  Understandably the Roman Empire’s occupation forces were on high alert during such moments. Israel had proven to be one of the most rebellious colonies within the Roman Empire. And the threat of revolt was never greater than during the high holy days of Passover. It was during Passover that Jerusalem was packed with pilgrims all rehearsing the exodus story, the story of their liberation from another oppressive empire. The Roman occupiers were very strategic to parade their power on such occasions to remind the Israelites of who was in charge.  During Passover, the Romans would stage a military procession into the city.  Borg and Crossan helped us to imagine that scene with cavalry on horseback, marching columns of foot soldiers with leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sunlight glinting on metal and gold. And the eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some seething with anger. Now imagine the alternative procession that we celebrate today. An itinerant rabbi from the rural boondocks is coming into the holy city riding on the back of a donkey. Greeted by the rural poor who wave palm branches and sing alleluia. For the first time, I understand that Jesus humble entry into Jerusalem was a dramatic counterpoint to the imperial military procession that flaunted Rome’s oppressive power over the people.

Because today is Palm Passion Sunday, we begin with the story of Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem but we cannot stay there. We must contemplate the mystery of how the crowds of people that welcomed Jesus with palm branches and alleluias could become a week later the bloodthirsty mob that called on Rome to crucify him. Every great drama has characters and action and the drama of Holy Week is no exception. But instead of focusing on Jesus and the discipleship community, the scribes or the Pharisees, or even the Roman authorities, I want to focus on the crowds themselves. I want to focus our attention on the throngs of people gathered in Jerusalem who witnessed these events. Mark’s gospel makes much of this. I sat down and read Mark’s story of the way to the cross and the crowds play an absolutely pivotal role. Throughout the last week of Jesus’ life, the authorities were trying to entrap him, make him say something for which he could be arrested. But Jesus somehow eluded every trap. Because of the crowds and their support for Jesus, the authorities were kept at bay and forced finally to arrest Jesus in the cover of night and to try him in a kangaroo court in the wee hours of the morning. But then as recounted in our second gospel reading, Herod the roman ruler offers to release one captive who could be Jesus. But the crowds call for Barabbas, the Zealot. But what about Jesus? Herod asks. Crucify him! Crucify him! How did this happen? I have studied this episode for a long time and I am convinced that what was at work here was a cruel manipulation of the crowds. What was true in Jesus day and is surely true today is that the people are all too easily manipulated by the powers that be.  If the high priests were willing to pay Judas to betray Jesus, surely they could have paid some others to disperse themselves in the crowds and to cry out crucify him, crucify him until support for Jesus was suppressed and the crowds became a bloodthirsty mob.  

Mobs are one of the ugliest expressions of human nature. When a mob gathers, ordinarily rational and moral people can become transformed into a collective organism that has no conscience and is capable of terrible evil.  My great, great grandfather PD Gilreath was High Sheriff of Greenville County from 1876 to 1900. This was a period in the American south that was fraught with racial violence.  One night a lynch mob came to his jail house demanding that Sheriff Gilreath turn over an African American man who had been accused of murder. The mob were all hooded Klansmen determined to carry out their vigilante justice. My great, great grandfather walked out in the street to face them.  Sheriff Gilreath, who was known for never carrying a gun, went out unarmed to face them and this is what he said. This man who has been accused of murder is going to trial and if he is found guilty, he will surely be executed. Now if you would like to witness that execution, simply take off your hoods and give me your names and I will make sure each and everyone is invited.  The hoods didn’t come off but the mob did disperse.  James Cone the African American theologian recently told Bill Moyers on PBS that the noose has come to represent in American history what the cross was for the Roman Empire. From the 1880’s to the 1960’s, 4,700 men and women were lynched in this country. And the continuing appearance of the noose at Jena and other places across this country is a disturbing terrorist symbol, an on-going threat of racial violence. But mob psychology has been known here in Tucson as well. Recently a historian by the name of Chip Colwell born and raised here in Tucson published a book that looks long and hard at a very ugly mob incident that happened here but has been long forgotten. On April 30, 1871 a band of our leading citizens marched out of the old pueblo headed for camp grant, alongside of Aravaipa creek not too far from Dudleyville, Az. There in the span of a couple of hours they massacred over 100 Apache women and children. Who supplied the weapons and ammunition for this mob? The venerable Sam Hughes, one of the founding fathers of Tucson. Who defended this massacre in print when the whole country including President Grant expressed outrage? The editor of the Tucson citizen John Wasson, for whom Wasson Peak was named. Chip Colwell asks in his book: Do our children who go to Sam Hughes School or our families that live in Sam Hughes neighborhood know this? Would someone climbing Wasson Peak in the Tucson Mountains as I did recently, know what John Wasson did?  This story only goes to show you that the dangers of the mob are as close to home as Tucson’s forgotten history.

There is now a whole discipline in psychology that studies the dynamics of group psychology that can lead a collection of individuals to behave in ways that they would never consider doing as individuals. But long before psychologists began focusing on this, the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book about it, called Moral Man and Immoral Society.  Niebuhr’s thesis was simply that social groups are very limited if not incapable of exercising moral responsibility the way in which an individual can and should. In every group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse. In every group there is less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism. Therefore groups will always have the capacity to behave in ways that moral individuals would otherwise reject. Niebuhr’s insights in moral man and immoral society give us a framework to understand how it is that group think, conformity and even mob mentality are functioning in contemporary American society.  The current administration provides us with a case study of how the powers that be will take a good nation of moral people and manipulate them into embracing immoral ends.  Because the White House was determined to go to war with Iraq, they simply played on the fears of the people, post 9/11 by simply repeating over and over again that Al Qaida is linked to Iraq. And thereby proved the cynical truth that if you repeat a lie enough times in a media culture, the lie becomes the truth.  If your commitment is to conceal from the American people, the dreadful costs of military adventurism, you prohibit photographers from take pictures of the caskets of our dead soldiers coming home.  If you are prepared to disregard the Geneva Convention and international law,  to torture prisoners then you simply repeat over and over again that the US does not torture while vetoing legislation as the administration did recently that explicitly bans water boarding, which all the world and every sane moral person would say is in fact torture.  Rick Ufford chase was one of our teachers in this adult education series on the Last Week and he made a very prophetic statement. Rick said he fears that the soul of this nation will be irreparably damaged if we become numb to the torture that is being done in our names. I would add: what about the soul of the church?  Is it not the ultimate irony that in Holy Week when we recount the story of Jesus way to the cross and his being tortured by the Imperial guards of Rome is it not ironic that people of faith are also growing numb to our nation’s use of torture? In closing: There is a legend about a medieval painting of Christ carrying the cross through the streets of Jerusalem. All around him are the crowds of people rendered with individual detail. Some among the crowds are jeering him. Some are weeping. Some are indifferent. But it is said, according to the legend that everyone who looks upon this painting can see their exact likeness among the faces in the crowd.   Where are you among the crowds? Are we to be found in the procession of palm branches and alleluias? Or are among those who watch with fascination an Imperial process of military power? Will we blend into the anonymity of the crowd, carried along by the moods of the group? Will our own moral voice be drowned out by the loudest voices of the mob?  Will we be manipulated by the Empire that is always seeking to manufacture the consent of its citizens for its wars? Will we follow the crowd? Or will we follow the Crucified and Risen One?