Jesus offers us a "way out" from crowd mentality

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 20, 2016  (The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, Year C) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

 Luke 19:29-40, Luke 22:14-23:56



Palm Sunday brings us face to face with one of the most difficult truths about human nature: our inclination to follow the crowd.

We begin the service with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds gather around and hail him as King, but soon, the mood abruptly changes as we hear the story of how the crowds turned against him and demanded his death just a few days later.

Although cramming the remembrance of these two events together on the same Sunday is in some ways a concession to the fact that not everyone will come to church during Holy Week (We’ve gotta make sure you hear the story of the crucifixion today, in case you don’t come on Good Friday!), there is also some meaning, I think, in feeling the dissonance of these two completely opposite moods juxtaposed beside one another.

They are both, at their core, stories about crowd mentality – joyful crowds celebrating Jesus and angry crowds torturing and killing Jesus – made all the more poignant by the fact that there were likely some – perhaps many – who were part of both crowds. This is not a pretty picture of humanity’s tendency to follow the crowd, no matter what the morality or ethics of what the crowd is doing. We have the ability to love someone one minute and hate him the next, to make someone our leader one minute and then put him to death the next.

The pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd squelches individual conscience and sense of responsibility. Psychological studies on conformity show that people tend to think that if everyone in a group is doing something, it can’t possibly be wrong [1], and they feel less legal culpability or personal responsibility for what happens when an action is taken by multiple people at the same time – no one person can be easily held responsible, so individuals who have an issue with what the group is doing are more likely to go along rather than to resist [2].

A recognition of this tendency to distance ourselves from wrongdoing committed by a group for which we are not “personally responsible” is behind the wording in the confession of sin we’ve been using from Enriching Our Worship: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us: the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” In saying this, the liturgy reminds us that we are complicit even in sins we did not personally commit when we are part of the unjust structures that allow or even encourage them to exist.

Palm Sunday forces each of us to look inward and ask ourselves, In the face of the pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd, do we have the ability to stand up for what we know to be true and right, even if our very lives are threatened? Peter, that “rock” on whom Jesus chose to build the church, didn’t. The same guy who promised Jesus, “I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” winds up vigorously denying that he even knows Jesus when questioned in the courtyard of the high priest.

If the first among the apostles, Peter himself, wasn’t able to resist this instinct to conform for the sake of self-preservation, perhaps we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much about it if we can’t, either, we might think. But before we excuse ourselves too easily, we must remember that at the same time, there were others who were able to resist that instinct, like the women who remained at the foot of the cross to the bitter end, or Joseph of Arimathea, “who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action” and who asks Pilate for the body of Jesus so that he can give him a respectable burial after his death.

The tragic story of the crucifixion plays itself out again and again throughout human history, anytime we allow ourselves to get swept up by a crowd into doing or saying things that internally raise all sorts of red flags for us. But the pull of the crowd is so strong, and the fear of rejection or even physical harm if we dare to resist is so powerful, that we become just a grain of sand tossed about by the power of the wave.

This week, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a “Word to the Church” that warns us of the ways this crowd mentality continues to play out in our world today, specifically in this election season in the United States. The bishops write:

“On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power… In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we are troubled by the violent forces being released by this season’s political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbors, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.”

We in the church, of all people, should know the dangers of crowd mentality. At the center of our faith we have a paradigm case of mob rule gone wrong, a story that we remember and recite year after year after year. Our bishops have reminded us that that story is not an isolated incident from 2,000 years ago. Mob rule continues to crucify innocent people today, and we are complicit in that if we do not actively speak against it.

The bishops’ call to us is clear: “No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else.” As people committed to follow the way of Christ, we must always remember that he chose the role of servant, not ruler; that he advocated love of enemy, not revenge; and as much as his death illustrated the worst of what humanity is capable of, his resurrection showed us that violence does not have to have the last word; in fact, that it will not have the last word in reality.

The bishops write, “On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead…unmasking the lie that might makes right.”

“Unmaking the lie that might makes right.” How easily we are seduced by that lie. Some scholars even think that seduction was at the heart of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus – that Judas thought by calling in the authorities, he would force Jesus’s hand and get him to lead the armed uprising against the occupying Roman forces that everyone expected the Messiah to lead. But Jesus tells the disciples to put away their swords when they try to defend him. He heals the ear of the slave of the high priest after one of his guys cut it off. And then he prays for God to forgive his executioners even as he hangs on the cross dying at their hands. He resists all the basest instincts of human nature that lead us to turn against one another, to follow the crowd no matter where it leads, and he shows us a way out. A way out of the cycle of violence, a way out of being held captive to the lie that might makes right.

My prayer is that the power of the story we retell this Holy Week would remind all Christians everywhere that we have a way out. That Jesus has shown us another way. That we have the power to resist the forces of fear and anger that would lead us to betray one another. And that with God’s help, we will do so.

[1] Greenberg, M.S. (2010). Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, cited in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
[2] Summarizing views of Gustave Le Bon, as described in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.