Mk 11:1-11

16 April 2000

Palm Sunday

 

"The Mob Rules"

 

Someone says to you, "I have good news and bad news, what do you want to hear first?"  Which of the two do you pick?  A lot of people want the good news first; maybe it will cheer them up enough to handle the bad news.  As for me, give me the bad news first.  I want something good to look forward to!

There's something about Palm Sunday that reminds me of that good news / bad news scenario.  We entered the sanctuary today waving our palm branches.  And that's great.  Before I became a minister and started leading worship, I used to love Palm Sunday because I could fiddle around with the palm during the service!  We carry the palms, remembering the followers of Jesus who welcomed him into Jerusalem.  They were part of the crowds flocking to the holy city to celebrate the festival of Passover.  Jesus is praised as "the one who comes in the name of the Lord" (v. 9).

That's the good news.  Like the subjects of a conquering hero, the crowd spreads cloaks and palm branches before Jesus.  The bad news is that, before the week is over, these same people will have either abandoned Jesus or will actually be screaming for his blood.

It's that part of it that gives me a nervous feeling about Palm Sunday.  It's unsettling to me how the people in Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday could go from praising Jesus with outstretched hands to cursing him with clenched fists—all in the space of a few days.  You know, it's not like he does anything different.  He's the same Jesus on Good Friday that he is on Palm Sunday.  He hasn't had some drastic personality change.  What has changed are the people.

But what makes me nervous isn't the change in mentality and behavior in the people we read about in the scripture.  What makes me nervous is the change in mentality and behavior in the people we see in the world today—maybe even in the one we see in the mirror.

In 1983, during my freshman year of college, I went with a friend—and a few thousand other people—to observe the Ku Klux Klan as they marched on the State Capitol in Austin, Texas.  It was my personal introduction to the power of crowd behavior.

It was a weird day.  With officers on hand from at least four different departments (Capitol Security, Austin City Police, Travis County Sherriff's Dept., and the Texas Bureau of Investigation), as well as helicopters flying around, it seemed like we were in a city under military occupation.  In those days, the evening newscasts were showing us Beirut, Lebanon being blasted apart, so I already had those kinds of images in my head!

That was bad enough, but then there were the crowds:  some people carrying signs, some people yelling at the Klansmen, and some people (like me) who were simply curious and wanted to see what was going on.  As the marchers made their way toward the Capitol building, they moved through thicker and thicker crowds along the road.  You could feel the hatred in the air.  It was just a matter of time before someone got bored with hurling insults at the KKK and decided to make it physical.

It began with a couple of small stones and quickly escalated into a barrage of rocks of all sizes and shapes.  Even though the Klansmen came equipped with plexiglas shields (apparently they were accustomed to this type of reception!), some projectiles managed to hit the mark.  There was more than one bloody face among the marchers (they were hooded, but unmasked).  When they reached the spot where their vehicles were parked, demonstrators started smashing car windows.  It was the final angry act of the day.

There's one moment, though, in that afternoon of violence that remains with me.  At one point, when the Klansmen had circled around behind the Capitol, people were running in all directions.  I had stopped and was surveying the scene (being careful to not get too close to the enraged rock-throwers!).  Suddenly, a young man who was about my age, an African-American, stopped running and knelt about ten feet from me.  He started gathering some dirt clods to fire at our white-robed friends.

He must have noticed out of the corner of his eye that someone was standing there, because he just froze and looked up at me.  There we were—two young guys, one white and one black—the black one probably wondering what the white one would do.  And what the white one did was to give the black one a little smile, as if to say, "Go for it!"  He returned the smile, picked up his weapons, and disappeared into the crowd.

I believe now, as I did then, that our constitutional right to peacefully assemble is a good thing.  Even a group that I find as repugnant and obnoxious as the Ku Klux Klan has the right to express its opinion, as long as they're not hurting other people in the process.  The KKK was being peaceful, at least they were that day.  It was the onlookers who were violent.  And I was a part, if only a small part, of that violence.  In my own way, I became a contributor to the mentality of the mob.  That's not a good feeling.

I like to tell myself that I wasn't a Christian then, and if I had been, that would have made all the difference!  But I wonder.  After all, on Palm Sunday, these are Jesus' disciples who later manage to get sucked into their own dysfunctional group psychology.

It's similar to peer pressure, which can also be either good news or bad news.  Whether as kids in school, people in business, cops on the street, pastors in ministry—we're all affected by those around us, especially our peers, those with whom we identify.

But the mind of the mob is something else.  It has a frightening power to, in the blink of an eye, lead people to do things they would never do under normal conditions.  The psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) talked about what he called the “collective mind.”  When the collective mind is in operation, “the individual feels, thinks, and acts differently compared to if he [or she] were alone.  The emotions, thoughts, and acts spread like a disease in the crowd; the result being that everybody behaves in the same manner.”  This is what Le Bon called contagion.  “When the crowd is in the same state of mind, they replace private self‑awareness with primitive instinctual urges.”[1]  That is, they lose their sense of individual identity—with all that they stand for—and become like a cell in the body of a monster.  This is when the mob rules.

This is also when we see ourselves at our worst.  In a similar way, we know that the crowds who welcome Jesus will soon be at their worst.  One wonders what Jesus thinks of the cheers that accompany his entrance into Jerusalem.  How sincere are they?  Or maybe a better way to put it is:  Is the applause only conditional?  That is, do the people praise Jesus, not because of who he is himself, but because of what they hope he'll do?

It's not clear from Jesus' actions exactly what he thinks about the situation.  His request for the colt of a donkey, an animal more befitting the peasantry than the powerful, suggests that he's not interested in all the fanfare.  Of course, behind this is Zechariah 9:9, which calls Jerusalem to "shout aloud," because "your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey."

Some people say that Jesus has staged this, to be seen in messianic fulfillment of the scripture in Zechariah.[2]  That appears to be more possible than probable, it seems to me anyway.  The Roman authorities don't look like they’re too worried about his donkey ride.  And the fact is, over and over, Jesus has tried to stifle reckless talk about his being the Messiah.

Keeping that in mind, Matthew and Luke have Jesus go into the temple on Palm Sunday and kick out the moneychangers.  Only Mark has him do it the following day.  As our scripture reading ends at verse 11, Jesus "entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve."  It reminds me of being out traveling and coming into town after everything's closed.  Nothing's going on—might as well go back to the motel!