Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne
Philippians 2. 5-11; Matthew 21. 1-11
“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’”
Lindy Chamberlain on the BBC Wogan Show in 1991. © BBC; used under Fair Use doctrine
Does anyone remember a lady in Australia named Lindy Chamberlain? If you don’t remember the name, you may remember her story. While camping at Ayers Rock in 1980, her nine-week-old daughter disappeared while she and her husband were making the evening meal at a barbeque pit. Chamberlain said she had seen a dingo leaving their family tent when she returned to check after hearing her daughter crying. Although other campers who were there that evening believed her, few members of the Australian public gave this unlikely story any credibility. I mean, “A dingo stole my baby…”—sure, love, whatever you say. Whipped up by the media, Chamberlain became a national and even international hate figure, with the hate exacerbated by the fact that she was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and therefore seemed insufficiently grief-stricken by conventional norms.
Two years later, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for murdering her own daughter, and soon exhausted every possible means of appeal. Yet she only served three years before the prosecution case fell apart: by chance, nearly six years after her disappearance, her daughter’s cardigan was found in a remote area with many dingo lairs; the prosecution’s forensic evidence also turned out to be full of flaws. Chamberlain was released: the hate figure turned out to be an innocent woman.
Somewhat closer to home, both in time and space, is Christopher Jefferies, a cultured and rather eccentric retired public schoolmaster from Bristol. When his lodger Joanna Yeates was murdered in 2010, the press went feral, portraying him as a sinister oddball who was almost certainly guilty. Yet he was entirely innocent; after the true killer was convicted, Jefferies sued multiple newspapers and won.
The social media era has brought a new arena for people to form mobs in. Because of that, the Internet gets blamed for changing human behaviour for the worse – and maybe it has – but the tendency to form badly-behaved mobs isn’t new at all. It goes back to the dawn of humanity.
Most of us are self-aware enough to know that we have a dark side that could lead us to join a mob in the wrong circumstances. It’s easy to understand why, as well. It’s hard to stand up as an individual against a group of angry people looking for blood and vengeance, even when we know the mob is in the wrong. More than that, if someone else can satisfy the mob’s bloodlust then we won’t ourselves be at risk of becoming their target – or we hope not, anyway.
We all know how fickle and cruel a crowd can be. Yet most of us also spend most of our lives looking for the approval of others. Partly it’s because we don’t trust ourselves enough but mostly it’s because we don’t trust God. If we really trusted that God’s judgment mattered more than the crowd’s, we might find it easier to stand against the crowd when it turns ugly. But instead, we look over our shoulders, anxious about what others think, and afraid of becoming the next target.
I think one of the main reasons why we struggle to trust God is quite subtle. As we can never understand God in all God’s fullness, there is always a risk that we turn God into an idol, something small enough for us to grasp—to grasp in our hands and use as a toy. A little toy god who will fix our problems, always take our side, and give us what we want—and when the actual God doesn’t live up to those silly projections, we feel let down, and our faith begins to wobble.
That’s the sort of thing that was going on with the people of Jerusalem in Holy Week. They were waiting for a king, one they thought would kick out the hated Romans and restore the national sovereignty they had lost more than five hundred years before. Now, Jesus, it has to be said, played up to this idea by arriving in Jerusalem riding a donkey, thus fulfilling an ancient prophecy of Zechariah that a righteous, humble, and victorious king would ride into town like that. The crowd recognises this and greets Him like a conquering monarch, but at the same time, they’re asking, quite literally, “Who is this?” It’s not hard to imagine that some of the people cheering His arrival didn’t even know who Jesus was – after all, people still do things like that.
Now certainly Jesus is consciously fulfilling a biblical prophecy, but He’s doing something more. He’s exposing people’s ideas of what this liberating king is supposed to be, knowing that these fantasies will be shattered when He is arrested and put to death later in the week, when many of the people who cheered Him will turn on Him.
This is a lesson for them and for us about not putting our faith in the wrong things—not in surface appearances, not in deluding ourselves that God is our political plaything, and certainly not in getting carried away with the supposed wisdom of crowds.
It was a lesson for all time, because all human beings and all human societies will build people up and destroy them as the fickle mood of the mob turns. This sort of behaviour isn’t caused by social media and other modern communications technologies; nor is it something only primitive people do, that will gradually be educated out of us through progress. Instead, the way a crowd can sweep us up into doing things far more wicked than we’d ever manage on our own is something more deeply and darkly fundamental to human nature, at least in its fallen state.
This morning’s first reading, from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, reminds us that Christ didn’t have to face this world of fickle mobs. Christ is God, equal to the Father, yet left that state and came into a world where He was subject to persecution and violence, and ultimately a degrading death. Why?
Before we answer that, we need to remind ourselves that Christ’s death wasn’t unusual, but ordinary in His time and place. Over their long centuries of imperial power, the Romans crucified countless thousands of men in the same way they executed Jesus. Many of them were no more guilty of a crime than Christ was – or Lindy Chamberlain, or Christopher Jefferies. The lives of countless billions since the dawn of time have been defined by senseless cruelty or injustice that went unmitigated in their lifetimes.
Jesus is truly God and also, in the needless and casual cruelty of His death, Everyman – just one of us. Of course we can never understand God in all God’s fullness, but Jesus was God made one of us; God who showed us how to live truly good lives right in front of our faces. Yet the same people who cheered Him as a king on Sunday shouted “Crucify Him!” by Friday. You and I have the same biology and the same chemicals and electrical signals bouncing around our brains as those people in Jerusalem back them. It is a conceit to pretend we’re any better.
That’s why Jesus came to us – to face the worst of humanity’s dark side and transcend it, and so to save us from the consequences of it. Not to magic away the world’s troubles but to save a troubled world. In this Holy Week, let us enter into the mystery of Christ’s death so that He can save us for eternal life.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
