mobs

The Madness of Mobs: Sermon Preached on 29nd March 2026 (Palm Sunday)

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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?’”

A screenshot from the BBC television programme Wogan. Two people are seated facing each other in a talk-show setting with a neutral beige studio backdrop. On the left, a woman with short, voluminous auburn hair wears a bright teal blazer over a patterned blue and purple dress. She is looking toward her interviewer with a composed expression. On the right, a man with dark, collar-length hair, seen from behind and in profile, wears a dark grey suit and has his hands clasped together as if mid-conversation. The BBC logo is visible in the upper left corner and the programme name "Wogan" appears in the upper right. The styling and set design are consistent with British television production of the mid-to-late 1980s.
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.

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