So they took Jesus, and, carrying the cross himself, he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, in Hebrew, Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus in the middle. Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews.” Now many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but that he said, ‘I am the King of the Jews.’” Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.” When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four shares, a share for each soldier. They also took his tunic, but the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top down. So they said to one another, “Let’s not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it will be.” This is what the soldiers did. (John 19.16-25)
There are no heroes in a crowd. That fact has resulted in a slew of psychological studies that seek to understand why individuals behave so differently when in a crowd than they do when alone. One school of thought called the diffusion of responsibility theory argues that individuals behave in a more primal way when they are in crowds because they feel relieved of individual responsibility.
Often called the bystander effect, it suggests that the presence of others discourages a person from taking any responsibility because the responsibility is diffused or shared among all the participants. It explains why so few people in a crowd reach out to assist someone in harm’s way. If everybody is responsible, then nobody is responsible.
Another explanation, not necessarily separate, but overlapping with the bystander effect, is called the contagion theory. It maintains that a crowd takes over the individuals in it in almost the same way that a virus does. And because the virus is contagious, everyone is swept up in it. The net result is irrational and emotionally charged actions.
These and other crowd behavior explanations are fine and good, but they overlook one ugly truth. Maybe the crowd simply gives permission to our inner demons to come out and play, bringing havoc and wrecking the world around us. There is no other way to explain the ugliness of the brutal assault and senseless torture of Jesus that culminates in his inhumane crucifixion, every item on the list done by an insatiable bloodthirsty crowd.
The story from start to finish is one nasty indictment of the inhumanity of humanity. There is no way to dress up the ugliness that we find in this story. Rereading it again today, a stomach-turning effort for sure, I am struck by the viciousness of the various crowds that show up and the utter cowardice of just about everybody that is part of this story.
As I look at the text, I can only conclude that courage stands alone and cowardice hides in a crowd. There simply is no other way to look at it. Who stands utterly alone in this story? Jesus. He stands alone in the garden as the temple guards and the Roman soldiers tie his hands and lead him away. He stands alone before the two Jewish religious leaders, Annas and Caiaphas who interrogate him and try to intimidate him with their power. He stands alone before Pilate as the Roman governor throws questions his way, wanting answers as to why his own people, the Jews, hate him so much. And in the end, he stands pretty much alone when he hangs from the cross, only two criminals close by, both of them nailed to a cross also.
And every step of the way, he shows courage. When the temple guards and soldiers show up with their torches and weapons in the dead of night, he doesn’t run for cover. When he asks them who they are looking for and they answer “Jesus the Nazorean,” he replies, “I am.” Then he tells them, “If you are looking for me, let these men go,” pointing to his disciples who have been in the garden with him.
When the crowd of henchmen carry him off to Annas, one of the priests of the temple, Jesus answers the questions put to him without hesitancy, without fear. “I have spoken publicly to the world. I have always taught in a synagogue or in the temple where all the Jews gather and in secret I have said nothing. Why ask me? Ask those who heard me what I said to them. They know what I said.”
A temple guard slaps him in the face for his answer. Even then, he shows courage. “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” It is the same when he stands alone before Pilate who carries the full weight of Rome behind him. When Pilate asks him if he is a king, he replies, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”
After having Jesus brutally scourged and ruthlessly mocked by the soldiers, Pilate brings him outside to stand alone before the hysterical crowd. “Look, I am bringing him out to you,” Pilate says, “so that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” When the crowd made up of the chief priests and the temple guards see Jesus, they shout, “Crucify him, crucify him!”
Three times Pilate presents Jesus to the crowd, each time making him stand alone before his accusers. And the crowd shouts at the top of their lungs, “Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!” Pilate says to them, “Shall I crucify your king?” To which the cowards in the crowd answer in one voice, “We have no king but Caesar,” an answer that is the complete opposite of what they truly believe, all Jewish people hating Caesar and his forces that occupy Judea.
We are told that Pilate becomes even more afraid, proving himself to be a coward in front of the crowd. So he hands Jesus over to the maniacal crowd to be crucified. And again, Jesus is alone. The evangelist tells us that Jesus carried the cross himself and he went to the Place of the Skull, the upright beam of wood standing off in the distance as he struggled with the horizontal beam put on his back.
When he comes to the spot, the cross beam is put on the ground and his arms are stretched out so that his hands can be nailed to its ends. Then the soldiers raise the beam with him on it and they attach it to the vertical beam already in the ground, nailing the two pieces of wood together. And Jesus suffers alone on his cross as the Roman soldiers take bets on who gets to keep his tunic.
Only when he dies hours later is the crowd somewhat sated and satisfied, no longer shouting and cursing at him, now in a drunken stupor, everybody packing up and going back home, their dastardly deed done. And not one of them felt an ounce of remorse for what they had done, because, after all, everybody else in the crowd was also going along with it. No one was even brave enough to admit that the whole bunch of them had been cowards.
But before we also walk away from the bloodfest and the bloody mess, we probably need to ask ourselves a few hard questions, the hardest one being how many times have we sold our souls so that we could be part of the crowd. What shouts have we joined in and what jokes have we made at the expense of someone else while we are part of a crowd?
Truthfully, we all become intoxicated by the crowd, caught up in the allure of belonging, basking in being somebody that the crowd likes. Like starving jaguars in the jungle, we feed off the crowd’s acceptance, wanting the popularity that comes with being a part of the group. We swallow whole its bigotry, its prejudices, its condemnations of others. And we don’t hesitate to join our voices to the many others, seeing who can shout the loudest, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
The story of the crucifixion of Jesus the Nazorean is more than a cautionary tale. It rips away the facade that we put on and exposes the ugly truths about humanity, how we grovel before the crowd, begging to belong, making compromises with our souls so that we can be a part of the pack. And while we’d be quick to deny we’d ever be a part of that ugly crowd in Jerusalem on that hideous day, the truth is we might have been.
Look at our fealty to the crowds we presently belong to. Our political party. Our FaceBook followers. Our church fellowship. How often do we break away, break rank, break apart from any of these crowds when we find the contagion of the crowd leading us somewhere dark, somewhere dirty, somewhere depraved? How many times have we refused to join in when they shout, “Not this one but Barabbas!”
That’s the question, isn’t it? How often have we had the courage to stand alone with the crowd on the opposite side of us? Put more starkly, how many times have we found the courage to stand with Jesus rather than stand with the crowd? It’s not like we don’t have the opportunity to do it just because we weren’t in Jerusalem when all the crazy stuff went down.
The truth is the same nightmare goes down every day right here and Jesus stands alone as much now as he did then. He still endures slaps to his face, fists to his guts, insults and injuries to his person. And before we claim we haven’t laid hands on Jesus, we may want to recall his words, “As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”
I suppose if there’s one lesson to take from this tragic and terrifying story that we call Good Friday it is that we need to be very careful about the crowds we find ourselves a part of. Every crowd provides a sense of insulation, anonymity, and belonging. All of which can be stronger than a Long Island Iced Tea. We take one sip and another sip and soon we’re stumbling on our feet, following behind the crowd without a clue as to where we’re going, shouting and screaming whatever criticisms and curses everybody else is spouting.
So, I want us to take a moment today to really look at the story of the crucifixion of Jesus the Nazorean. It won’t take long to see that Jesus stands alone while everybody in the crowd tries to outshout the others in yelling for his head on a pike. Ugly as it is, we need to see it. We need to hear it. And we really need to take to heart the lesson that the courage to do the right thing always stands alone while cowards hide in a crowd.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 