The popular interpretation I received as a child of the crowds: the crowd that lauded Jesus on Palm Sunday cried “crucify him” on Friday.
I received that teaching and tried to preach and perpetuate it for many years. It seems to be the most popular narrative depiction of the concept of total depravity or original sin: that deep down we all must be completely awful, and crowds even more so.
But crowds vary in size and makeup. There are Swifties and there are pro-football fans. They aren’t the same crowds, and even if they are gargantuan can cohabit nearby spaces without overlapping.
A friend recently wrote:
“There seems to be a tendency, intentional or otherwise, to treat every instance of a “multitude” in scripture as a stand-in for humanity as a whole, and certain theologies seem to lean into this more than others because it helps support some of their other dogmas. Now that your have brought this to my attention though, it occurs to me that the authors of the Gospels went out of their way to portray a different and more accurate depiction of human behavior with the example of Peter reacted when things seemed to be hopeless. We don’t see him joining in the calls for Jesus’s crucifixition or otherwise dancing on his grave, but we do see him driven by sociopolitical pressure to deny actually knowing Jesus with increasing vehemence as the night goes on, which is much more realistic and something I think just about everyone could relate to in the right context. For example, although I cannot imagine marching in a pride parade on Sunday and then joining a mob in ransacking an LGBTQ community center the following Friday, regardless of how rapidly public sentiment changed, I can absolutely see myself driven back into the closet as a matter of survival by a sudden and severe change in the political climate. Human beings do compromise their values for any number of reasons, but rarely if ever will they suddenly and violently reverse them on short notice, even in a mob setting.”
As we proceed through Holy Week, I’d like to try and adjust a theological assumption, a wrong-headed leitmotif in much of Christian theology.
We tend to emphasize, especially this week, how sinful we are.
But this doesn’t existentially make sense to most of us, because most of us are actually also quite good. We are good to one another, good to ourselves, kind and supporting and loving.
The doctrine that we are sinful “all the way down,” that we are fallen, depraved, entirely curved in on ourselves: we have moments like this, sometimes even long stretches, but it isn’t much true of us as a whole.
As my friend points out, individuals might retreat rather than entirely turn. Once we see the winds are not favorable to collective resistance, we may become self-protective.
But it’s entirely unlikely that the insurrectionists on January 6th could, by the 10th, become strident Biden supporters.
It goes beyond all reason to think thousands of Swifties would turn on Taylor Swift simply because she released a rap album.
And it makes no sense at all to imagine the same crowd of the palms hanging together all week while everyone else sits by, out of the picture, then becoming the “crucify him” contingent as if they were a Greek chorus in a three-act play.
I raise all this for a few reasons:
It’s a relatively new thought to me, and departs from a long tradition into which I had been indoctrinated. I’d like to work myself out of this longtime held and seemingly widespread assumption.
It highlights the importance of figuring out where you find yourself in the gospel accounts, reader-response theory and all that, and then make sure you know the character of the characters. If you are part of the crowd, which crowd, and how many are there, and do they shift?
Jettison the traditional notion that in order for Christ’s death to mean something we have to be awful. It doesn’t have to work like that. Christ can also have died for good people, and there may have been, probably were, many other crowds sidelined by the oppressive forces of that era, silently mourning, for whom it makes literally no sense to accuse them that they also are guilty of or complicit in the crucifixion of Christ. Christ’s death can be meaningful for you even if you aren’t complicit in it.
Thank you. I learned in confirmation (ALC) that I, a 13-year-old chubby girl who once chased her siblings with a butcher knife, was the reason Jesus died a horrible death on the cross. Over the years, I've moved from a John 3:16 to a John 3:17 perspective: Jesus died because of the reality of sin. The big picture.