palm Sunday

Jesus answered:  ‘Even if the people in the crowd were silent, the stones would cry out’.

Wherever Jesus went he attracted crowds of people. When he was teaching they came in great numbers to hear him. His reputation as a healer spread though the country and many gathered to him. Jesus was an attractive crowd puller – a celebrity.

Crowds can be a potent force both for good and for ill. All politicians and indeed celebrities have always to be aware of this. The same crowd that raised you to the heights of fame can also drag you down. But there is another side to it. Crowds can easily be influenced. We have all heard about mob or crowd hysteria – where a crowd of many thousands of people can seem to take on a single personality or at least be manipulated into doing so. Hitler knew how to appeal to this crowd phenomenon and to use it. The newsreels of Germany in the 1930s the famous Nuremburg Rallies demonstrate how he had the power of oratory to  work up great crowds in to a frenzy of enthusiasm. He was the leader they were waiting for and, thousands though they were, they were at one in their allegiance to him, their adulation of him and their desire to follow him. When you are part of a crowd it’s very easy to be carried along with it all. Its so easy to follow the crowd, to go along with the crowd and to be taken up into the enthusiasm of the crowd.

One of the things that we might recall as we begin Holy Week is the part played by the crowds in the unfolding events of these dramatic days of Jesus death and resurrection. The crowds were very much in evidence in the events of what we call Palm Sunday. As Jesus approached the city of Jerusalem from the direction of the Mount of Olives the crowds began to gather and to follow him. By the time they reached the city the crowd was enormous, loud and enthusiastic to the point of hysteria. As they gathered they shouted their hosannas and cut down branches of palm trees and strewed them in Jesus way and waved them around him. What was happening to this crowd? Well in a way Jesus had provoked it all.

The people will have heard of Jesus mighty works in the Galilee – his teaching and his healing. His fame will have spread and gone before him. Could this then really be the Messiah? Could this be the one that we have been waiting for all these long and bitter years? There is a passage in the prophecy of Zechariah which was understood in those days as referring to the coming of the Messiah to the city of Jerusalem to claim it for God. The Messiah would enter the city it was believed from the east from the Mount of Olives – the exact route that Jesus took. He would be meek and riding on a donkey – the mode of transport chosen by Jesus. No wonder them that the crowds gathered and no wonder they hailed him as the Son of David – the title of the Messiah. No wonder they shouted their hosannas to him. The word means Lord Save us – the Messiah had come to save them. It was an explosive situation made more potent by the fact that this was Passover time and liberation was in the air.

No wonder the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate thought it best to leave a pleasant sea-side residence at Caesarea Maritima and come up to Jerusalem  to keep an eye on things. Jewish crowds are dangerous at any time but at Passover with thoughts of a Messiah in the air a Jewish crowd  could be trouble indeed. It was an explosive situation in which Jesus was expected to respond to the crowds by fulfilling their hopes. Delivering on their aspirations to defeat the Romans and overturn their tyranny. And to establish the Kingdom of God. Jesus did nothing of the sort. He had come to establish the Kingdom of God in the hearts of men and women. He had come to overthrow the tyranny of sin. He had come to Jerusalem to claim the city and the hearts and minds of its people in the name of his heavenly Father. Jesus was indeed the Messiah but very unlike the Messiah that the crowds thought they had come out to meet and to welcome. In their disapointment the crowd would turn upon him and stirred up by their rulers and leaders would call for his death. The very same crowd which called out Hosanna would call out crucify within days. The crowds deserted him he was alone with his fate. This story which began with the adulation of the crowds would end with a single lonely man utterly alone kneeling in despair in Gethsemane. A man deserted now even by his friends. It would lead to a single man standing alone before his accusers betrayed and denied and a falsely accused with no-one to say a word in his defence. A man dying alone on a cross on a bleak hill top deserted it would seem  even by his God. Except that in the silence of the lonely garden with no-one there to see God would raise him from death so that the entire world could find in him their saviour and their Lord.

For us being part of a crowd can be a powerful feeling. But when it comes to faith in Jesus Christ and in what he has achieved for us in his death and in his resurrection each one of us has to stand before him alone and accept what he has done for us in faith and in trust. We have to step aside from the crowd, as he did, and accept the cross of discipleship so that we may share with him in the gift and the promise of new and eternal life. Each one of us is called to offer who we are to him in loving and trusting obedience – no one else can make that offering for us. Even within the great and worldwide universal family of the Church each one of us has to stand alone with Jesus in faith and in love to receive from him all he has to give to us and to offer to him all that we have and are. The road which we shall travel during this Holy Week is indeed a road that we travel together with the whole Church – that great crowd which is the people of God. But it is also in a way a road that each one of us must travel with Jesus Our Lord – from Hosanna, to crucify, to Alleluia He is Risen. Amen.