A Crowd Of Many Voices
Matthew 21:1-11 and 27:15-23
by Jim Westmoreland
Life starts out simply. It's a good thing, because we weren't equipped to deal with much complexity when we entered the world. Our needs are simple. We want to be fed, kept clean and given warmth and security. We want to sleep a lot, and we like to be held and loved, rather than laid aside and ignored.
Life goes by so fast in those early years. We can hardly remember the simplicity of it all. We were cared for and our world began to expand. Perhaps, we had brothers and sisters, cousins, neighbors, and we eventually had classmates at school. We quickly learn that we are not the center of the universe, and we begin to learn the power that others can have over our lives.
We see that parents, other adults, and teachers are all working hard to define who we are. As we continue to develop we become very much aware of the power and influence of those around us in our own group. It is amazing how naturally and easily the power of people who are not us and not even members of our family begins to tell us how to live our lives. There are so many voices at times that it easy for us to become confused about who we are and what we believe in and stand for. We vacillate as we decide how to be a real person and how to differentiate ourselves from the crowd. Or, perhaps, fully diluted by the culture of the crowd, we realize that the crowd is all we are and we live our lives floating passively in the current of all of those around us. Actually, the crowd, until it becomes a group-think, reactionary kind of mob, has many voices, and one of the voices in the crowd is ours. And we are left with the choice, Will I raise my voice to be heard?
Often, crowds have no more direction than a blind person. I heard a story of an elderly woman on a busy street corner who was confused and hesitant to cross because of the heavy traffic? Finally, a gentleman came up to her and asked if he could cross the street with her.
Gratefully she took his arm, but grew progressively more alarmed as he zigzagged randomly across the street, to the blare of horns and screech of locked brakes. Finally on the opposite curb, she said angrily, "You almost got us killed! You walk like you're blind." "I am," he replied. "That's why I asked if I could cross with you." Don't ask a crowd for directions.
Crowds are a part of our lives and consciousness in many ways. We're most aware of them around sporting events like local football and basketball games with their rivalries, pride and competitiveness. In recent weeks we've had the phenomena of the Super Bowl and last week's Daytona 500 that attract thousands to the event itself and millions more in extended crowds through TV audiences. On New Year's Eve we see the crowds at Times Square in New York and others around the world welcome the beginning a new year. Only days before our recent New Year's festivities, we began watching pictures from southern Asia, seeing home movies of unsuspecting crowds playing innocently on beaches or working in familiar stores and vendor stands, only to become panic stricken crowds running from the rising waters soon to become crowds of devastated and grief-stricken people who had suffered great loss.
Soon after Jesus was baptized and began his public ministry, he began to regularly face large groups of people. Jesus attracted crowds. He was a charismatic person. People came from far away to hear him, to see him, to witness the amazing things that he was doing. He talked about a God who was great and more inclusive and more loving that anything they had heard before.
But, in any crowd, then and now, there are two kinds of people-there are believers and doubters. When Jesus healed the man born blind, some of the Pharisees believed he had done a great miracle and that he was the Messiah. Others continued to question the man, his parents and his neighbors. Rather than believe, they accused both him and Jesus of being agents of the devil. Always, some were for him and some were against him. There were the voices of the cheerers, but also the jeerers.
At times the crowds that followed Jesus were mostly curious. Other times, they were needy and sometimes intimidating causing the authorities and the Pharisees to fear them. And, in the end they were a frenzied pawn of the power structure and the religious systems that feared change and ultimately feared the kind of love and servanthood that Jesus represented.
When we listen to the voices of the crowds throughout Jesus ministry and in the two texts from Matthew that we read tonight, we can feel emotions and hear words that, perhaps we too have felt and thought. We have felt ecstasy and joy at the thought of God loving us and forgiving us and offering us a new life, and we would have run into the streets and bowed down. We would have thrown our outer garments in front of Jesus to pass over, and we would have waved our palms and shouted Hosanna.
But after a while, we become more self-conscious, more subdued, more concerned about fitting in than in living our lives as God's unique creation, gifted and called out to be a blessing to others. Once, we were a unique person, but we can become fully diluted, realizing that the crowd is all we are and that we are floating in the current of all of those around us.
That is when we can become the mob, like the one that so easily yelled "Crucify him" to put Jesus to death. It is not that we make rational choices to be or do evil. Being a part of the crowd is much more subtle than that. Floating uncritically in the great river of our culture, we don't recognize the structures and systems in our everyday lives that hurt whole groups of people, that can ignore people and not hear their cries for help, that can gladly receive good things and call them blessings, but refuse to be a blessing or pass on the blessings to others. How many times have we crucified Jesus by our silence and refusal to get involved?
The truth is that crowds are made of many voices, which include ours, and we can choose to keep the uniqueness of our identity or lose it.
One cool September night at Yankee Stadium in New York, a foul ball was hit into the lower left field stands. It was heading right toward a boy of about nine who had obviously come to the game that night hoping for just such a moment. He had a pair of cheap binoculars around his neck and was wearing an oversized Yankees cap and a small Little League glove which had that hardly-broken-in look of a mitt worn by a kid you let play right field in the late innings of hopeless games.
The foul ball was arching directly toward this boy's outstretched hand, but suddenly, a man of about 35 wearing an expensive knit shirt and horn-rimmed glasses reached over the boy, jostled him aside, and caught the ball. In the jostle, the boy's plastic binoculars were broken, and the boy, despite his mother's comfort, was clearly crushed. Everybody in the left field stands had seen this, and, after a second or two of stunned silence, someone shouted, "Give the kid the ball!" Then another cried, "Give the kid the ball!" A couple of rows joined in unison, "Give the kid the ball!"
Horn Rims shook his head and put the ball in his pocket. That inflamed the whole left field crowd, and with one voice they took up the chant, "Give the kid the ball!" It spread to the center field stands, then to right field, obviously including people who did not even know the story, were shouting, "Give the kid the ball!" Players began to glance up from the field to the stands to see what was going on.
Meanwhile, Horn Rims remained stubbornly firm. Finally, a man got up out of his seat, walked over to Horn Rims and spoke some words, patiently and gently, to him. I would love to know what he said because Horn Rims hesitated, then reached into his pocket and handed the ball to the kid. "He gave the kid the ball!" someone exclaimed. Then the whole stands thundered, "He gave the kid the ball!" and applause rippled around the stadium.
Then an even more strange thing began to happen. When another foul ball landed in the left field stands, the man who caught it walked over to Horn Rims and gave it to him. Horn Rims, incredulously thanked him and took it. Some time later, another foul ball came toward their section and was caught by a man in a muscle shirt who was sporting a Fu Manchu mustache. He turned and tossed the ball to the kid, who, to everyone's delight and surprise, caught it. Now, there was more enthusiastic applause from the crowd, who had come that night to see a baseball game but witnessed instead a parable about justice and grace.(1)
In the decisive moments of crowd consciousness, will our voice be heard? As we penitently move toward Easter, let us choose to not get lost in the crowd, let us choose to not just blindly flow with the culture, but let us have our own voice in the crowd, even a voice that can guide a crowd to do good.
A
Sermon preached Wednesday, February 23, 2005, for Ecumenical
Lenten Service at Zion United Church of Christ, Owensboro, KY
1. Thomas G. Long, Whispering The Lyrics, CSS Publishing, 1995.