The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
March 28th, 2021
Palm Sunday (B)
It was February, 2002. The New England Patriots, had just won their first super bowl behind a no-name second year backup quarterback named Tom Brady ending a decades long championship drought for Boston sports. The city was electric, and people wanted to celebrate. So, when it came time for the victory parade downtown, my mom broke me and some friends out of school and drove us to the train so we could all go. Literally everyone and their mother was coming to this thing. The train cars were sardine cans. And when we got into the city we filed out with the masses up the escalators and stepped into a plaza already packed with revelers. It was awesome. A huge party for the entire city. But then the crowds kept coming. And coming. More and more packed trains unloading their passengers who pushed their way onto the plaza. The city police and planners had not anticipated this kind of turnout. And as people kept coming, and coming and the crush of humanity got stronger and stronger, I can remember a moment, clear as day, when I started to panic. I was powerless against the force of the crowd. I was getting crushed. I couldn’t move. I was getting pulled away from my mom and my friends. I was completely helpless. And my adolescent brain suddenly realized, “If this all turned bad, I could die. They could carry me away or crush me or trample me. And there would be no stopping them.” Luckily, I was able to keep my wits about me and push through some people to locate my mom and friends and head to the edge of the crowd and a slightly less congested place. We couldn’t really see the stage where the players were celebrating, but at that point we didn’t really care. We were safe, but all a little shaken.
Crowds often exist on this knife’s edge between jubilation and violence. They can be quite exciting to be a part of, but there’s always this lingering threat that they might get out of control and turn dangerous. They generate their own force, a mind independent of the people involved, but obviously dependent on them as well. And that knife’s edge, that fulcrum between exultation and aggression is precisely where we find ourselves this morning on Palm Sunday. We begin the day with shouts of “Hosanna!” as Jesus rides into Jerusalem, a city replete with festival goers. And we end it with shouts of “Crucify, Crucify him!” To some that may seem odd. But it doesn’t take much for a crowd to turn into a mob. And the fear that they could is always there right below the surface. Even in our cries of excitement, there exists a certain desperation. “Hosanna!” means “Save us!” A cry for help laced into that happy cheer. And if they turn, when they turn ,these crowds can sweep us up and carry us along, leaving us powerless to resist, or worse, trampled beneath their feet.
“Yes,” some of you may be saying, “that’s why I steer clear of crowds.” Too unpredictable, too dangerous. But physical crowds are only one manifestation of collective forces that can sweep us away and carry us to place we do not wish to go, turn us into people we do not wish to be. That same thing can happen with ideas or ideologies. This Lent, many of you read with me the book, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. In that book there are numerous examples of crowds behaving atrociously: Nazi parades, lynch mobs. But as awful as those examples are, even more insidious are the forces she describes that shape our collective conscious, that mold our understanding of the world, subliminally instilling in us a mentality we don’t even question. We are often members of the crowd without even knowing it. And time and again in our discussion groups as we talked about the pervasiveness of the groupthink that tells some people they are superior to others simply because of the color of their skin, we used the metaphor of being swept up in the tide of it all; being pulled deeper into an ocean many of us didn’t even know we were swimming in. Said another way, if we’re not careful our shouts can turn from “Hosanna!” to “Crucify!” without us even knowing how we got there. For it’s not just physical crowds that can overwhelm or overtake us, exerting a force beyond our control. It’s the forces of culture and habit and laws and policies, the gears which keep our world turning, that can sweep us up and carry us away. That crowd in the plaza that almost swallowed me up was just a physical manifestation of how dangerous and divisive ideas and ideologies can overtake us if we do not recognize them and resist them. None of us can ever completely avoid that kind of crowd.
As we walk through this Holy Week you will notice crowds are everywhere. And they are often the force propelling the story to its tragic end. How many of those people do you think woke up that morning with minds set on blood? With hearts primed for murder? And yet there they are. Whipped up into a frenzy, possessed by the spirit of the crowd, driven mad by their collective consciousness, and led down paths they did not know even know they could walk. Mind the crowds, this week, mind the crowds. Mind the ways you are being overtaken by forces or people or ideas beyond your control; forces turning you into someone you do not mean to be. Mind the crowds, my friends, mind the crowds. Lest you too get swept away.