Reliving The Passion #25

Mark 15:15

So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas; and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.

The crowd is a power to be feared. In fact, its power is the fear it inspires in rulers who know its quickness to riot, its ungovernable lack of sense or of personal integrity.

People lose individuality in a crowd. At a certain flash-point they fuse into one simple bellowing brute, passionate and huge. A rioting crowd, then, can destroy a ruler’s schemes, good or bad, a ruler’s authority, the rule and the ruler together. Therefore, rulers satisfy crowds before they riot.

Jesus’ enemies fear the crowd. That’s why, as rulers, they would not arrest him in public. But they also appreciate the power of the crowd, and that’s why, as citizens, they whip it to a frenzy in front of another ruler, the Roman Governor. They have no personal care for the people who compose the crowd. To them it’s a beast of a hundred throats which they might ride to their own advantage (as long as it doesn’t turn and kill them).

And Pilate fears the crowd. He sees the brute swell louder and huger. It’s beginning to eat him up: it has ravaged justice and now devours whatever virtue this ruler might have had, spitting him out as a man of expedience only. To prevent a riot, Pontius Pilate satisfies the crowd. He releases Barabbas. He orders Jesus scourged. He delivers innocence to be crucified.

Thus the power of this brute: it swallows the soul of a Roman; it feeds on the body and blood of the Son of God.

Clearly, neither the high priests nor Pilate ever see the crowd as anything but a brute. Rulers don’t find precious what they fear; they avoid it, or they use it, or they feed it. That’s all.

But Jesus, even when he is food for the Many, sees the crowd as persons after all, individuals to be redeemed, sheep in need of a shepherd, captives to be freed, children, little children lost whom he came to seek and to save. If there’s a brute about, that brute is Lucifer. Sin is brutal. But even the swollen-throated bellowers in the crowd are people to Jesus, whom he regards one by one by one, whom he does not fear, but whom he is serving right now—right now!—by giving his life to ransom them from the very brutishness they are displaying.

Ah, who can believe the paradox of our report? The crowd would destroy Jesus by crucifying him. But Jesus would destroy the crowd—by naming its persons one and one, by calling them out of the brute-slavery of sin, by loving them and renewing one by one their right spirit and their personhood.

Where there is a divine relationship with each individual soul, there can be no crowd. There is only a holy communion.

But he has to die first—

The righteous Servant shall cause many to be accounted righteous; for he pours out his soul unto death; he bears the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors. By dying, he kills the brute.

Jesus, you are like no human ruler. Never, never did a ruler look at me with such earnest singularity, such exclusive attention and mercy as you. I saw you, Jesus, seeing me. Across the heads of all the people, I saw your eyes on me.

I cannot speak.