Lent VI The Crowd is Untruth
175 years ago, the year that then Superintendent Charles La Trobe laid the foundation stone of St Peter’s, Søren Kierkegaard wrote an essay: The Crowd is Untruth.
“The crowd is untruth” he wrote, “There is therefore no one who has more contempt for what it is to be a human being than those who make it their profession to lead the crowd.”
“The crowd is untruth. Therefore was Christ crucified, because he, even though he addressed himself to all, would not have to do with the crowd, because he would not in any way let a crowd help him, because he … would not found a party, or allow balloting, but would be what he was, the truth, which relates itself to the single individual.”
“For to win a crowd is not so great a trick; one only needs some talent, a certain dose of untruth and a little acquaintance with the human passions.”
“To honour every individual human being, unconditionally every human being, that is truth and fear of God and love of ‘the neighbour.’”
Today, Palm Sunday, we re-enact the day when our Lord rode into Jerusalem on a colt; in this very act, he was fulfilling a Messianic prophecy. And they knew it. He drew a crowd. “Hosanna!” they sang, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
Their song was both truth and untruth. The kingdom of their ancestor David was indeed coming. But ironically it was to come through the untruth of the self-same crowd, who would so soon turn on their Messiah, before Pontius Pilate, and cry “crucify.”
The crowd is untruth because the crowd is fickle. Have you seen those huge flocks of sparrows that fly together in tight formation as a whole. Somehow, one bird, not usually a leader out front, often one of the birds in the midst of the crowd changes direction, and in that moment the whole flock changes direction, as one.
We see it in politics all the time, most vividly perhaps in recent times on January 6th, when the crowd of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. Alone, it is highly unlikely that any individual within the crowd that day would have smashed windows or stormed into the debating chambers of government. But together the crowd wrecked havoc.
The untruth of the crowd happens all the time, in small ways as well as big ways: small uprisings, small injustices, small untruths. Even in churches. Gossip fuels sentiment, the crowd creates chaos, and truth is swept away in the blood-lust.
This is not the way of the cross; our calling. Palm Sunday will soon dissipate, and the crucified Messiah will find himself alone. He will proclaim truth in his broken body, in his cruel death. He will proclaim truth to the soldiers who mock him, truth to the women who look on from afar; and all these years later, truth to each one of us who come forward as individuals, in humility, to receive the body of Christ.
When the crowd has gone, and even Our Lady of sorrows has returned home, the truth lies cold in Joseph of Arimathea’s sepulchre. I will leave you with George Herbert’s poem “Sepulchre” (1663) in which he tells so poignantly of this moment of solitary truth.
O blessed body! Whither art thou thrown?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
Receive thee?
Sure there is room within our hearts’ good store;
For they can lodge transgressions by the score:
Thousands of toys dwell there, yet out of door
They leave thee.
But that which shews them large, shews them unfit.
What ever sinne did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now? Who hath indited it
Of murder?
Where our hard hearts have took up stones to brain thee,
And missing this, most falsly did arraign thee;
Only these stones in quiet entertain thee,
And order.
And as of old, the law by heav’nly art
Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart
To hold thee.
Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can,
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
Withhold thee.