Yesterday I posted a short story by Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. Well, I thought it would be fun to post one more thing by him before turning to more important matters. The story by Leacock that is usually considered his most humorous is entitled “Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich.” As one commenter (who happens to be my mother) posted yesterday, some of the book is “devoted to contrasting an Anglican [Episcopalian] and Presbyterian church—and their respective ministers. Of course, it is a caricature, an absolutely brilliant one…A must- read for Reformed people wanting to laugh at themselves!” Here are two excerpts, one very short and the other a bit longer. If you are Reformed and/or Anglical and/or Presbyterian, you may recognize a caricature of yourself somewhere in here. Enjoy!

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Later on, when Spillikins went into business and into society, the same fate pursued him. He loved, for at least six months, Georgiana McTeague, the niece of the presbyterian minister of St. Osoph’s. He loved her so well that for her sake he temporarily abandoned his pew at St. Asaph’s, which was episcopalian, and listened to fourteen consecutive sermons on hell. But the affair got no further than that. Once or twice, indeed, Spillikins walked home with Georgiana from church and talked about hell with her; and once her uncle asked him into the manse for cold supper after evening service, and they had a long talk about hell all through the meal and upstairs in the sitting-room afterwards. But somehow Spillikins could get no further with it. He read up all he could about hell so as to be able to talk with Georgiana, but in the end it failed: a young minister fresh from college came and preached at St. Osoph’s six special sermons on the absolute certainty of eternal punishment, and he married Miss McTeague as a result of it.

* * * * * *

The church of St. Asaph, more properly call St. Asaph’s in the Fields, stands among the elm trees of Plutoria Avenue opposite the university, its tall spire pointing to the blue sky. Its rector is fond of saying that it seems to him to point, as it were, a warning against the sins of a commercial age. More particularly does he say this in his Lenten services at noonday, when the businessmen sit in front of him in rows, their bald heads uncovered and their faces stamped with contrition as they think of mergers that they should have made, and real estate that they failed to buy for lack of faith.

The ground on which St. Asaph’s stands is worth seven dollars and a half a foot. The mortgagees, as they kneel in prayer in their long frock-coats, feel that they have built upon a rock. It is a beautifully appointed church. There are windows with priceless stained glass that were imported from Normandy, the rector himself swearing out the invoices to save the congregation the grievous burden of the customs duty. There is a pipe organ in the transept that cost ten thousand dollars to install. The debenture-holders, as they join in the morning anthem, love to hear the dulcet notes of the great organ and to reflect that it is as good as new. Just behind the church is St. Asaph’s Sunday School, with a ten-thousand dollar mortgage of its own. And below that again on the side street, is the building of the Young Men’s Guild with a bowling-alley and a swimming-bath deep enough to drown two young men at a time, and a billiard-room with seven tables. It is the rector’s boast that with a Guild House such as that there is no need for any young man of the congregation to frequent a saloon. Nor is there.

And on Sunday mornings, when the great organ plays, and the mortgagees and the bond-holders and the debenture-holders and the Sunday school teachers and the billiard-markers all lift up their voices together, there is emitted from St. Asaph’s a volume of praise that is practically as fine and effective as paid professional work.

St. Asaph’s is episcopal. As a consequence it has in it and about it all those things which go to make up the episcopal church—brass tablets let into its walls, blackbirds singing in its elm trees, parishioners who dine at eight o’clock, and a rector who wears a little crucifix and dances the tango.

On the other hand, there stands upon the same street, not a hundred yards away, the rival church of St. Osoph—presbyterian down to its very foundations in bed-rock, thirty feet below the level of the avenue. It has a short, squat tower—and a low roof, and its narrow windows are glazed with frosted glass. It has dark spruce trees instead of elms, crows instead of blackbirds, and a gloomy minister with a shovel hat who lectures on philosophy on week-days at the university. He loves to think that his congregation are made of the lowly and the meek in spirit, and to reflect that, lowly and meek as they are, there are men among them that could buy out half the congregation of St. Asaph’s.

St. Osoph’s is only presbyterian in a special sense. It is, in fact, too presbyterian to be any longer connected with any other body whatsoever. It seceded some forty years ago from the original body to which it belonged, and later on, with three other churches, it seceded from the group of seceding congregations. Still later it fell into a difference with the three other churches on the question of eternal punishment, the word “eternal” not appearing to the elders of St. Osoph’s to designate a sufficiently long period. The dispute ended in a secession which left the church of St. Osoph practically isolated in a world of sin whose approaching fate it neither denied nor deplored.

In one respect the rival churches of Plutoria Avenue had had a similar history. Each of them had moved up by successive stages from the lower and poorer parts of the city. Forty years ago St. Asaph’s had been nothing more than a little frame church with a tin spire, away in the west of the slums, and St. Osoph’s a square, diminutive building away in the east. But the site of St. Asaph’s had been bought by a brewing company, and the trustees, shrewd men of business, themselves rising into wealth, had rebuilt it right in the track of the advancing tide of a real estate boom. The elders of St. Osoph, quiet men, but illumined by an inner light, had followed suit and moved their church right against the side of an expanding distillery. Thus both the churches, as decade followed decade, made their way up the slope of the City till St. Asaph’s was presently gloriously expropriated by the street railway company, and planted its spire in triumph on Plutoria Avenue itself. But St. Osoph’s followed. With each change of site it moved nearer and nearer to St. Asaph’s. Its elders were shrewd men. With each move of their church they took careful thought in the rebuilding. In the manufacturing district it was built with sixteen windows on each side and was converted at a huge profit into a bicycle factory. On the residential street it was made long and deep and was sold to a moving-picture company without the alteration of so much as a pew. As a last step a syndicate, formed among the members of the congregation themselves, bought ground on Plutoria Avenue, and sublet it to themselves as a site for the church, at a nominal interest of five per cent per annum, payable nominally every three months and secured by a nominal mortgage.

As the two churches moved, their congregations, or at least all that was best of them—such members as were sharing in the rising fortunes of the City—moved also, and now for some six or seven years the two churches and the two congregations had confronted one another among the elm trees of the Avenue opposite to the university.

But at this point the fortunes of the churches had diverged. St. Asaph’s was a brilliant success; St. Osoph’s was a failure. Even its own trustees couldn’t deny it. At a time when St. Asaph’s was not only paying its interest but showing a handsome surplus on everything it undertook, the church of St. Osoph was moving steadily backwards.

There was no doubt, of course, as to the cause. Everybody knew it. It was simply a question of men, and, as everybody said, one had only to compare the two men conducting the churches to see why one succeeded and the other failed.

The Reverend Edward Fareforth Furlong of St. Asaph’s was a man who threw his whole energy into his parish work. The subtleties of theological controversy he left to minds less active than his own. His creed was one of works rather than of words, and whatever he was doing he did it with his whole heart. Whether he was lunching at the Mausoleum Club with one of his church wardens, or playing the flute—which he played as only the episcopal clergy can play it—accompanied on the harp by one of the fairest of the ladies of his choir, or whether he was dancing the new episcopal tango with the younger daughters of the elder parishioners, he threw himself into it with all his might. He could drink tea more gracefully and play tennis better than any clergyman on this side of the Atlantic. He could stand beside the white stone font of St. Asaph’s in his long white surplice holding a white-robed infant, worth half a million dollars, looking as beautifully innocent as the child itself, and drawing from every matron of the congregation with unmarried daughters the despairing cry, “What a pity that he has no children of his own!”

Equally sound was his theology. No man was known to preach shorter sermons or to explain away the book of Genesis more agreeably than the rector of St. Asaph’s; and if he found it necessary to refer to the Deity he did so under the name of Jehovah or Jah, or even Yaweh in a manner calculated not to hurt the sensitiveness of any of the parishioners. People who would shudder at brutal talk of the older fashion about the wrath of God listened with well-bred interest to a sermon on the personal characteristics of Jah. In the same way Mr. Furlong always referred to the devil, not as Satan but as Su or Swa, which took all the sting out of him. Beelzebub he spoke of as Behel-Zawbab, which rendered him perfectly harmless. The Garden of Eden he spoke of as the Paradeisos, which explained it entirely; the flood as the Diluvium, which cleared it up completely; and Jonah he named, after the correct fashion Jon Nah, which put the whole situation (his being swallowed by Baloo or the Great Lizard) on a perfectly satisfactory footing. Hell itself was spoken of as She-ol, and it appeared that it was not a place of burning, but rather of what one might describe as moral torment. This settled She-ol once and for all: nobody minds moral torment. In short, there was nothing in the theological system of Mr. Furlong that need have occasioned in any of his congregation a moment’s discomfort.

There could be no greater contrast with Mr. Fareforth Furlong than the minister of St. Osoph’s, the Rev. Dr. McTeague, who was also honorary professor of philosophy at the university. The one was young, the other was old; the one could dance the other could not; the one moved about at church picnics and lawn teas among a bevy of disciples in pink and blue sashes; the other moped around under the trees of the university campus with blinking eyes that saw nothing and an abstracted mind that had spent fifty years in trying to reconcile Hegel with St. Paul, and was still busy with it. Mr. Furlong went forward with the times; Dr. McTeague slid quietly backwards with the centuries.

Dr. McTeague was a failure, and all his congregation knew it. “He is not up to date,” they said. That was his crowning sin. “He don’t go forward any,” said the business members of the congregation. “That old man believes just exactly the same sort of stuff now that he did forty years ago. What’s more, he preaches it. You can’t run a church that way, can you?”

His trustees had done their best to meet the difficulty. They had offered Dr. McTeague a two-years’ vacation to go and see the Holy Land. He refused; he said he could picture it. They reduced his salary by fifty per cent; he never noticed it. They offered him an assistant; but he shook his head, saying that he didn’t know where he could find a man to do just the work that he was doing. Meantime he mooned about among the trees concocting a mixture of St. Paul with Hegel, three parts to one, for his Sunday sermon, and one part to three for his Monday lecture.

No doubt it was his dual function that was to blame for his failure. And this, perhaps, was the fault of Dr. Boomer, the president of the university. Dr. Boomer, like all university presidents of today, belonged to the presbyterian church; or rather, to state it more correctly, he included presbyterianism within himself. He was of course, a member of the board of management of St. Osoph’s and it was he who had urged, very strongly, the appointment of Dr. McTeague, then senior professor of philosophy, as minister.

“A saintly man,” he said, “the very man for the post. If you should ask me whether he is entirely at home as a professor of philosophy on our staff at the university, I should be compelled to say no. We are forced to admit that as a lecturer he does not meet our views. He appears to find it difficult to keep religion out of his teaching. In fact, his lectures are suffused with a rather dangerous attempt at moral teaching which is apt to contaminate our students. But in the Church I should imagine that would be, if anything, an advantage. Indeed, if you were to come to me and say, ‘Boomer, we wish to appoint Dr. McTeague as our minister,’ I should say, quite frankly, ‘Take him.’”

So Dr. McTeague had been appointed. Then, to the surprise of everybody he refused to give up his lectures in philosophy. He said he felt a call to give them. The salary, he said, was of no consequence. He wrote to Mr. Furlong senior (the father of the episcopal rector and honorary treasurer of the Plutoria University) and stated that he proposed to give his lectures for nothing. The trustees of the college protested; they urged that the case might set a dangerous precedent which other professors might follow. While fully admitting that Dr. McTeague’s lectures were well worth giving for nothing, they begged him to reconsider his offer. But he refused; and from that day on, in spite of all offers that he should retire on double his salary, that he should visit the Holy Land, or Syria, or Armenia, where the dreadful massacres of Christians were taking place, Dr. McTeague clung to his post with a tenacity worthy of the best traditions of Scotland. His only internal perplexity was that he didn’t see how, when the time came for him to die, twenty or thirty years hence, they would ever be able to replace him. Such was the situation of the two churches on a certain beautiful morning in June, when an unforeseen event altered entirely the current of their fortunes.

I was in a bad mood yesterday. For weeks now I’ve been trying to figure out something simple with a nearby bank—or something that should be simple. It has been a comedy of errors, really. Every time I try to do something (anything!), it seems that their incompetence or ignorance is working against me. I’ll receive a phone call telling me to come in and sign papers, but when I get there I’m told that the papers are actually still at the head office. “We didn’t call you!” they’ll insist. Was the phone call a figment of my imagination, then? No, I guess it just turns out that the call center and the branch don’t have the best communication. The next time I went to the bank they ran around the branch scraping together some paperwork, all the while calling across the branch with personal details of my account and its contents (despite all kinds of other customers milling about). After a couple of weeks of this I had to admit that I had been holding on just to satisfy my own morbid curiosity as to whether they could actually follow through on any of their promises.

Yesterday I was told I could drop by to fill out the paperwork for a safe deposit box they had reserved for me. I took a few minutes around lunch time and drove up there. When I arrived at the branch I was told that all of the boxes were already spoken for. A little vein in my forehead started throbbing. I tried to explain with decreasing self-control that every time they called me to the branch I took time out of my day only to find that they had been wrong. The girl behind the counter explained that her manager and all other superiors were out at the moment but that they would call me when they arrived later. Of course I could also wait at the bank if I preferred. Well, I am a busy guy and can’t be waiting at a bank for a manager to arrive, so I rolled my eyes, barked something grumpy and stormed away with a black rain cloud over my head.

Fifteen minutes after getting home the branch called and left a message to say that there was a safe deposit box for me after all. Later that afternoon, when I had put aside work for the day, I headed back to the branch. I was just hoping that I’d be able to get in a word or two with that manager. There was so much I wanted to say. “I’d keep my money in a sock under my mattress before I’d open another account in your half-rate, two-bit institution!” I was ready. I was prepped.

I got to the bank and stood in line. In just a few seconds it was my turn and I marched up to the wicket to see the same girl there that I had spoken to that morning. This was going to be good. It was time for some justice.

And right then and there, God whacked me on the chest with a two-by-four. Or if felt like it, anyways. It was like my conscience was something physical, something palpable and something that was anxious to pull out of my chest. Suddenly I didn’t feel like fighting. All I could say was, “I’m sorry I was a jerk this morning.” She replied as people always seem to: “That’s okay!” And I said, “No, it isn’t okay. I shouldn’t have acted like that and I’m sorry.” And then, after many more delays, we opened my safe deposit box.

As humbling and humiliating as this was, I’m grateful to the Spirit that He struck my conscience in the way He did. I need His help. I’ve been trying to become a better apologizer. I’ve been trying to take the initiative, as the leader of my household, in apologizing. Too often I’ve seen apologizing as weakness—that a real man never apologizes. What will my wife and children think of me if I’m always apologizing to them? They’ll catch on that I’m pretty well a jerk and that I sin, you know, at least occasionally. But God has really helped me to understand that taking initiative in apologizing is the mark of a leader, not the mark of someone who is weak. God knows how many opportunities I have to practice apologizing. And He is showing me how important it is that I take them.

As I’ve been working on becoming a better apologizer, I’ve come up with just a short list of tips. I’ll post them in the hope that maybe they can help you, too.

Just Do It

Just apologize. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Don’t let bitterness take root. Don’t let pride sever your relationships. If there is anything that will keep you from apologizing, it is pride. Your pride will rebel against humbling yourself before God and before another person. Don’t trust your pride. Just apologize. When you offend someone, just apologize. If you’re anything like me, you won’t ever lack for opportunities to practice apologizing. As times goes on it may not get any easier or any less humbling, but it will become something you do sincerely and out of a desire to please God and to honor people created in His image.

Ask for Forgiveness

It is easy enough to say, “I’m sorry, ” But far more difficult to ask, “Do you forgive me?” Asking forgiveness allows both you and the offend party to understand that you are not merely seeking to salve your conscience by apologizing, but that you are seeking true reconciliation. Forgiveness is something that needs to be both given and received.There may be times when actually asking for forgiveness will be very awkward and there may be times you will choose not to actually force the question (as I did yesterday. The girl at the bank was already looking at me funny. I was worried she’d hit the panic button if I pressed much more). But you will generally want to ask for forgiveness.

Don’t Rationalize Your Sin

I try to teach my children that an apology does not include the words “but” or “if.” We do not say, “I’m sorry if I offended you.” We do not say, “I’m sorry I did it, but if you hadn’t…” We apologize sincerely and from the heart. If we cannot apologize without rationalizing our own sin, we are not truly apologizing. We will want to examine our hearts before attempting to make a true and sincere apology. We cannot make apologies that are really our attempts to forgive ourselves for the wrongs we’ve committed. So apologize sincerely and apologize from the heart, not as an attempt to clear your own record but as a step of love and obedience.

Learn to Forgive

And finally, learn how to forgive. As difficult as I find it to be the one asking forgiveness, I find it even more difficult and even more awkward being on the giving end of forgiveness. You may well feel the same. Far too often, when someone apologizes to us, we are embarrassed and inadvertently excuse their sin. “That’s okay! It didn’t bother me…” we may reply. But it is not okay; sin is never okay. So learn how to forgive.

If God grants me my three score and ten, I’m not even halfway through life yet. And while he has certainly been gracious in helping me overcome sin, plenty remains. I’m still a committed sinner. Dave Harvey, in his book When Sinners Say ‘I Do’ said something I love—that the more you get to know him, the more respect you’ll have for his wife. The same is certainly true of me and of my wife. Get to know me and you’ll soon see the kind of person that Aileen is. It’s not always an easy calling for her to be my wife. But even more, the same is true of me and my God. Get to know me and you’ll learn just how gracious and loving a God I serve that He would be willing to forgive a jerk like me.

Postscript

I was wrong to bark at the girl at the bank. There’s no doubt. And I truly am sorry. But the fact remains that the bank really is a half-rate, two-bit institution and I really do think I’d keep my savings in a sock under my mattress before I entrusted them to this particular branch. Then again, they now have a safe deposit box in my name. Dare I entrust them with whatever I might want to stuff in there?

Today I am posting something rare—a guest post. This article was written by John Ensor, whom you may know as the author of The Great Work of the Gospel and Doing Things Right in Matters of the Heart. In this article he takes on what he considers a popular Palm Sunday myth. Read it and let me know what you think. Is he right? Were the crowds really as fickle as we often think? Or have we got this all wrong?

It is a theological myth that gets restated every Palm Sunday. I heard it again this past week and it grieves my spirit deeply; that the cheering crowd that lauded Jesus with sweet “Hosannas,” later cried “Crucify him!” Such is the fickle nature of man it is said.

I say it is not true. The people were not fickle. Apart from the fact that the word “crowd” is used in both contexts, there is no evidence to assert that it is the same crowd and lots of evidence that it is not. The evidence suggests that the crowd shouting “Crucify him!” was a crowd of chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees, Sadducees and “conscripted” false witnesses (by threat or bribe most likely).

Using Matthew’s gospel, the crowd shouting “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” (21:9) are referred to collectively as the “daughter of Zion” (21:5) and later referred to simply as “the people” (26:5). They are the regular, average citizens, the “folks” as opposed to the power-protecting religious leaders. The people perceived that someone great and glorious, in deed, heaven-sent, was arriving. They burst forth with due praise. Included in this crowd were children who continued shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David” when he arrived at the temple (21:15). The sick, blind and the lame were also part of this crowd and they too followed Jesus to the temple (21:14). They believed that Jesus could heal them. They were not disappointed (21:14). Before we say that this crowd turned on him, we ought to check. Most likely they neither understood his fullness nor his purpose. Not even his disciples grasped that. But they at least understood him as “a prophet sent from God” (21:11). There is no evidence that these people, just a week later, screamed and rioted in demand of his execution.

But even before I trace this out in the gospels, I submit that people, in general, are not fickle like this. They do not swing from rapid popular acclaim to hatred in a few days for no reason other than that they are fickle in nature. People generally change their opinion about leaders, from initial great enthusiasm to deep disappointment and bitterness slowly, over time (months and years), based on the disappointing actions of those leaders; not group “mood swings.” We do well to remember Psalm 146:3 when watching cheering crowds swoon before any political leader. “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.” All people, being sinners, make horrible Saviors, spiritual, political or otherwise.

That is why the Triumphal Entry of Christ is so great that the rocks were tempted to break the rules of nature (Lk 19:40). For this was the Son of Man arriving on a colt. Shout aloud! O Church! Or stand aside and let the trees clap their hands!

But even within this greater crowd of everyday people, the seeds of another crowd were present. “And some of the Pharisees were in the crowd” (Lk 19:39). They immediately attempted to suppress the glory, laud and honor to our redeemer King. But it could not be done. In fact, the children carried over the very praises they heard during this march to the temple when Jesus arrived there. The blind and the lame also showed up at the temple, hoping that this man sent from God might heal them. They were not disappointed. But the other crowd was also milling at the temple. “When the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things [Jesus] did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant” (21:15). They challenged Jesus to stop the crowd from acclaiming him. Jesus said their praise was only natural (21:16).

Next we read that “the chief priests and the elders” arrived at the temple and attempted to question Jesus’ authority (21:23). Their goal was to take him down a notch in the eyes of the people (who still loved him). Jesus returned their question with a question about John the Baptist: was he sent from God or was he a human invention? They were stuck. “If we say ‘From man’ we are afraid of the crowd, for they all hold that John was a prophet” (21:26). Here is confirmation that the crowd remained enthralled of Jesus and saw him in the same way they saw John the Baptist, as a prophet sent from God. The chief priests and elders left unsatisfied and growing in their anger.

Next we read in 21:45 that “the chief priest and the Pharisees” witnessed Jesus teaching parables. They wanted to arrest him, but “they feared the crowds” (21:46). This is the second reference about fearing the crowd. The problem they faced in bringing down Jesus was the continuing popularity of Jesus by the “folks.” They were not fickle. They were consistent. The religious elites needed to figure a way to break the popularity of Jesus in order to destroy him. .

Taxes are always a good wedge issue. In 22:15-16, we read that the Pharisees “plotted” to entrap Jesus into taking an unpopular position regarding taxes. They expected him to try to slip out of it so they began by praising his honestly and integrity. This would force him to speak in a way that would make the crowd think again about Jesus. “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and that you are not swayed by appearances. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” (21:16-17). It didn’t work, and his popularity with the crowd of regular folk only intensified, even as the other crowd’s anger deepened (21:22).

Next the Sadducees took a turn (22:23-8). They raised a disputatious matter of theology concerning resurrection, trying to show the irrationality of it and thus peel off a chunk of his popularity by forcing Jesus to choose sides in a matter that divided the people already. Jesus’ answer did take a side (for resurrection!) and made a persuasive case of it as well. The result? “And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching” (22:33).

Here we see the crowd of “folks” growing in their joy over Christ, not diminishing; and certainly not fickle. But the crowd of leaders opposing him was also growing. The Pharisees and the Sadducees joined together to thwart a common enemy (22:34). This crowd plotted and planned. Meanwhile, we read, “Then Jesus said to the crowds and to the disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you- but not what they do” (23:1-3). Jesus is teaching and building up the faith of the “folks”. Here he is warning them to follow the teaching of the law, but not the lifestyle of the teachers (the scribes, Pharisees, elders, priests etc.). Are we to believe that those who lauded Jesus’ arrival, and witnessed his healing power, and who were taught parables about the Messiah’s reception and were explicitly warned not to follow the behavior of the religious elites were not impacted by it in any way and subject to fickleness of allegiance? (If we do, then it is worse than the myth says. For the fickleness must have erupted not over a week, but over a few days.) Or should we acknowledge that this crowd continued to hunger to be in Jesus’ presence in the days that followed his entry, and deepened their hope in him throughout the week, as they were taught by him? This crowd’s open embrace of Jesus was growing and it served as his protection from the growing crowd of plotters.

In 26:3-4 we read that the chief priests and elders gathered together and “plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him.” Why the stealth? Because this crowd of plotters feared upsetting the other crowd of folks. Since their attempts to turn the crowd’s opinion against Jesus failed, their only option was to go around the crowd. We may be sure of this because 26:4-5 makes it explicit. “[They] plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him. But they said, ‘Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people.” Praise God, the people, the same people who cried “hosanna!” a week before, were still standing firm even at this last hour!

And so the plot unfolded at night and throughout the night, when the people were largely asleep and unaware of the unfolding events. By the time they awoke the next morning, the arrest and trial was done. Jesus was crucified at 9 AM (Mk 15:25) before the crowd would have come looking for Jesus to see and learn more as was their daily habit now, or react defensively on his behalf, or to provide their own testimony of his healings and teachings, the deed was done.

It began, according to Mt 26:47 when Judas arrived and “with him a great crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the people.” This is the crowd that would push for crucifixion-a crowd consisting of chief priests and elders and their cronies, armed with clubs. They expected that those gathered around Jesus would fight to defend him (they suffered from sleepiness; but not fickleness). At least one rose up fighting and cut off the ear of one of the chief priests. Jesus heals him. “At that hour, Jesus said to the crowds, ‘Have you come out as against a robber…” (26:55). Again the evidence is building that two crowds are at work here: one that was growing more passionate in their intent to murder Jesus and one growing more determined to defend him. Fickleness is not in the picture.

Continuing on, the crowd of high priests and elders took Jesus to Caiaphas, another high priest, where still more of their kind had assembled; “where the scribes and the elders had gathered” (26:57). This group is now called “the whole Council,” or the Sanhedrin (26:59) and they sought out “false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death” (26:60). It is possible that they sought these out from among the healed or from the people in general. But this would be reading into the text. More likely they sought these ought from among the chief priests, elders, scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees that had tracked him all week and grew blood thirsty with each passing day. What is clear is that there is still no sign of fickleness here.

In the early hours of the morning, this same crowd of “chief priests and elders of the people” (27:1), led Jesus to the governor, Pilate. Again in 27:12, it is this crowd of chief priests and elders who accused him before Pilot. It was before this same crowd that Pilate looks for a way out. “Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted” (27:15). This makes sense, politically. Pilate benefited by appeasing this crowd of religious leaders from time to time. He did not need to curry support from the children, the lame, the blind, and the every day folks of Jerusalem. And it was this crowd that finally got what they had wanted since Jesus first arrived on a donkey; they found a way to kill him.

When we read in 27:20, “Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus.” All the indications are that this refers to the crowd of fellow elders, priests, scribes, and Pharisees that the narrative indicates had been gathering and assembling and moving about all night. “They all said, ‘Let him be crucified!’” (27:22). Still Pilate was reluctant. But this crowd knew they had their man cornered. Just a little protest now was all that was needed. They screamed, shouted, threatened, perhaps ripped their clothes or threw a few chairs. Hard to know. But whatever it was, it equaled the first stages of social unrest. Pilate saw “that a riot was beginning” (27:24). He was now left with little choice but to slake their thirst for the blood of Jesus and thus purchase his own peace with this crowd.

It was morning now and people were out and about. This same crowd conscripted a by-stander, Simon, a Cyrene, to carry his cross (27:32). By noon, other bystanders were around watching. Hearing Jesus’ cries, they said, “Truly this man is calling Elijah.” They were confused. But they were never fickle. They still believed that Jesus was sent from God and even at this final hour, expected God to come to his defense (27:49).

So let the joyous news be spread! The crowd was not fickle. And did not praise him one day and cry out for his murder another. Two crowds were coming and going all week. Both grew stronger in their conviction as the week went along. The sheep grew sheepier. And the goats grew goatier. The later group conspired to work around the former. Later on, Peter referred to this group as “lawless men” (Acts 2:23). This better fits the crowd of chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees, who could act against the law and above the law, and get away with it. Regular folk lack such power in general.

So let us join in the singing; and stand with the blind, the lame, the disciples, the children, the Cyrene, the women who later stood at a distance and look bewildered at the cross, and the general populace, who at this moment saw the truth, at least in part. “All glory laud and honor to thee, Redeemer King. To whom the lips of children make sweet hosannas ring.” Sing with them and do not diminish their child-like faith with talk of fickleness.

John Ensor is the Executive Director of Urban Initiatives for Heartbeat International and author of “The Great Work of the Gospel” (Crossway, 2006).