Though you
pound a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with crushed grain, Yet his
foolishness will not depart from him (Prov. 27:22).
Lessons can
be drawn from every event in the Bible because human nature has not changed
since Cain killed Abel. Consider that Jesus fed thousands, healed the lame and
blind, and even raised people from the dead. Even so, there were those among
the religious and political leadership in Israel who wanted Him dead (John 8:58–59).
While reading
through the Passion Narratives in Luke’s Gospel, I noticed a few things that
apply today.
Facts Don’t
Matter to the Mob
When Jesus
was before the Sanhedrin made up of Israel’s religious and legal leaders (Luke 22:66), consisting of chief priests and
scribes, the following exchange took place:
When it was
day, the Council of elders of the people assembled, both chief priests and
scribes, and they led Him away to their council chamber, saying,
“If You are the Christ, tell us.” But He said to them, “If I tell you, you will
not believe; and if I ask a question, you will not answer” (22:66–68).
No matter
what Jesus said, the religious and legal establishment were not going to
listen. They had their agenda, and they were sticking to it. They had too much
to lose if Jesus’ message was embraced by the people. The argument was only
secondarily about theology. It was more about money and control of the people via
religion and economics. This might be hard for Christians to grasp, but it’s
true as Jerry Bowyer, author of
the soon-to-be-released book The Maker Versus the Takers: What
Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics, explains:
While He was
in the economically dynamic area of lower Galilee, the Jesus of the Gospels
never confronted any individual over their wealth. But once he travels south to
Jerusalem, over and over again, we see Him confront members of the Judaean
ruling class, specifically over issues of economic exploitation.
In the end,
they killed Him for that. Ruling elites might get a bit annoyed if you mess
with their theology, but they get downright murderous when you mess with their
money. The Gospels point to two specific events which triggered the plot to
kill Him: the parable of the vineyard (which pointed to their economic
exploitation of what belonged to God) and His confrontation with the money
changers. (Townhall Finance)
On both sides
of the current debate over what started as racial justice issues, what’s really
at stake is control of the corridors of power and the people of all races be
damned. The elites in both parties want to retain influence of a political
system that has been steadily reconstituted to favor power over principles and
economic largess over economic freedom. The facts are unrelated to the larger
agenda.
The Mob
Cannot be Appeased
The People of
Israel did not reject Jesus. As has been said, the religious and political
leaders feared the people, thousands of whom embraced Him (Matt. 21:1–11, 14–17). Like what we are seeing happen in
cities across the United States, disparate ideologies have joined forces to
bring down the system. Some things need to be brought down, like those who were
desecrating the temple (21:12–13), but not everything. (In a sense, Jesus was
the heir to the Temple. It was His Father’s House.)
The Jewish
establishment needed a way to topple the emerging transformational system that
would have put them out of work. They couldn’t do it on their own because they
feared the people (Matt. 21:46), so they
worked behind the scenes to enjoin agents of the Roman Empire to carry out the
assassination by false testimony (Luke 23:2) and threats of political reprisals
if the local governor Pontius Pilate did not give into their demands:
Pilate made
efforts to release Him, but the Jews cried out saying, “If you release this
Man, you are no friend of Caesar; everyone who makes himself out to be a king
opposes Caesar” (John 19:12).
In the case
of Jesus, the mob consisted of the religious and political establishment to
maintain the status quo, even if it meant the death of someone like Jesus and
later Stephen (Acts 7) and James the brother of John, an action that “pleased
the Jews” (12:1–3).
The long-term
ramifications of these actions and many more like them that we read about in
the book of Acts resulted in the destruction of the temple, the death of nearly
a million Jews, the captivity of tens of thousands, and the end of the Jewish
nation at the hands of the Romans.
Zechariah
predicted the end results of their duplicity:
“I will make
it go forth,” declares the LORD of hosts, “and it will enter the house of the
thief and the house of the one who swears falsely by My name;
and it will spend the night within that house and consume it with its
timber and stones” (5:4).
The timbers
and stones of the temple were torn down within a generation of the lies that
were told by the religious and legal leaders in Jerusalem to eliminate the
threat of Jesus (Matt. 24:1–3, 34).
Surrender
Both Herod
and Pilate realized that Jesus had not committed a crime. Pilate said to the
chief priests, “I find no guilt in this man” (Luke 23:4). The mob would not quit with their
lies. It’s here that Pilate makes his first surrender to the mob. He turns
Jesus over to Herod (24:7), hoping that he will not have to make the right
decisive decision.
Herod’s
questioning and ridicule of Jesus did not assuage the determination of the mob
to see Jesus done away with. Like Pilate, Herod passes the buck and returns him
to Pilate. The mob is still in control. Another surrender. They can smell
victory.
Cowardice
We shouldn’t
be too hard on Peter. He was outnumbered and had no clout with the religious
and political authorities when he denounced Jesus three times (Luke 22:31–34, 61). He “wept bitterly” for his betrayal.
Today’s
political leaders don’t have an excuse for their cowardice. They are the people
in charge. They refuse to lead. Most of them easily capitulate to the mob.
We’re seeing something among religious leaders who support a Marxist
organization like Black Lives Matter since it’s the easiest thing to do if you
don’t want to be assailed with mob “justice.”
There are
cowards in the Republican party:
Never Trump
super PAC the Lincoln Project and other anti-Trump Republicans continue to plot
to not only take down President Donald Trump, but also the Senate Republican
majority, according to a report released on Saturday.
Never Trump
Republicans believe that preventing a second term for Trump is insufficient,
and that Senate Republicans must also pay the price of backing the 45th
president.
Steve
Schmidt, who works for the Never Trump Lincoln Project, said, “The analogy would
be in the same way that fire purifies the forest, it needs to be burned to the
ground and fundamentally repudiated. Every one of them should be voted out of
office, with the exception of Mitt Romney.” (Breitbart)
These
political cowards have no sense of history. Those who burn down the house of
the first will be burned themselves once they are no longer needed by the mob.
The mob turns on them like the mob turned on Maximilien Robespierre
(1758–1794), “one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution.”
As the
leading member of the Committee of Public Safety from 1793, Robespierre
encouraged the execution, mostly by guillotine, of more than 17,000 enemies of
the Revolution. The day after his arrest, Robespierre and 21 of his followers
were guillotined before a cheering mob in the Place de la Revolution in Paris.
(History.com)
Be careful
what you wish for, because “[i]t’s an iron law of history that the revolution
always eats its own children — as proven time after time in the centuries
since.”
