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THE ANSWERING CROWD
The crowds answered, ‘This is Jesus.’
– Matthew 21: 11 (NIV-UK, and throughout) –
CROWDS COME in all shapes and sizes. There’s the football crowd, the concert crowd, and the crowd that waits in the rain for a sale or the star for an autograph. The Formula 1 crowd, or the crowd by the road at the accident. Then there’s the crowd of daffodils which Wordsworth happened upon. Not a poetic description of such beautiful sight, one might have thought, but memorable and cleverly done.[fn1] His was a beautiful, benign crowd, ‘fluttering and dancing in the breeze’, and not a bit like the crowd standing outside the gaol in one of those Westerns, looking to hang the unfortunate chap inside.
Then there’s the generic crowd, as in the crowd you used to hang around with, but have now outgrown. There’s ‘your crowd’, usually said to you by someone older than you in a disparaging manner, the implication being that you have poor taste in the company you keep. There’s the crowd which is formed by two plus one, when the one is surplus to requirements.
‘Crowd’ is a plain, no-nonsense word with an unfortunate pedigree. It’s related to an ancient Dutch word which means to ‘push in a wheelbarrow’. Adopted into Middle English it took on the meaning of ‘moving by pushing’, which is pretty much how most people view crowds and behave in them.
It’s revealing that the first meaning of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘a large number of people gathered together in a disorganized or unruly way’. Anyone who has been locked in a surging, panicked mass of people will know how terrifying and dangerous it can be. In 1989, at the football stadium at Sheffield (Hillsborough), 96 spectators were killed when the crowd behind stampeded and crushed them against a security fence.
Usually, a crowd is a run-of-the mill affair, made up ordinary people. We rarely encounter a crowd of aristocrats or a crowd of billionaires. No, crowds are of the sort alluded to by Kipling in his classic poem, If, framed copies of which once hung on the walls of schoolboy bedrooms up and down the land:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son![fn2]
THE
CROWD FOLLOWS JESUS – Matthew 15: 30
Great
crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and
many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed
them.
Jesus could talk with crowds. They loved Him. Common folk delighted in what He had to say to them, for He touched their hearts and the conditions of their lives. They traipsed after Him, to see the miracles He performed, to hear Him speak, to eat the food He produced out of thin air. There was probably some pushing and shoving then, too, as those in the back sought to get a better look.
THE
CROWD SHOUTS HOSANNA – Matthew 21: 10, 11
When
Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, ‘Who is this?’
The crowds answered, ‘This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in
Galilee.
Jesus
had been preaching for almost three-and-a-half years. He was coming to the end
of His ministry. They didn’t know it, but He did. The animal which carried Him
on His triumphal entry into Jerusalem He had that very morning reserved
especially for this occasion. He had sent two of His disciples into the nearby
village of Bethphage, telling them to expect to find an ass and her colt
tied up, ready to go. And now, as He advanced along the road, the crowd gave Him
the royal treatment, strewing branches of palm before Him, roaring with approval
and joy and shouting Hosanna! – Praise to the
Lord!
To the peevish rebuke from the Pharisees Jesus levied against them the force of prophecy. If the crowd would not shout out, He told them, then the stones must (Luke 19: 39, 40). But it was not only the passage into the city to which the prophecies pointed. It was the ominous event which the entry presaged – His death. This was far from the thoughts of the delirious crowd.
THE
CROWD COMES WITH SWORDS – Matthew 26: 47
Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with
swords and clubs.
Crowds are fickle. Always on the move. One minute mellow, the next minute mad. Amorphous, it takes little for a crowd to transform itself with one singular suggestion, one ill-considered vicious passion, into a mob.
And so it was that they came at Him that Gethsemane night with swords and clubs their black mission illumined by flaming torches, and He was taken away and stripped and beaten and mocked.
THE
CROWD IS INFLUENCED – Matthew 27: 20
But
the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to
have Jesus executed . . . . they shouted all the louder, ‘Crucify
him!’
And then He was paraded before the people – perhaps some of the same ones who had cheered him a few days earlier. But now it was Barabbas, a criminal, they applauded.
Sometimes it doesn’t take much to put a mob into an uproar. What inducements were advanced by the priests and the elders we are not told, but it was sufficient to have the crowd baying for blood. And there can be little doubt that Satan was somewhere in that savage company, stirring up their hatreds, egging them on, dripping with venom. If only he could get Jesus out of the way, make Him fail, scuttle the whole Plan . . . .
We might well wonder, where was the crowd who had earlier ‘listened to him with delight’? Or the five thousand whose bellies He had filled? Or the throng who had bubbled with joy and anticipation and who had celebrated Him with Hosanna?
Crowds can be like that.
CROWDS IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH – Revelation 19:
6
Then
I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and
like peals of thunder, shouting: ‘Hallelujah!’
‘Multitude’ sounds so much more refined than ‘crowd’, but both are translated from the same Greek word. Here the Hallelujah! is shouted by a heavenly crowd. And there are more crowds to come. Jesus informs us in John 5: 28, 29 that there will be a resurrection on earth of all who died in Adam (‘grave’). Untold thousands of millions. From other Scriptures we know that this astounding event will occur in the Millennium, that great dispensation of the Kingdom of God on earth, when all things will be renewed and the race reconciled with God as a result of the atoning work of Christ.
THE
CROWDS WORSHIP – Philippians 2: 9-11
God
highly exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above
every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on
earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Such will be the method of teaching in those days that the knowledge of God and His Plan of salvation will become common knowledge. The experience of sin and dying and death behind them, these vast numbers of people will come to understand what is now, in this age of faith, hidden to most. The knowledge of the saving love of God will fill the earth and the Saviour will be received with unquestioning affection, honoured and celebrated.
And to the question, ‘Who is this?’ the crowds will answer, ‘This is Jesus.’
__________________________
^[fn1] ‘Daffodils’, by William
Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Source: http://www.englishverse.com/poems/daffodils
^[fn2] ‘If’, by Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936)
Source: http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
Copyright April 2009, UK Bible Students. You may reproduce any part or all of this article, but please let us know if you, and link to our site, if possible.