Wednesday, December 15, 2021
A crowd is impossible to please.
In a football stadium, whenever the referees throw one of those yellow
flags in the air, they’ve judged that one or more of the players have done
something outside the rules of the game.
And every time they make half of the people in the crowd happy, and the
other half fighting mad! It just depends
on which side you want to win. You
cannot please a crowd.
Whether you’re in the crowd or on the field, the weight of being in
control of things raises an elevated level of possibilities for good or
evil. Jesus had just gotten done
teaching the crowd that John the Baptist’s ministry of proclaiming God’s
salvation through repentance was right.
The crowd was pleased, but the Pharisees, lurking in the shadows, had
other ideas. They began sowing seeds for
a crop of discontent among the people, and making plans to take Jesus down.
There’s a worn-out phrase that describes what the Pharisees wanted from
Jesus: You go-along to get-along. They wanted this son of the carpenter to get
in line with their brand of thinking and authority; they considered themselves
the referees who were in control of what people could do or think. They knew best! And every time Jesus wouldn’t dance or cry to
the tunes the Pharisees played, they kept score; the game was getting lopsided…so
they decided to kill him.
For the Pharisees, being in control was everything. Without their elaborate robes, sashes, artifacts,
and rituals, they wouldn’t be noticeable.
And they wanted that fame, and the attention that went with it all. This Jesus, a nobody carpenter’s son from a small
town, was ruining everything.
The weight of control is tied to the weight of vested interest. If change will cost you what you want to
keep, the tendency (of selfishness) will be to resist. The larger the personal stake, the more
intense will be the level of resistance.
Fame, notoriety, fortune, and self-gratification are intoxicating – to say
the least.
It’s difficult to read this account of the shoving match the Pharisees
created, trying to limit Jesus’ effect on the crowds; those people were the Pharisees’
home team, and this upstart country bumpkin was not going to take away what
belonged to them. The battle was joined
at this point; and it would get as ugly as it needed to be for the control-mongers
to keep it together their way.
For You Today
One benchmark of true Christian discipleship is the
absence of control. It’s known as the
surrendered life. You enter
God’s salvation that way, surrendering control of your life by confessing your
sins to God, placing your faith in Christ and His blood-sacrifice on your
behalf, and God does the forgiving and saving.
Wanting to be in control of any of that negates your confession.
Confessing is admitting that you are not in control…God
is! And that is a weight that’s
wonderful to get off your back!
[1] Title and Other Images: Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
For another post on this text see The Original Radical
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