One of the biggest puzzles for me growing up was the question of why the same bunch of people celebrating Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem would, a scant week later, call for him to die the most horrid death imaginable.
Who was in that crowd anyway?
Short answer: the crowd was composed mostly of the people who saw, or heard about, how Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. And that was why they shouted “Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” hosanna meaning “save us.”
The crowd, fired up by news of the miracle, believed that a saviour had come. Little did they know that they were hailing a King-soon-to-die. All they saw was this image of Jesus they had created in their hearts and minds; a kind of superman able to work miracles that would lift them up out of the misery of their lives.
The problem was that, in the days of the Passion that soon followed, Jesus’ humanity was put on full display, as was his inability to work a miracle to save even himself. In the minds of the once welcoming crowd, this was a betrayal of their faith and perhaps most damningly, of their hope. As Judas sings in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), “you have set them all on fire / they think they’ve found the new messiah / and they’ll hurt you when they find they’re wrong // I remember when this whole thing began / no talk of God then, we called you a man / and believe me my admiration for you hasn’t died // but every word you say today / gets twisted ’round some other way / and they’ll hurt you if they think you’ve lied //.”
And so they did.
In this one Biblical story, we can find a critical lesson for would-be messiahs: do not promise more than you can deliver. But there is a lesson here, as well, for the millions upon millions of us who have no shot of ever being any sort of messiah: when we heap all our expectations on one person, we set ourselves up for tremendous disappointment.
And since we are thousands of years removed from literally crucifying anyone, the best we can usually do is just swallow our bitterness and wait for someone better to come along. Occasionally, we rally.
The tragedy, however, is that when that someone does come along, we tend to repeat the whole suicide spiral of expectation and disappointment all over again, leaving us having to do what we’ve always had to do: uplift ourselves without depending on some superman to do it for us. History proves it.
Throughout the long story of humanity, we have had kings, presidents, and strongmen who have swept to power on a wave of public adoration, only later to have that love turn into resentment and even hatred. In almost all cases, the beloved despots are shown to have feet of clay, betraying their promises and leaving most of the people worse off than they were before, struggling doubly hard to pay for the delusion of a easy fix.
No, I am not comparing Jesus to dictators; I am comparing us to the people who welcomed him into Jerusalem. I am drawing a parallel between between the people who started with palm leaves and ended up with scourges in the hands, to those of us who started with ballots and will end up with angry tweets. I am underscoring the ephemeral nature of our adoration, and the completely illusory nature of the promise of an earthly messiah.