Starting from Palm Sunday
The ideas behind this article, at least for me, start off on Palm Sunday. As an Episcopalian, part of our liturgy is reading the Passion of Christ. Different people read different parts, and we have done it different ways over the years. Sometimes we have the youth read it, sometimes everyone, it varies. But there is one part that everybody reads, and reads loudly. This is the part of the crowd, which only ever says one thing, “Crucify Him!” Every year, everyone in the church who is not reading another part has to personally yell for the death of Christ, whose teachings and person we revere. We even repeat ourselves, to make sure it’s understood. “Crucify him, CRUCIFY HIM!”
But why on earth should we do this? It’s extremely uncomfortable. It bothered me for years, and some years I said it quietly, trying to avoid confronting this awful thing I was going to have to do. Nobody ever told me why we did this, we just did, every year, and I never knew why.
This post is the story of why I began to understand, and when. In the current climate, the current society, I think we need to understand, because we DO this awful thing, and deny it, frequently. We even justify it to ourselves, and feel good about it.
Some might point to a book called The Madness of Crowds when trying to understand this, and indeed Douglas Murray does a very good job of dissecting the current ideologies and problems of today. But the problem goes deeper than that, far deeper, and the book I would like to cite is Ordinary Men, by Christopher R. Browning. It is here that I think we need to look, amid horror, to see why, every year, we should cry for the painful death of one we love.
Ordinary Men
As a warning, Ordinary Men is a horrible book, and painful to read. It is quite well written; that is not the issue. The book is the story of the 101st Reserve Police Battalion, which was dispatched to Poland by the Third Reich. These were not distinguished men, not evil, and certainly not criminals. These were volunteers, too old for military service. Among them were butchers, police, a pharmacist, and so on and so forth. They were ordinary, decent chaps, until they got to Poland.
At first it started small, a horrible duty that they were asked to do, but were allowed to refuse. Many did refuse, or broke down while carrying it out. All were deeply affected. All they had to do was take a Jew into the woods, tell them to lie down, put their gun in a specific spot on the back of the head, and pull the trigger. Many rebelled, could not fire, or only managed one or two before they had to quit. Horrible, right? Surely the human mind could not stand this. Ordinary folk like they would never have the strength to continue this horror! Only monsters like the SS could continue these killings!
Untrue, as it turned out. By the end of the war, these utterly ordinary men, and many other Reserves like them, had manned the trains to Auschwitz and Treblinka, shooting and brutalizing those inside, had participated in rounding up and executing Jews and others, and were going, of their own volition, on Jew-hunting sweeps in the woods to see how many they could catch and kill. They even participated in filling the mass graves in Treblinka, moving people into the pit and getting them into position to be shot by the submachine guns of the Baltic mercenaries.
What makes it worse is that they were volunteers, and they continued to be so. Some few, including one Lieutenant, managed to avoid the work, and did everything they could to get out. But over time, the rest grew used to it, and some even became eager to kill. It was just what they did.
So what does this horror have to do with Palm Sunday? Everything.
I used to think, and I know plenty who still do, that they could never call for the death of Christ. They could never do something so awful. These men did worse, and volunteered. I know people who think that because they are good, and kind, and are very intelligent and moral people, that they could never have been Nazis. THEY, surely, would have been among the resistance, those who hid Jews, who protected them at the risk of their lives!
Wrong. Most Germans went along. These men did worse, volunteered to do worse… And so will you. If your inputs are changed enough, if the culture changes, if it becomes normal or valorized to do these things… You WILL do them.
You may feel bad, at first, but you will be able to rationalize it. It’s for a greater good. If the pain gets too great, alcohol helps. Some of the Baltic mercenaries at the Treblinka pit were drinking as they shot.
Crucifixion Now
Christianity was founded in a more violent time, when the Romans marched around fighting and conquering everything in sight. It persisted and grew throughout the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and other times, when skirmishing and petty wars were only interrupted by major wars. Somewhere in the world, someone was always at war over something during those years.
We’re different, aren’t we?
No. We are not different. Just because we managed to avoid World War III, at least for the moment, doesn’t relieve us of the legacy of Afghanistan, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the blight in our cities, the threat of terrorism, the genocide in China, and so on. Just because war is happening elsewhere, not on our soil, doesn’t mean that we’re not contributing, not part of it. Heck, looking at our inner cities, at gang wars and drug wars, at the slaving and violence along our southern border, one might wonder how, exactly, we are better than our violent ancestors some 2000 years ago.
And that’s the point. We are still, no matter the pill, no matter the computer and the cell phone and the internet, only and eternally human. We will still cry for the blood of our enemies, and even for the blood of our friends and loved ones, if managed carefully enough. If the ideology is right, the culture rewarding, if it is valorized, we will turn, as our spiritual forebears did, on those who hold our highest good, and we will kill them. Maybe not physically, but we can crush their lives, their livelihood, their morals, their ethics, and their freedom beneath our feet and call it good. And we ALL, me included, have done so, or called for it, in a moment of rage. Remember 9/11? We will gladly sacrifice even essential liberties for the chance to put the boot on the neck of someone we dislike.
So think about now. Who are we crucifying? White supremacists? Remind me who is white supremacist this week? The term is losing its meaning. Perhaps anti-vaxxers who aren’t doing their bit to keep us all safe? It’s amazing how many of them are vaccinated against everything EXCEPT the one shot the government demands they get. The people who took that horse de-wormer that the news tells us is bad and evil? And yet they are getting better, and it was prescribed by a doctor, and has saved many lives in humans.
The right is not immune from this, either. People may remember the Southern Baptist Summer Banning program, when they would get together and ban something at their yearly convention. Or one could talk about the Westboro Baptist Church, or more current groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, who keep getting in misguided fights with Antifa.1 Or perhaps we could call on such types as Milo Yiannopolous, who made a career out of infuriating the left, particularly the Progressive left.
The Chief Priests Incited the Crowd…
One of the other things about Palm Sunday that is striking is that the crowd was being manipulated by the Chief Priests. They had gotten them there and fed them full of fury, so that the crowd could support the hierarchy of the priesthood, and the structure of the kingdom, by destroying this man, this radical, who could undercut both. One can certainly see Chief Priests in our time, too. Influencers on social media, for example, or talk show hosts, or the Twitterati, or influential types like Brian Stelter, Don Lemon, or Rachel Maddow, and perhaps Tucker Carson, Sean Hannity, and Gret Gutfeld on Fox. These people take and shape a grand narrative that, especially for some of them, is patently false and steers people towards extremism. They craft a compelling world that we can live in, should we choose; a world in which we can be heroes fighting the other side.
All this is true enough, but blaming others is a bad idea here. Remember, we choose to listen. We choose to give credence to these people instead of doing our own investigation, seeking out alternative sources of news, fact-checking, finding reporters like Tim Pool and Glenn Greenwald who care more for fact than narrative, for liberty than tyranny. In the end, we still are the ones who, lending our ear to the Chief Priests and Scribes, begin to cry out the words they would have us say: “Crucify him! Cancel him! Vaccinate him! Lock him/her up!” In the end, we do that. We ALWAYS do that. The question is: are we self-reflective enough to repent, to stop repeating the old habits, and to try to transcend ourselves? Or would we prefer to be asleep, repeating what we are told by the Chief Priests, and killing those who would do us good, while weaving the bonds of their corrupt tyranny around ourselves, just for the chance to live that lie?
Either way, whatever happens, we are responsible. We will always cry for blood. It’s human nature. But occasionally we can pause, stop, and look inwards, and maybe find something better to strive for. It’s our choice.
I will happily concede that they don’t START the fights, but it looks like, for many of them, the will to fight has taken over the will to do whatever they were actually THERE to do in the first place. They are now there to throw down with Antifa. If they don’t show up, it’s a victory, but they will, and violence will ensue.