Let Go: Palm Sunday and Our Mob Mentality

I didn’t understand it at all.  We had been such good friends.  Why did she stop talking to me?  Why did she insist that ‘I knew why’, when I absolutely did not.  Why was I so easily let go, so suddenly cast aside?  Perhaps you have been there too.  Perhaps you have been the one who suddenly let go of a friend. Perhaps it was recent, maybe it was a long time ago.  We do these things to each other because we are imperfect beings, desperate for love, anxious for acceptance.  We with busy unexamined lives, we are so easily swayed by the crowd.

There this idea, called mimetic theory.  To incredibly oversimplify, it is a theory with two parts.  First, is the part about the mob-mentality.  About our innate desire to copy the behavior of those around us.  The second part of the theory is about how human societies respond to the chaos caused by this mimicry and mob-mind.  How when things seem to be spinning out of control we try to restore a sense of order through a scapegoat.  Not just anything will do.  Only something or someone we care for, someone who is both insider and outsider.  Beloved, yet different.  This one, this adored friend will be cast out.  And for a moment calm and order will return.  

Scapegoating is a process that continues because it 'works'.  We, those of us in the mob, when someone or something is cut down, we absolutely feel better.  Yet, only for a time.  Yet I believe that something changed with this Passion story.  Jesus. Beloved. Innocent. Scapegoat.  In a chaotic festival season, he was sacrificed by the power of the mob.  And like always, for a moment, the quiet returned.  And then, surprising us forever, he returned.  His death changes our view of all victims, all scapegoats. 

The complexity of why Jesus died for our salvation, it isn’t something that I necessarily comprehend in an articulate way.  Yet it is something I trust.  In a world of chaotic choices and passionate mistakes the love of God made flesh will not blend in with the crowd.  We do not have to look for complex theories to understand this day, this week.  We only have to pause and recall the way in which we find some people ‘to good to be true’, and the relief we feel if a ‘Pollyanna’ fails.  

For us to be at peace, Jesus’ life is given up.  Not in the vengefulness of a despotic God or any other unsatisfactory notion.  The passion, it is a mystery, and it has been done for our sake and for our salvation. God endured the worst of the world we inhabit, put to death in the middle of our most chaotic blindness.  Yet from the middle of our hellishness, he forgives us.  He invites us out of the mob, out of the chaos.  He invites us into a new reality remade by his love.

Palm Sunday, RCL, Year A

April 12, 2014

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church: Walla Walla, Washington

PS: I must admit that I leaned heavily on the wisdom of Archbishop Rowan Williams in his book Tokens of Trust.  Furthermore to learn more about mimetic theory and Christian theology I suggest the works of James Allison and Gil Bailie.  

audio file !