Fear IV: the religious leaders’ fear
Today is the last in the series on fear, and in my reflections today I want to consider the fear of the religious leaders, who were ultimately responsible for handing Jesus over to be killed.
It’s Palm Sunday.
We have heard the reading of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, heard about how the crowds shouted ‘Hosanna!’ and ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ We have seen how they laid their cloaks and leafy branches on the road for the colt to ride on. In one of the Gospel accounts, we hear of children calling out praise to Jesus as the ‘son of David’, in another, Jesus says that if his followers were silent, the stones would should out. It’s a joyful, noisy, celebration.
But, a short time later (we reckon it as less than a week in our traditional format of Palm Sunday leading into Holy Week), the religious leaders have managed to turn the crowds into people who bayed for Jesus’ blood, calling out ‘Crucify!!’ to the decider, Pilate.
What happened?
In the synoptic gospels, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem signals a sharp increase in hostilities between Jesus and the chief priests, elders and religious authorities of his day. Jesus overturns the tables in the temple. He speaks a vast diatribe of woes against the Pharisees, and says parables that are also clearly against the religious leaders and their practices. The Pharisees and Saducees go to Jesus with questions designed to trick him into saying something they could use against him. They keep looking for a way to arrest and kill Jesus, but they hold back for fear of the crowds who believed he was a prophet. Eventually they conspire to take him by stealth.
In Matthew’s gospel, the word ‘jealousy’ is used to describe the religious leaders’ motives in handing Jesus over. I think that jealousy is a secondary emotion – and that what lies beneath it is fear. After all, if I am content and secure with who I am and what I have, what need is there to be jealous of anybody else? But if someone else threatens my position and I fear that they will displace me from the job or the status that gives my life meaning, then I will be jealous indeed.
I don’t think that much has changed in leadership, particularly religious leadership, since Jesus’ time. Whenever somebody claims to speak for God, there is a powerful and vulnerable mix of inflation, insecurity, power, defensiveness, influence, and resistance to change. Jesus undermined the status quo of the religious situation of his time. While affirming the law, he also criticised the way that the Pharisees interpreted and imposed the law.
He upset their carefully composed rulings on things like purity, cleanness, Sabbath, and the temple, and tithing and so on. He led a reform movement that appealed hugely to all those who were not allowed to participate in the life of the temple…he kept company with unclean people, women, gentiles…basically anyone who was barred from the religious structures that the chief priests maintained and oversaw.
It is very hard for people charged with maintaining an institution to accept change to the status quo. And the chief priests and the Pharisees and the elders were no exception. What did they have to fear? In terms of external things, they probably feared the loss of authority…their particular ability to say ‘God wants it to be like this’ and to have it obeyed. They probably feared the loss of status – one of the things Jesus criticised about them was their public, outward display of religion, designed to court respect and approval. They probably feared the loss of credibility – people who are used to winning arguments fear publicly losing them.
Inwardly, there were probably other kinds of fea—fear that maybe the religious decisions they had given their life to were actually leading themselves and other people astray, rather than into closer connection with God. Imagine being told, as the scribes and Pharisees were: ‘you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.’ We shouldn’t imagine that the elders and Pharisees were inherently bad people, or consciously malicious. To be confronted with the idea that their life’s work was worse than meaningless…that it may have been actually destructive, would have been deeply unsettling.
Certainty, especially religious certainty, creates a kind of security for a while. It is nice to feel sure about things. But, underneath certainty, there is always a lurking fear, because in reality, very little about ourselves or the world or God can be known absolutely. I believe that we can know things truly, with conviction, and through experience…and to affirm what we know, while holding ourselves open to change and newness. This is not the same as that brittle certainty that asserts and argues things without openness to different information or perspectives. A person who is certain is actually very vulnerable, despite appearances, because if their certainty is threatened, or exposed as untrue, their whole world collapses like a tower of cards.
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day had too much certainty going on. They knew who God was, and how to worship God properly, and how to keep in favour with God. They knew so well they were willing to tell others to do as they did.
And then along comes this man, claiming to come from God, claiming God as his Father, disrupting all their certainties and replacing them with teaching that turns their world upside down. This is not just fear of losing their job, but also of all that they thought they knew. Of course this threat to cherished certainties and received beliefs was met with defensiveness by those who had so much at stake.
There’s only a few people who could face this kind of threat with openness. Nicodemus was one, though he still needed the cover of darkness to protect him. These reversals are rare. We know that people can only move a short distance at a time when confronted with information that rocks their paradigm - something like a 5 degree shift rather than a 180 degree reversal - and that we can’t actually hear or understand perspectives that are too far beyond that small shift we are ready to make. Hence, ‘those with ears to hear.’
The people who fell in love with Jesus on the spot were people with nothing to lose… the poor and the sick, people who were already marginal to the power structures, people who were already excluded from the world that these religious leaders lived in. For the religious leaders themselves to change required a lot more letting go. Jesus said that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person into the kingdom of heaven. He might well have said that it’s easier for an elephant to climb into a bora hole than for priests to accept that they are not the authors of true religion.
I am sure that we have all been in the position of asking a question of someone and being met by a defensive, or rote response that was simply unable to engage with the question. Possibly, we went away from that encounter feeling inadequate, or as though our question was the problem. However, as life goes on, we learn that when someone is defensive towards us…even when they go on the attack, it probably has as much to do with their insecurity, and what they are unable to countenance, as it does with us. I don’t have to talk in this company about the effects of toxic religion, about what it feels like to be corrected and criticised and coerced by people who feel that they occupy moral and spiritual high ground, and who respond to questioning with put downs and silencing techniques.
Having experienced this, however, does not necessarily make us immune from reacting with defensiveness and shutting down voices that contradict our own preciously held beliefs and certainties. Even if we happen to think that our worldview is tolerant and compassionate, if we hold it with absolute certainty, or if our identity is in some way bound up with other people’s acceptance of it, then we can be as aggressive as any Pharisee, even if it’s not in our means to put someone to death.
A small segue. I am intrigued by the comparison between the Jewish religious leaders, and the Roman military & political leader Pilate. The Gospel narratives suggest that Jesus’ fate lay ultimately in Pilate’s hands…and that he washed those hands of responsibility, letting the energy of the crowd and the priests dictate his actions. Here is a man whose fear leads him not into aggression and violence, but into passivity and avoidance. While the Gospel stories suggest that Pilate’s personal conviction is of Jesus’ innocence, he is willing to over-ride that when confronted with a hostile group of local leaders and a potentially rioting crowd. I wonder where the line is between pragmatism and cowardice, between compromise, and sitting on the fence…especially when a person’s life is at stake. In what situations does our fear of others lead us into quietly going along with something that we know is wrong? Or into abdicating our responsibility to change things, because the tide of inevitability seems to be flowing strongly in the other direction?
Simon Walker (simonpwalker.com), a priest, teacher & writer in the UK, has written a book suggesting that the primary narrative in Scripture is not a guilt/moral redemption narrative, but a fear/risk narrative. That is, God is calling us toward an undefended life, a life that doesn’t fear the world’s hostility, and that doesn’t need protection or performance measures in order to be safe. When Jesus calls people into discipleship, he is calling us to let go the ways we hyper-manage our own world and to trust that God is for us.
This same autho—Simon Walke—has written a book on leadership based on this idea of ‘undefendedness’…examining the reactivity that is embedded into us due to our formation in a fear-ful world. His nutshell summary of the idea of ‘defendedness’ is that “we tend to see others as either commodities (to be exploited) or threats (to be overcome). This in turn leads to behaviours which are ‘defended’.”
We can see this all being played out in this drama between Jesus and the religious leaders: Jesus calling people into radical trust, becomes a threat to the Pharisees and Priests who are trying to maintain a protection system of rituals, rules and sacrifices. All of the fears that lurked behind that protection system come flooding out to consume Jesus, resulting in his crucifixion.
For those of us who lead, or manage, or hold authority, even in our home life, there is value in exploring what kinds of things provoke us into behaviours like those of the religious leaders. What kinds of things make our hearts race and our fists close? How do we react when someone questions or challenges a project or a plan that means a lot to us? At what cost will we protect our role, our position, or our status? At what point do we bring in punishment, or threats, when our will is thwarted? Or do we divide and conquer…creating in groups and out groups among those we manage?
Part of what Jesus calls us towards is a way of inspiring and influencing other people without being hooked by the fears and flashpoints of our inner worlds. Knowing our own tendencies and weaknesses and being willing to be vulnerable, are crucial to this process.
Leadership in our world too often looks more like that of the Pharisees, than that of Jesus. Let’s remind ourselves how Jesus led…he called and invited people toward him, into a space of risk, by assuring them of God’s care. He persistently reminded his followers that being with him was a journey of instability, not power. He took off his robe, tied a towel round his waist, knelt at his disciples’ feet, and washed them. And then he laid down his life. This is the Jesus who we follow, and whose example is our pattern whenever other people’s lives are entrusted to us, whether that’s in the home or workplace or church or other group.
May Jesus guide and bless us as we learn to exercise the kind of faith that trusts instead of fears, that risks instead of protects, that opens instead of closing and that loves unto death and beyond.