May message

The events of the first Easter two thousand years ago were really little more than a sideshow to the thousands of Jews who had come up to Jerusalem for their great Festival. There could hardly have been all that number welcoming Jesus on his humble mount – a terrified donkey walking along narrow streets was scarcely a crowd-puller, and the vast majority were probably quite unaware of this mean little procession as it wound its way up to the Temple. Even the events there enraged the authorities more than they excited the mass of people of whom few would have witnessed the overturned tables or the animals let loose. The arrest of Jesus triggered by Judas accompanied by "a crowd armed with swords and clubs, and sent by the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders" (Mark 14:43) a ‘rent-a-mob’ cobbled together in the middle of the night while the rest of the world was asleep, was not a public spectacle; neither was the subsequent trial and sentence of much concern other than to that same religious elite (joined by "the whole Council" [Mark 15: 1]) and to the family and friends of Jesus watching at a distance. The whole process was completed on Golgotha by nine in the morning just as life in the rest of the city was getting under way. Just a sideshow, but of lamentable sorrow to the palm-wavers and a triumphant vindication to the religious establishment.