Coming home from a meeting a few weeks ago, I inadvertently timed my journey through the heart of the town to coincide with the end of a football match at Portman Road, not my best idea ever. The match had only just finished and I was thankful that the crowds of fans now filling the pavements, hadn’t got as far as their cars to cause the usual traffic jams. As I approached a pelican crossing the light was green for me, but my way was blocked by fans, some, noticing that the little red man was on, stood back, so I inched forward, others totally ignored the lights and kept walking across the road, meaning that I was stranded half on and half off the crossing. It was at that moment, the lights changed giving them the advantage and people started hurling abuse at me “It’s a red light you *****” one man yelled, dragging his children across the road “why don’t you learn to drive” another yelled. I felt my stress levels rising, I was only in this position, because people had crossed at red and the people hurling abuse at me weren’t aware of that, they simply assumed that I was in the wrong, and with my car surrounded by crowds of fans, I felt intimidated, vulnerable, and scared. Fortunately, the lights changed and there was a sufficient gap in the flow of people to allow me to cross and continue my journey.
The experience reminded me once again of the power of the crowd. According to the Ipswich town website, they had an attendance of almost twenty-five and a half thousand people that Saturday and in crowds of that size there is power, the match had been an FA cup qualifier and had resulted in a 0-0 draw, which I guess was a disappointment for many, so the mood of the crowd might have influenced their attitude to a motorist getting in their way. The Easter story is dominated by crowds, today is Palm Sunday, the day when Jesus rides in Jerusalem, the people of the city are living under Roman rule and they have heard about this Jesus, and they pin all their hopes on him. The vast majority of the people on the streets that day would have a good knowledge of scripture and would have had high hopes that if this bloke really was the Messiah, he would come in, overthrow the Roman occupation and restore the Israelite people to their position of power. Maybe in their enthusiasm, they misunderstood what was actually happening, misreading the signals.
We often talk about the crowd on Palm Sunday as being “fickle” for we know that only days later, Jesus faced a very different crowd, and we assume, maybe correctly, that the same people who had shouted “Hosannah” on Palm Sunday were screaming “Crucify him!” just five days later. Over centuries human beings have had strength when they have been part of the crowd, that can be a positive experience, I often long for Churches full of people, the crowd spells success, we like to quote numbers. But throughout history the most vulnerable people have been the ones who stand alone from the crowd, who look different, who behave differently, who think differently, who don’t fit. Sometimes we can be so swept along by the crowd that we fail to see those who don’t fit in.