Like many of you, I spent Easter Sunday with family. We hunted eggs. We ate food. We shared stories we’ve told before and will tell again, because that’s what families do when the world is moving too fast and you finally get a day where it slows down.
We began our day of celebration attending church services, and like many congregations across West Texas, the nation, and the world we listened to a sermon about the crucifixion, the death, the resurrection, the empty tomb, and the salvation of our sin.
There is a reason we revisit it. It isn’t just because it is sacred. It’s because it is familiar — in hidden ways.
A man heals, teaches, and tells the truth plainly. He doesn’t raise an army. He doesn’t steal. He doesn’t take bribes. He doesn’t even play politics very well, because the truth is a terrible campaign strategy if your goal is to stay alive.
And then the human machinery does what machinery does.
The story is also, if we’re willing to look at it honestly, a ruthless case study in human behavior: power protecting itself, crowds outsourcing conscience, and ordinary people convincing themselves that participation in wrong is less so if everyone is doing it.
And before anyone gets defensive, I’m not saying we’re Rome. I’m not saying we’re the Sanhedrin. After all, we no longer hike in sandals and speak Latin or Aramaic.
What I point to here is that the behaviors in that story have far from gone extinct. They’ve just updated their wardrobe.
You can see the pattern in the cast of characters.
There are the leaders who know what’s right but don’t have the spine to do it. They want order. They want calm. They want the noise to stop. They do what weak leadership always does: it confuses “quite” with “peace”.
So, they try and wash their hands of a decision they’re actively making.
There are the power brokers who aren’t threatened by crime as much as they’re threatened by goodness. A criminal is predictable. A criminal lowers the standard. A criminal gives you someone to point at.
But a man doing the right thing in public — consistently — creates a problem. He forces comparison. He forces accountability. He forces a question: if he can live that way, why can’t we?
This causes us to realize that the “someone” we are pointing at is but a shadowy reflection in our own mirror.
And we are often considerably worse in groups than as individuals. Not to say that every person in the crowd, or even every crowd, is evil.
That’s the uncomfortable part. Crowds aren’t built out of pure villains.
They are groups of everyday people who have been handed a script, offered a target, and reassured that responsibility is shared, which is therefore diluted.
It’s easier to shout than to think. It’s easier to repeat than to discern. It’s easier to join a chorus than to stand alone and say, “This is wrong.” Let alone, overturn tables of money changers and call out those exchanging righteousness for robbery.
As a result, the more chilling aspect of the crucifixion story is not the violence. It’s the choice.
Given the option between a man who challenges the conscience and a man who validates our cynicism, the crowd chooses the criminal. While that decision is old. The impulse is not.
We have versions of it in public life today. We repeatedly choose what is easier to manage over what is harder to measure.
We will choose the person who lowers the bar over the person who raises it, because the higher the standard, the more vulnerable we feel… not to mention the increasing frequency we fail in rising to it.
Modern crowds don’t need a street corner. They need a comment section.
Torches are lit around a rumor, an accusation, a screenshot with no context, and a tone of certainty. It doesn’t take much.
A neighbor excels at something. They build a business. They earn a scholarship. They lead a program. They serve the community well. They do something hard with discipline and character.
Instead of celebrating, we start picking.
We hunt for the flaw because flaws make excellence less threatening. We look for the rumor because rumors are easier than reflection. We search for the private mistake that will let us feel better about our public mediocrity.
We don’t say, “Crucify him” much these days, but we often look for something that rhymes with it.
We reduce a person to an 80-character meme. We turn a complex life into one sentence. We mistake being loud for being right, and we quietly substitute “I heard” for “I know.”
Then we pretend we didn’t participate in the cruelty, because we didn’t swing the hammer. We just shared the post.
Power thrives on this pattern. Because when the crowd is busy, it’s easier for leaders to avoid responsibility, and easier for institutions to protect themselves while calling it “order.”
That’s why the crucifixion isn’t only a story about sin and salvation. It’s also a story about what happens when leadership refuses moral courage and the citizens trade good judgment for the will of the public.
There is a warning tucked inside God’s promise.
The promise is resurrection. The warning is simply: us.
So, when the crowd gathers — and it will — who do you become?
Do you become the leader who avoids responsibility and calls it neutrality? The bystander who keeps quiet because it’s easier? The chorus member who repeats what everyone else is saying because singing along is easier than being a solo act with your conscience?
Or do you become the person willing to step back, tell the truth, and refuse to help destroy what is good simply because it is inconvenient?
The latter of the decisions rarely make a sound, but they nearly always leave a mark, and often issue a warning. Because the Bible doesn’t only record what happened to Jesus. It reminds us of how people react when faced with goodness they cannot con-