Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend
Philippians 2. 5–11; Matthew 21. 1–11
If Jesus made his second coming in the near future, how would we know about an event like his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday? I suspect we might learn about it from TikTok, or a YouTube video, probably made by one of the army of professional YouTubers trying to cash in on Jesus’ popularity.
When I talk to primary school children, one of the most common things that both boys and girls say they want to be when they grow up is a “YouTuber”. You might wonder if that can actually be a job. Well, the highest paid video-maker on YouTube in 2020 earned US$26 million in that year alone. He is a boy from Texas called Ryan Kaji who reviews toys, and 2020 was the year in which he had his ninth birthday.
James Tissot, The Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem, (1886-94). Hangs in the Brooklyn Museum
So, the Palm Sunday story should resonate powerfully in our era of celebrity. Jesus rides into town like a king, and He is quite conscious of what he is doing; He seeks to fulfil Hebrew prophecy, with a direct quote from Zechariah. What comes next has clearly been carefully thought through, and Jesus seems to have made preparations for His triumphant entry to the Holy City with people in Jerusalem who call him “the Master”, but who aren’t known by even the closest disciples who have travelled with him from Galilee. The crowds greet Jesus like a conquering king entering his new capital, spreading their cloaks in front of him and forming a guard of honour.
Today, we break the story here, with Jesus the darling of the masses. Yet within just a few days, the story will take a dramatic twist. To be a darling of the crowd and greeted as a coming king is, needless to say, a serious threat to the actual kings and rulers of a society. The authorities soon launch a campaign of black propaganda against this preacher who some people see as a prophet. The propaganda is effective and soon enough the masses turn against Jesus. When He is brutally executed just five days later, those members of Sunday’s crowd who come to see Jesus on the Cross do so not to cheer, but to jeer.
There is nothing new under the Sun. The celebrity culture that bedevils our own time is based on patterns of human behaviour known since time immemorial. How many sporting or entertainment celebrities, monarchs of popular culture, have we seen fall from their perches after an ill-judged comment in an interview or on social media? How few of their fans stick with them when they go from hero to zero? The mention of social media is relevant, for each era has does have its uniqueness, and technology might be creating for us a uniquely insidious twist to that universal tendency to worship heroes.
It is this: in our time, we are all encouraged to be little celebrities, to cultivate our followers online, our own little entourage whom we hope will give us laurels and spread cloaks before us, even if it only amounts to our family, friends, and a few old work colleagues liking our photos of our cats. That is, after all, how the social media companies make money.
Worse yet, we are all given the tools to measure how many people engage with us, and compare ourselves with others. Inevitably, some people are extremely popular, a larger but still minority group develop smaller but loyal and interested followings, and all this is visible to the majority who get much less engagement. This pattern is repeated in every classroom across the country and around the world. Are you somebody who gets a hundred likes for a blurred picture of your back garden or someone whose profoundest thoughts are ignored by even your real-world friends? Do you need to change anything about yourself and how you act or look do be more popular online? What is this endless measuring of our popularity doing to us?
To return to Ryan, who is now eleven years old and once again earned twenty-odd million dollars last year – well, good luck to the lad, but one wonders what effect this will have on him in the longer term? And what about those at the other end of the popularity scale?
In an article in this week’s New Statesman, the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt directly cites social media as a cause of teenagers’ declining mental health. Since the early 2010s, rates of anxiety and self-harm among teenagers have spiralled in most countries that have reliable statistics; among teenage girls, many measures of serious self-harm have increased twofold or even threefold in just a decade.
Is there a healthier way to live in relation to the opinions of others? Does the Bible have anything to teach us on that score?
St Paul, in perhaps his most beautiful letter, that to the Philippians, presents us with a different vision – he calls us to embrace humility in the pattern of Christ, to make our mind-set conform to that of Jesus. Humility isn’t the same as seeing ourselves as of less value than others. In fact, it requires us to truly value ourselves: to remain humble in a world where we’re all encouraged to take part in a giant digital popularity contest, we need to love ourselves for what we are. To refuse to chase the crowd, to avoid constantly checking for the approval of those whom we live and work among, to refrain from constantly puffing ourselves because we fear others think we’re worthless, requires us to trust that we are the people God made us to be. To be humble, we need to trust that God loves us just as we are and made us to be the people we are – not because we are better than others, but because all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.
Humility calls us to plough our own furrow for the sake of Christ, in ways for which there can be no guarantee of success in worldly terms, and which might be unpopular. Yet those who chase approval and worldly success take all the same risks, at great cost to their mental well-being, and their souls. Recently, I have been reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography. Parts of it consist of long litanies of long-forgotten kings who enter Jerusalem as triumphant conquerors, before and after Christ, of many faiths and languages, lured by the city’s mystical aura. Many of them ended up dead relatively soon afterwards. Today’s celebrities risk merely a social death, but before long will not even merit a couple of paragraphs in a specialist history. In contrast, Jesus Christ, put to death in obscurity, is worshipped by billions on every continent and, if we trust in what St Paul tells us, in the end, at the name of Jesus every knee shall indeed bow.
So cleave fast to Christ and try not to worry if that’s something respectable and popular, as it once was, or considered passé or just plain weird, as it often is now. Christ will remain constant with you, even if the world turns on you, and even if – like some of our celebs – you frankly deserve the world to turn on you.
Walk with Christ this Holy Week, from the cheering crowds of today, through His dark night of the soul and agonising death, and then to the great surprise of finding Him risen from the dead. Do join in with at least some of the special Holy Week services, in which Christians walk the Holy Week way with one another and with Jesus. For if you make that Holy Week walk with Christ the pattern for your own life, if you keep your loving faith in Him even as the crowds turn away, He will raise you be together with Him in heaven for eternity.
Now praise be to God the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, and the Holy Spirit who sustains us, now and forever more. Amen.
Banner photo: James Tissot, The Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem, (1886-94). Hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.
