In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. I wanna talk about the crowd, the public. Our late friend Horace put it this way, and that translated in the vernacular is, I hate the vulgar crowd. I keep them at a distance.
I ask you to remember Caesar, that play that, you know, a guy named Shakespeare wrote, at his funeral, Brutus' speech. How one gets up, he says, I have come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him. So he gives a very favorable and everybody caps and applauds. Caesar's a great guy. The other senator gets up, who hated Caesar, probably had a hand in his death, gives the opposite.
So the crowd then goes over to the other one. They hate Caesar. Look at our blessed Lord. Look at today's why do these people follow him? Because they got his good health insurance.
What's the main thing we're interested in this country now? Health insurance for everybody. And here's a man who gives you not only health insurance curing your sick, but he feeds you for free a free lunch. Who wouldn't wanna make that guy king? So they wanna make him king.
They wanna eat. They wanna have good health. How much later was it when the crowd says, don't give us give us Barabbas. Well, then, Pilate says, what are we gonna do with the Christ who says he's the Messiah? You know what they said?
Crucify. Crucify. Crowd, the hoi polloi, the vulgar crowd, the lynching mob. That's how they sway. They eat and they like the two main things, good health and food, feed, fun and games.
Bodhi, profanum, bogus, and archer. I keep them at a distance. The very first night I was in the seminary, I never I don't remember much about it. But I remember that very first night very well because what the what the priest said, father Hoag, who was president, was so startling to me because I've been in the boarding school for about eight years. Now, here's this fine elegant gentleman.
It's our first night back. It was my first night, the evening in the seminary. And what was the subject of his talk that night? That when you live a community life, it pulls you down. Pulls you down.
And he gave us a stirring talk that we must resist that. You can he didn't use this example, but you can take a barrel of good apples and put one bad one in there, and the good apples don't make the bad one better. But the rotten apple destroys the ovens. So this lesson, this, the way the crowd treated Christ, it's typical of human beings. It's typical of what human beings could do.
You've heard a lot about the well, you couldn't miss it yesterday or the day before or the day before, the dedication of the Jewish or the Holocaust Museum. But you see, there's a point to this. Let us admit the enlightenment. Let us admit good old Rousseau. The fact is human beings can be bad.
Put them together and they generally are bad. I've often thought when we used to have when there was these lynching, but they talked about a mob. Usually, it was a handful of people who actually did the lynching. I would wager in most instances, those that crowd or group or whatever you wanna call the lynching, they call them a mob. It's usually just a handful of people, really, who who are the leaders.
Take them singly, would any one of them lynch do the lynching? Put them all together and they certainly do. This has been proved experimentally. And so let us why do we follow Christ? That's the question I wanna ask.
Why do you individually follow Christ? What do you expect to get out of it? Why do you do it? Why do you why do you walk around the lake? A hill a long walk.
Why do you go hungry? Why do why do you do it? To be fulfilled, to be comfortable, to keep you civilized, Or what why? Why do you follow Christ? Good question, and you ought to be able to answer it.
In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.