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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Zahnd
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October 15 - November 1, 2016
“The crowd is indeed untruth. Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd.”1 Kierkegaard is right,
Christ was almost always against the crowd. Consider these examples:
it’s deeply ironic that the crowd would raise the subject of demons. (As we shall see, crowd dynamics are closely associated with the demonic.)
revolutionary crowds advocating violence for their cause are driven by the demonic spirit of murder.
we can attribute the death of Jesus to cowardly leaders capitulating to a crowd committed to violent action.
We should never forget that Jesus was executed in the name of “freedom and justice”—whether it was the Roman version or the Jewish version. But the cross shames the ancient deception that freedom and justice can be attained by killing.
The crowd loves their violent heroes.
What we need to recognize at this point is the dangerous nature of crowds.
A crowd under the influence of an angry, vengeful spirit is the most dangerous thing in the world.
The unholy spirit (think mood or attitude) of the satanic is the inclination to blame...
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When
the satanic spirit of angry blame and accusation infects a crowd, a perilous phenomenon is born. The crowd abandons truth as it searches for a target upon which it can express the pent-up rage it feels.
The crowd is now in search of a scapegoat, whose role it is to bear ...
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When a group of people perceive themselves to be slighted or wronged, displaced or threatened, they can metas...
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becomes an angry, fear-driven crowd, the groupthink phenomenon of mob mentality quickly overtakes rational though...
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can be as spontaneous as the Rwandan genocide or as systematic as the Nazi’s Final Solution.
The crowd has the demonic instinct to select a scapegoat—a sacrificial victim to bear the sinful anger of the crowd. As soon as the scapegoat is identified, the crowd proceeds to blame, shame, accuse, vilify, and possibly murder the scapegoat.
The scapegoat is usually a marginalized person or a minority
group that is easy to ...
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The crowd must continue to practice the self-deception that the scapegoat is a real threat to “freedom” or “righteousness” or whatever the crowd is using to ...
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Jews have had a long, tragic history of being victimized as scapegoats.
As the destructive energy of the demonized crowd is released upon the scapegoat victim, a kind of “miracle” occurs—peace is restored and unity is achieved within the crowd.
Human beings have been utilizing the “scapegoat mechanism,” as René Girard calls it, since the dawn of human civilization. It’s the blood-drenched altar of civilization. It’s the Cain model for preserving the polis.
It’s collective murder as the alchemy for peace and unity. The crowd vents its violence and vengeance upon a scapegoat to protect itself from itself. But this dark secret is hidden from the crowd.
if you follow an angry crowd—even if it calls itself Christian—you are likely to be wrong.
Even if you’re not wrong in the actual issue, you will probably be wrong in spirit. So never follow an angry crowd.
An angry person is bad enough, but an angry crow...
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Without any hyperbole, I insist that a crowd under the sway of an angry spirit is the most da...
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Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd.
Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority. Jesus hides from the triumphalistic crowd
The crowd is antichrist. The angry crowd, in its cruel sacrifice of a scapegoat, is the opposite of Jesus’s teaching of cosuffering love for neighbor and enemy.
it doesn’t feel unholy. It feels holy; it feels spiritual; it feels patriotic; it feels right. It has a deeply religious aura to it. It is a spiritual experience. The spiritual experience of expressing a shared hostility can even be confused for the Holy Spirit … because of how it feels.
A unity is achieved around this kind of angry rhetoric, a unity that is undeniably cathartic and religious. But it is cathartic and religious in the wrong way.
As Kierkegaard said, “To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.”
we don’t do it consciously, but we do it. We do it through an inherited dark instinct.
an adolescent inauguration into the demonic. The fear of being exposed … the group selection of the one to be picked on … the relief that it’s not you … the bonding achieved by the crowd’s cruelty to the scapegoat. … All of this is what the satanic is about.
scapegoating is one of the evils Jesus came to save the world from. He did it by becoming the ultimate scapegoat—by dying for our sins.
the Bible translates the Hebrew word azazel as “scapegoat.” The azazel was the banished goat that carried the sins of Israel into the wilderness.
Over time, scapegoat came to mean a person blamed by the crowd for the wrongdoing of others.
Jesus was a scapegoat for Pilate and Caiaphas and for the dangerous crowds they both sought to appease.
Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him; then he put an elegant robe on him, and sent him back to Pilate. That same day Herod and Pilate became friends; before this they had been enemies. (Luke 23:11–12)
Through the “miracle” of the scapegoat, these two dangerous rivals relaxed and became friends.
By becoming a scapegoat, Jesus dragged the demonic practice of scapegoating into the light where it could be named, shamed, and once and for all rejected!
Our sinful addiction to blaming others—Jesus took that upon himself. He was innocent, but he took the blame anyway.
The practice of blaming is given a place to die in Jesus. Jesus carried our blame down to Hades—where it belongs—and left it there.
Jesus became the final scapegoat. The innocent one, suffering, praying from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34 ESV).
Jesus took the blame to do away with blaming. Jesus bore the accusation to do away with accusing. Jesus became the scapegoat banished to the wilderness of death. But then something new happened.
The banished scapegoat came back!
Jesus forgives us, but he also calls us to forsake the evil practice of turning people into scapegoats. Jesus says to a humanity that has built its civilizations upon the blood of sacrificial victims,
“I forgive you, but we’re not going to play this way anymore.” No more cruelty. No more blame. No more scapegoating. No more sacrificing. No more trying to shape the world by the violent sacrifice of collective murder. Jesus is the Lamb of God who ends sacrifice!
