The Crowd

I’ve been thinking recently about the crowds in the gospels, particularly in Luke’s gospel, and the way the crowd features in the passage which we have just heard. Of course, the crowds feature in rabbinic Judaism. The am ha’aretz are the ‘people of the land’, and in the Talmud they are referred to rather dismissively as uneducated Jews, who were deemed to be negligent in their observance of the Law. And of course, in the gospels, the crowds often provide a foil for the disciples.

That is certainly true of the passage that we have just heard with the dramatic call of the first disciples – the call of Simon Peter and James and John, the Sons of Zebedee. Their role is fore-grounded. They have a distinctive call, a role to perform, they have left everything and followed Jesus. Their response to Jesus is dramatic and wholehearted. The crowds simply blend into the background.

The Church of England is currently engaged in some soul-searching about its mission and ministry, and one of the things that characterises that thinking is the way in which the role of the disciples is fore-grounded. ‘Making new disciples’ is the name of the game. Driven in part by a heavy dose of institutional anxiety, perhaps accentuated by the experience of the pandemic, the ministry of a particular church is validated by the strength and focus of its recruitment strategy. Like Peter, and James, and John, we are all supposed now to be engaged in the task of ‘catching people’.

I think it is worth interrogating this phrase in the gospels. It is worth rehearsing what Jesus meant by it – and also what he did not mean. ‘Catching people’ can sound rather manipulative, predatory, even slightly sinister. ‘Catching people’ sounds like a way of limiting and restricting the freedom of others.

And yet, Luke seems to be alert to such a negative reading of this phrase, ‘fishing for people’. When we look at the parallel passage in the other gospels, Mark and Matthew use the term ἁλιεις, ‘fishermen’, while Luke uses the less familiar term, ζωγρων. It’s a term which has the sense of  capturing alive or keeping alive in some protected way. The term is connected with the Greek word ζωη, which means ‘life’  – it is intriguing that Luke uses a completely different word. I wonder whether Luke trying to convey the sense that this whole enterprise is about offering people life - the more abundant life of the kingdom of God? Is that what he means when he refers to the disciples in this way?

But again, we have been distracted by the focus on the disciples – we have forgotten about the crowds.

Recently, I’ve been reading a book by a black theologian, Willie James Jennings, a Professor at Yale Divinity School. He is particularly fascinated by the role of the crowds in the gospels. Challenging the individualism that characterises so much of Western Christendom, he says that ‘the crowd is everything. The crowd is us.’ And he goes on to describe the crowd like this, ‘People shouting, screaming, crying, pushing, shoving, calling out to Jesus, “Jesus, help me,” “Jesus, over here.” People being forced to press up against each other to get to Jesus, to hear him, and to get what they need from him. People who hate each other, who would prefer not to be next to each other, Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, rebels, insurrectionists, terrorist, murderers, tax collectors, sinners all… widows, orphans, the poor, the rich, sex workers, wonderers, magicians, musicians, thieves, gangsters, centurions, addicts, magistrates, city leaders, people from all over the Roman Empire – all pressing to hear Jesus.’

Suddenly, we see life in all its fulness, in all its complexity, in all its joy, and in all its sadness. The crowd is where the ministry of Jesus begins – and I think this is where the recent accent in the Church of England’s thinking, with its focus on discipleship, misses a trick. When we start with discipleship, the danger is that we get the whole thing the wrong way round. As Jennings says, ‘It is the crowd – people who would not under normal circumstances ever want to be near each other, never ever touching flesh to flesh, never ever calling in unison upon the name of Jesus, never ever listening together to anything except Roman edict or centurion shouting command, now listening to the words of Jesus. Yet the crowd is not Christian, nor is the crowd exclusively Jewish.’

It is not easily categorised. It is diverse and a bit muddled and a bit disorganised. And faced with the crowded range of human experience, we discover that the task of the church is ‘to glory in the crowd, think the crowd, be the crowd’, for in the gathering of the crowd, we discover that longing, that cultivation of community, that leads ultimately to communion, to ‘the deepest sense of a God-drenched life’.

‘Discipleship’ is about organised religion. The disciples are a clearly delineated group, with a purpose and a mission. But ‘the crowd’ is about disorganised religion – and in my experience that has always been a particular charism of the Church of England.

And yet, by placing the accent on the crowd, Jennings shows us that the sense of call, experienced by Peter and the other disciples, begins at last to make sense. They are not called to be an exclusive little club, a holy huddle of the like-minded. They are invited to respond to the whole crowded range of human experience. That’s what this whole business about fishing in the story is about. It’s not about success. If it is, it’s all rather precarious, with nets at breaking point. I think that this story is about giving voice to the overwhelming complexity of our lives and the lives of others. It’s about saying, ‘Here, when we meet the reality of our lives and the lives of others in all their complexity and ambiguity, even when we feel completely overwhelmed, we may in that moment discover God’s grace,… because in that moment we just might have learned to experience life as a gift, as an abundance, as a joy’.

So when people talk to you rather earnestly about the importance of discipleship, tell them about the crowds. Amidst the isolation of lockdowns and the separations imposed by the pandemic, it is too easy to forget about the crowds. But the crowds are important. Time and again in the gospels, when Jesus or the disciples encounter the crowds, they discover that that encounter is where the joy and the challenge of authentic discipleship always begins. It is real and sometimes raw and sometimes perplexing and disorientating and confusing. But it is almost always the place where a genuine encounter with God begins.

We receive a hint and an intimation of that truth when we gather together and crowd around this table as Christ’s honoured guests. When we share the bread which is broken, the wine that is poured out, we contemplate Christ’s broken body, amidst the messiness and disruption and tears of pilgrims crammed into the streets of Jerusalem for Passover, and we dare to speak of healing, and love, and redemption.

As we draw closer to God and to one another in this sacrament, let us pray that when we are sent out from this place, we may be ready to glory in the crowd, to embrace the crowd, to serve the crowd, to give life to the crowd. And if we put our faith into action like that, we might discover again the character of authentic discipleship.