Last year, the philosopher Agnes Callard
published a column in the New York Times
reflecting on the phenomenon of social media pile-ons,
or what are sometimes referred to as “Twitter mobs.”
Someone says something
that others find in some way offensive,
and critique cascades into denunciation, vilification,
and even death threats
as more and more people join the chorus,
convincing themselves that the offending party
must be shamed and somehow expelled
from the realm of public discourse
in order to restore purity
to the community constituted
by right-thinking people.
published a column in the New York Times
reflecting on the phenomenon of social media pile-ons,
or what are sometimes referred to as “Twitter mobs.”
Someone says something
that others find in some way offensive,
and critique cascades into denunciation, vilification,
and even death threats
as more and more people join the chorus,
convincing themselves that the offending party
must be shamed and somehow expelled
from the realm of public discourse
in order to restore purity
to the community constituted
by right-thinking people.
In her column, Callard counsels her friends
that, if such a thing should ever happen to her,
they should not rush to defend her from the mob,
as consoling as she might find such a defense.
As she provocatively puts it,
“If you care about me,
let them eat me alive.”
She says this because of her conviction
that there is no way to argue a mob out of its rage,
out of its passion to shame and vilify,
since the logic of the mob is an illogic,
an irrational conviction about
the unique evil of a single person
and how the elimination of that person
will purify the world.
The mob convinces itself that it represents
the right-thinking people of the world,
when in fact it isn’t thinking at all.
To act collectively against the mob,
to try to shout down its angry cries,
is simply to enter the mentality of the mob,
to succumb to its contagion.
As Callard puts it:
“You imagine that you are fighting against the mob,
but actually you are becoming a part of it.
Within the mob there is no justice
and no argument
and no reasoning,
no space for inquiry or investigation.
The only good move is not to play.”
The only good move, we might say,
is to let the rage of the mob
burn itself out.
Jesus seems to agree.
Throughout the story of the Passion,
Jesus refuses to play the mob’s game.
His actions fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy:
“my face I did not shield
from buffets and spitting.”
When one of his followers draws a weapon
to defend Jesus from the large crowd
who have come with swords and clubs to arrest him,
Jesus says, “Put your sword back into its sheath,
for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
When questioned by the high priest’s council,
which has transformed itself
from an instrument of justice
into an agent of mob violence,
Jesus remains silent, except to quote scripture:
“From now on you will see ‘the Son of Man
seated at the right hand of the Power’
and ‘coming on the clouds of heaven.’”
When dying in agony on the cross,
with the crowd reviling and mocking him,
he again speaks no word but God’s word,
crying out in the voice of the psalmist:
“My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?”
Of course, there is a key difference
between the mob Agnes Callard is speaking of
and the mob Jesus confronts in the passion story.
Callard’s mob is a virtual mob,
and its threats, by and large, are virtual threats:
the prospect of public shaming
and expulsion from the realms
of right-thinking discourse.
You can stoically resign yourself to such shaming
and wait for the mob’s anger to burn itself out.
But the mob Jesus faces does not want
to shame or “cancel” or “de-platform” him.
It wants to kill him.
The silence of Jesus,
his refusal to defend himself
or let his friends defend him,
is not simply a strategy
of waiting out the mob’s rage
by enduring its shame.
For the rage of this mob will consume him,
not simply metaphorically,
but literally.
The irrational, unjust, cruel conviction
that he must be removed
from the realm of life itself
crashes over him and crushes him.
Stoic patience and resignation cannot save him.
Resignation cannot save him,
but resurrection can.
“I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.”
Jesus faces the mob, defenseless and silent,
for he knows that humbling himself
for the cause of God’s kingdom,
“becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross,”
is the prelude to glory.
The ultimate answer
to the violence of the mob,
to its irrationality, injustice, and cruelty,
to the contagion of sin that affects our race,
is God’s vindication of Jesus
by raising him to new life,
so that every power
on heaven and earth and below the earth
would bow down before the humiliated one
now glorified.
on heaven and earth and below the earth
would bow down before the humiliated one
now glorified.
As we enter this most holy of weeks,
let us set our faces like flint,
walking with Jesus
on his silent, defenseless journey
from the shame of death
to the glory of resurrection.
