P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

THE MOB AGAINST THE MAN

Here in this little recording studio, we often remark about the serendipity – the timing – of events happening around us. We’ve been here in the Praetorium for about two weeks now, as Pontius Pilate tries to decide what to do about this preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. And just as we got ready to record, and were putting the last touches on our programs, Mel Gibson’s widely anticipated film, The Passion of the Christ, hit theaters all around North America. By the time you hear this Friday message, millions of believers and other interested people will have seen this powerful and much-discussed motion picture.

Newsweek Magazine’s Jon Meacham, an observant Episcopalian, wrote the cover article in the February 16, 2004 issue entitled Who Really Killed Jesus? He suggests that Pilate was not as weak and vacillating as Christians have maybe concluded over the past 2,000 years, that Rome actually had a very strong hand in crucifying this Man they decided was seditious. History indicates that Pilate was “a ruthless tyrant,” and that there may be ways of understanding his role in the crucifixion without denying the validity of the Gospel accounts and the shouts of the mob that morning.

One thing the film hopefully makes plain is the culpability of the entire human race, and not one people group, for the death of Jesus on that cross. Director Mel Gibson looks right into the camera and confesses:

“This film collectively blames humanity. Now there are no exceptions there. I’m the first on the line for culpability. I did it. Christ died for all men for all times.”

Other reviewers as well have written about how they sat in frozen silence, tears streaming down their faces, as the final credits rolled – that they felt a personal connection with and responsibility for this crucifixion. Well, friend, let’s hope that this courageous project does as intended, and invites millions to look toward a hill far away as their only hope in this lost world. But as we wrap up our radio series, I want to return again to the idea of a man in power, wielding a gavel, walking the marble hallways where great decisions are made. Even today, e-mails and voice mails come flooding into senate office buildings in our nation’s capital. How DO you say no when the crowds are shouting against you?

One of the great case studies of all time – on the other side from Pontius Pilate’s – is the success story of William Wilberforce. He was just 21 years old when elected to Parliament, and he took his seat in 1780, a time when London was a moral mess. “One vast casino” is how one historian describes it. The rich gambled away fortunes in an alcoholic haze, while poor people and children worked 14-hour days in smoky factories. The greatest blight, in Wilberforce’s mind, though, was slavery. Chuck Colson’s book, Kingdoms in Conflict, describes the trafficking as “the institution,” the “pillar and support of British plantation industry in the West Indies.” It was a scourge no sensible politician could ever beat. The slave industry openly “bought” seats in the House of Commons for five thousand pounds.

Two things happened. Wilberforce’s best friend, William Pitt, became Prime Minister in 1784, which increased his own sphere of influence. Wilberforce, standing just over five feet tall, abandoned his seat in Hull and ran instead from Yorkshire, a more influential district. Standing in the rain one day – up on a table, actually – he delivered a knockout speech to the soaked and muddy crowd, causing biographer James Boswell to write in amazement:

“I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table, but as I listened the shrimp grew and grew and became a whale.”

One year later, though, while on a tour of the Continent with Christian Isaac Milner, the young politician did the unthinkable: he became a born-again believer as well. Colleagues in Parliament were stunned as Wilberforce began turning to former slave ship captain-turned-preacher John Newton for counsel. “The Lord has raised you up to the good of His church and for the good of the nation,” the composer of “Amazing Grace” told the new convert.

As you can imagine, Wilberforce now faced a firestorm of opposition when he went to work each day. “Some thought his mind had snapped,” Colson writes. And when he began to push for abolition of the slave trade, it began to get very lonely for the diminutive crusader. Look at the jobs we’d lose, opponents thundered. The commerce! The profits! One rabid opponent stood up on the floor and frankly admitted:

“The slave trade ‘was not an amiable trade, but neither was the trade of a butcher . . . and yet a mutton chop was, nevertheless, a very good thing.’”

For eleven years, unlike Pontius Pilate, Wilberforce continued the lonely battle. He would introduce bills; they got voted down. Or delayed. Or buried. In 1796, it actually looked like victory was close; in fact, it appeared such a sure thing that 12 supporters of abolition took off the night of the vote and went to a new comic opera opening in London. Wilberforce’s motion failed by four ballots. It was eleven more years until, finally, on a snowy February night, 1807, the House of Commons voted 283 to 16 to outlaw the barbaric practice. Wilberforce sat in his congressional seat and wept. Twenty-six more years had to pass before slavery itself was banished from the British Empire; the courageous little statesman passed to his rest just three days later.
We found some extra insights from the foreword to Wilberforce’s own classic book, Real Christianity: Discerning True and False Faith. Interestingly, this essay was penned by Oregon Senator Hark O. Hatfield, himself an ardent Christian politician. As an adult already in Congress, he too gave his heart and life to Jesus Christ. And he admits that a politician who tries to be a truly obedient disciple can well face “ostracism and loss of political popularity.”

“Many of us,” he writes, “have had to wrestle with the temptation to want both popularity and service to God.”

He had to stand in a crowded ballroom once, and for the first time publicly confess his faith in Jesus. The difficult words bounced off the mirrored pillars and gave him a blinding headache. It was a hard thing to be pulled in both directions that way.
Colson tells a fantastic story where the beleaguered Wilberforce once got a letter from an appreciative anti-slavery supporter.

“My dear sir,” it began, “unless the Divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature.”

A text note relates that the Latin phrase I just mentioned, Athanasius contra mundum, means “against the world,” and refers to any person who stands up for a moral cause against the prevailing tide of the crowd. Athanasius, Colson points out, was a church leader in the third century who fought the abuses of his day. But now the letter to Wilberforce continues:

“Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils, but if God be for you who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? . . . That He that has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen in this and all things, is the prayer of . . . Your affectionate servant, John Wesley.”

In our last moments in this series, let’s ask this practical question: how do we do it? How did Wilberforce do it against all the odds? How did he face down the temptation to compromise when Pilate and so many others were not able to?
Senator Hatfield, who did some teaching earlier in his public career, tells how he advised students to think about and to KNOW what their political philosophy was. Pick it and know it. Otherwise, he advised, “[you’re] faced with the awful prospect of abandoning [your] mind to others.” And good Christian friends advised him that the same was true with his faith. He needed to know what he believed; he needed to be rooted in it, grounded in it. Otherwise, even a mild breeze could blow him away.
And in the case of William Wilberforce, this keen-thinking man, once he became a Christian, just fed himself on the pillars of the faith.

“Wilberforce’s practical spiritual disciplines not only undergirded him,” Hatfield writes, “but provided a striking witness (along with other Christian models throughout the centuries) of the power resulting from faithful prayer, meditation, and Bible reading.”

He submitted himself to a “personal accountability” relationship with Milner, who had brought him into the faith. He kept a spiritual journal. He used these tools – the godly mentors, the journaling, the Bible – to regularly assess his own integrity in areas like appetite, his relationships with women, his personal ambitions.
The bottom line is this, friend – and oh how true even here in 2006: who but God can measure the impact of a man or woman so rooted in the Kingdom, so fixed on heaven and the Redeemer, that they cannot be swayed by the shouts of the mob? What if Wilberforce had taken the easier path and sold his vote to the highest bidder?
May God help us to fix our eyes on Him, and sustain us in our own hour of decision.