Matthew,
Chapter 21, verse 26:
26 But if we say,
‘Of human origin,’ we fear the crowd, for they all regard John as a
prophet.”
The chief priests and the elders of the people were
master politicians during Christ’s time.
Some of them were faithful in thought word and deed, but many were as
Christ pointed out like marble sepulchers which are pretty on the outside but
inside full of death and rottenness within.
Many of them put on the airs of piety but in reality were agnostic in
nature.
Here we see the priest and elders were afraid of
the people. I think in our time a
similar thing occurred with Saint John Paul II’s struggle with communism in
Poland. John Paul was a John the Baptist
of his time. Poles like the Jews of the
Baptists time identified with John Paul and were hungry for a chance to cleanse
themselves of the compromises they had to make to live under the rule of the
communist’s.
I believe John the Baptist message to have been
very similar to John Paul’s. “He told
them to be good, not to compromise themselves, to stick by one another, to be fearless,
and that God is the only source of goodness, the only standard of conduct. 'Be
not afraid,' he said. Millions shouted in response, 'We want God! We want God!
We want God!' The regime cowered. Had the Pope chosen to turn his soft power
into the hard variety, the regime might have been drowned in blood. Instead,
the Pope simply led the Polish people to desert their rulers by affirming
solidarity with one another. The Communists managed to hold on as despots a
decade longer. But as political leaders, they were finished. Visiting his
native Poland in 1979, Pope John Paul II struck what turned out to be a mortal
blow to its Communist regime, to the Soviet Empire, [and] ultimately to
Communism."[1]
[1]
Angelo M. Codevilla, "Political Warfare: A Set
of Means for Achieving Political Ends", in Waller, ed., Strategic
Influence: Public Diplomacy, Counterpropaganda and Political Warfare (IWP
Press, 2008.)
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