Commentary on the Gospel of
Popularity is a fickle goddess: the crowd that cheered “Hosanna!” to Jesus were crying “Crucify him!” a few days later. Jesus went through both. The rest of us, with few exceptions, would settle for just Hosanna! Popularity looks like glory, and it is a kind of gory: someone called it “glory’s small change.” There is the personality type described as ‘the pleaser’. Such a person will never challenge you; they rely too much on your good opinion of them. But it backfires; most people would prefer that you said what you thought. “He more had pleased us had he pleased us less.”