“In two days’ time the festival of the Passover and of unleavened bread was due.

Consequently, the chief priests and scribes were trying to think of some trick

by which they could get Jesus into their power and have Him crucified.”

(Mark 14:1)

What makes human beings act like they do? This is what puzzles the psychologists and theologians, penologists and statesmen, sociologists and salesmen. By closely observing people and their manners, these astute students of human nature have arrived at fairly accurate schedules of predictable behavior. Most of us pride ourselves upon being able to predict normal human behavior. Given a certain pattern of circumstances, a sequence of events, and we can set up a reliable expectancy of human reaction.

For example, the crying child who has been cheated out of his turn at the playground slide, when offered a strawberry ice cream cone usually, normally, in nine cases out of ten, will smile through his tears, and with each lick of his tongue on the cool cream, find soothing solace for his soul’s sense of outraged justice. We expect people to holler when hit, bend double with an acute stomach ache, and laugh out loud at a very funny joke.

But sometimes folks fool us. There is an unpredictable element in human nature which always keeps us guessing. The strange sequel surprises us, on occasion disappoints or disillusions us, and sometimes destroys us.

There are two strange sequels reported in chapter 14 of Mark’s gospel. The record reads: “In two days’ time the festival of the Passover and of unleavened bread was due. Consequently, the chief priests and the scribes were trying to think of some trick by which they could get Jesus into their power and have Him executed.” A holy feast is due shortly. Therefore, consequently, the religious leaders thought of murder. A strange sequel indeed!

What would you normally expect the priests and scholars and custodians of a people’s faith to do in preparation for the observance of a sacred season? Would you not assume they would be at worship, preparing a glad thanksgiving, thinking up what they could do to dramatize and make real what wonders God had wrought for their nation in deliverance from the Egyptian oppressors and in sending His prophets in every age with fresh messages of His truth?

But no! A festival is coming up — a holy season, and the religious leaders, the men into whose hands a nation’s faith had been committed, plotted murder!

But there are other pretty patterns that can be perverted into a strange sequel. What of the familiar fairy story conclusion: “They were married and lived happily ever after”? Of course, that’s the way it ought to be. That’s the hope and fond expectation of every May and June bride. For marriage is designed by the Creator for the completion of personality and the consummation of human happiness — that the two should become one flesh. “Christian marriage is also appointed for the lifelong companionship, help, and comfort which husband and wife ought to have of each other, both in prosperity and in adversity.” But it just doesn’t automatically work out that way. What a strange sequel to the sound of wedding bells is the ugly wrangle of accusation and counter-accusation before the divorce court judge.

It is a very wise old sage who laid out another social theorem to predict the normal expectancy of a godly home: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” There’s great truth in that, for the young years are the formative years, when the pattern of a lifetime is established.”

Follow the advice of the church and distinguished educators who in this season of National Family Week are urging parents to have family devotions, find time for family fellowship, and make every possible effort to guarantee wholesome nurture. And usually, in nine cases out of ten, you may expect results in keeping and in proportion to your efforts.

And yet, there are the strange sequels, the unpredictable outcomes of the most careful Christian upbringing. Conscientious parents can support the church with their funds and time and talents. They can encourage their children to take part in the church’s program for youth. And yet, the very youngsters from the homes where the greatest pains are taken with their training can be irreverent and boisterous in church and church school — pay no attention to their teachers and reveal no practice of the principles of Christianity in their personal lives. How strange a sequel it turns out to be to careful, prayerful parents, and how discouraged they can get.

I’ve talked with numbers of men and women who today are out of the church, have nothing to do with God or godliness, because, they say, they were given an overdose of Christian nurture and church functions in earlier years, and so when they reached the freedom of the adulthood, they departed from it all – never expecting to return. Their very participation in the things of God developed in them an aggravated spiritual allergy nothing can cure. There is this strange, disappointing, unexpected sequel to a carefully planned pattern of Christian nurture.

But there is another strange sequel in the 14th chapter of Mark’s gospel which highlights not the disappointing lapse of man into unexpected cruelty and wickedness, but the undreamed of grandeur to which an unlikely human soul can leap. While the holy Passover season was drawing nigh, and the high priests and scribes were feverishly scheming some trick by which they could lay hold of the Son of God and have Him executed, Jesus went for supper to the house of Simon the leper. In the midst of the meal, a woman came into the banquet hall. Luke says she was a woman of the street. In her hands she carried an expensive alabaster container of perfumed oil, valued at current currency rates between $200 and $500. Impulsively she broke the vessel, poured the entire contents on Jesus’ head.

A horrified gasp went through the company. “What waste!” cried out the indignant disciples and other solid citizens. “Why, she should have sold the ointment and given the money to the poor.” What a ridiculously out of the ordinary piece of behavior on the part of this woman, and yet, Jesus was thrilled by her deed. “Leave her alone,” said the Savior. “She has done a beautiful thing.” And there is here an excitement in Jesus, almost lyric ecstasy, such as He seemed to feel on just a few occasions, as when He saw the widow casting her two mites into the Temple treasury and as when He found such unlimited faith in the Roman centurion. It seems as if Jesus is saying: “Leave her alone. This is it. What I’ve longed to see. That remarkable, unexpected, self-forgetfulness and self-denial which is the mark of the Kingdom of God. And her deed will be a lasting memorial to her.”

But the banqueters were surprised at this strange sequel because their calculating observations of life had no room in them to account for such selfless generosity which could give beyond the reach of arithmetic.

The return of our pitiful wounded prisoners from communist Korea calls to mind the contrast of two stories with surprisingly strange sequels. The first comes to us from the Old Testament. Jehosaphat, King of Judah, learns that powerful armies from Ammon and Noab are marching against his nation. Fear grips the land. Judah is hopelessly outnumbered. They have no adequate defense. The people gather for a day of national fasting and prayer. The king himself eloquently intercedes with the Lord of heaven for his people. Then, to the delight of all, Judah is providentially delivered by rival tribes who ambush the attackers. Then Jehosaphat and his people, instead of getting down on their knees to offer prayers of thanksgiving, scramble like jackals on to the field of battle to plunder the bodies of the dead and dying.

The other story and its strange sequel is of a modern battle, fought in the middle of the 18th century for the freedom and unity of Italy, near the little town on Solferino. A young man from Switzerland named Henri Dunant, on business in Italy, was by chance, so it seemed, an unwilling witness of the carnage. All day the battle raged in the intense heat, and when the fighting ceased, the fields were littered with the dead and wounded soldiers. Henri Dunant plunged into the work of carrying the wounded to churches, barracks, monasteries, wherever makeshift hospitals could be set up. For three days and nights he worked without ceasing, going from place to place on the battlefield to organize volunteer nurses. He sent his coachman to neighboring towns for supplies and doctors. He wrote friends at home to send supplies at once. He remained a whole month after the battle of Solferino before returning to his business and his peaceful home in Geneva.

But the horrors Dunant had witnessed left him no peace of mind. The cries of help still rang in his ears. Soon, as if by divine inspiration, he was writing a little book called The Memory of Solferino. In it he asked the questions which were disturbing his soul: Must brave men like this die for want of proper care? Could there not be some neutral bands of mercy ready to offer their services in time of war? The book was circulated as if by magic, translated in numbers of languages. The questions Henri Dunant raised caught hold of the minds and hearts of men everywhere. Soon there was held in Geneva a convention of ten nations which signed a treaty ratifying Dunant’s principles and organizing the Red Cross. An unexpected, strange sequel to a bloody battle which ushered in a new day of mercy.

What is the secret of the strange sequel in human behavior? Is it chance or caprice, luck or providence, or is there some way to unravel the riddle?

Surely this much is sure: the strange sequel is both the plague and the hope of man. The low and base throwbacks to sub-human activity appall us.  A French colonial officer reported (last week) that in his African colony the human race was about to win out, though for years it had looked like the baboons, hyenas, and wild pigs would take the territory. From the way human beings have been acting, one wonders if the baboons, hyenas, and wild pigs wouldn’t do a better job of managing the world than man. But now and then there occurs some strange sequel like Dunant’s sequel to Solferino, or that amazing anointing of the Savior’s troubled brow by a Jewish courtesan, and hope is born anew that man may break through to a higher level of glory.

And then there’s this for sure; the strangeness of the strange sequel lies in the fact of man’s freedom. Neither in heredity nor in environment can we search out the predictable pattern of human behavior. Man, a free agent, makes his own personal, peculiar response which determines his act.

But most important of all, there’s this, the strangeness of a strange sequel lies in the fact that man is a spirit. Not material values and forces, but spiritual ones determine his destiny. We do not live in a world of economic and materialistic determinism.

Henry Drummond says that “the Christian experience is not casual, but causal.” There is no magic about the miracles that take place in human society and individual lives. Though they are miracles nonetheless, there is a reasonable explanation and a traceable sequence. As the natural laws operate inexorably in the natural realm, so the well ordered laws of God operate in the realm of the spirit. Only because the spiritual world is unseen, its operations of cause and effect are often hid from our eyes. Hence our surprise at what appear to us to be strange sequences.

Even though they were priests and High Priests in God’s temple and students of His law, because they were men motivated by a philosophy of self interest and opportunism — of course they would use even sacred services to further their selfish ambition and slay the Lord of glory.

Because Henri Dunant was body and soul Christ’s man, he was compelled to break war’s ancient convention of fight, kill, and plunder to transmute the bloody spectacle of Solferino into a Red Cross of saving mercy.

The only thing which will give a satisfying and sensible sequence to human life is an inner, unimpeachable allegiance to what Lord Moulton called “life’s unenforceables” — the undying absolutes of God: His standards of love and faith and justice and truth and mercy.

               In vain we call old notions fudge

               And bend our conscience to our dealing.

               The Ten Commandments will not budge,

               And stealing will continue stealing.

And while a contemporary lecturer at Harvard joyously boasts of his “boyish escape from moralism,” this liberated lecturer is given the lie by a British columnist, who upon being released from his communist captors tells of the indignities they heaped upon him: taunts, jeers, and little children throwing filth from the gutter in his face — then the unexpected whisper from another Korean who saw it all: “I’m sorry. I’m a Christian.” There’s the secret of the strange sequel revealed.

Only the spirit’s glad obedience to Christ can save us and society from the insanity of suicide. Only thus can we predict and count on the sequence in human affairs which can best be described by that blessed word, integrity — but most of all, then God can count on us.