A Bottom-Up Movement
Why the People at the Bottom Always Heard Him First
Every day Jesus was teaching at the temple… All the people hung on Jesus’ words.
One day, Jesus was teaching in the temple and telling the good news. So the chief priests, the teachers, and the nation’s leaders asked him, “What right do you have to do these things? Who gave you this authority?”
Jesus replied, “I want to ask you a question. Who gave John the right to baptize? Was it God in heaven or merely some human being?”
They discussed it among themselves… “If we say, ‘From men,’ the people will stone us.”
— Luke 19:47–20:4
Pull up a chair. I’ve been sitting with this passage all week and I can’t let it go.
You know how sometimes a single line in scripture just reaches out and grabs you by the collar? That’s what happened to me here. Luke slips in this almost offhand observation right in the middle of Holy Week: all the people hung on Jesus’ words. I keep finding myself back at that sentence, turning it over like a stone you pick up on a trail because something about it catches the light.
Let me back up and set the scene, because context matters here.
Jesus had just arrived in Jerusalem. You know the story: the crowd spreading cloaks across the road, the whole city stirring, people asking who is this? It was the kind of entrance that turns heads and raises temperatures. And Jesus didn’t slow down. He walked straight to the temple, looked around at what the courtyard had become. He heard the noise. He saw the commerce, the whole machinery of religious transaction, and he cleared it out. Tables overturned. Merchants gone. He gave the temple back to what it was always meant to be: a house of prayer.
And then he stayed.
He found a spot in the temple courts and he sat down and he began to teach. No entourage. No stage. No advance team booking venues. Just Jesus, choosing a place, opening his mouth, and the crowds coming back every single day.
All the people hung on his words.
That’s the world this conversation is happening in. That’s why the religious leaders are so agitated. The wrong people, the bottom people, the ordinary people, are absolutely captivated by this man from Galilee, and the leaders can’t figure out how to make it stop.
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Here’s the thing about Jesus that I keep coming back to, sipping my coffee and turning these pages. The Jesus movement has always been a bottom-up movement. Not top-down. Of course it is.
Think about what Jesus did. He left heaven. He left the throne. He left the crown. He gave up the top place. He came to the bottom. All the way to the bottom. He said he had no place to call his own. John tells us that Jesus took the position of foot-washer at the last supper. Paul tells us he took the position of a servant, using the specific word in Paul’s language that pointed all the way down to the lowest position. Even among the group of servants, there were top servants and bottom servants. Need to guess which servant position Jesus took? To find Jesus among the servants, you have to go to all the way to the bottom.
Which means there’s genuinely good news hiding in this little scene.
You don’t need a platform to hang on Jesus’ words. You don’t need credentials, or access, or the right people to vouch for you, or a seat at the table where decisions get made. You can begin right now, right where you are, doing exactly what that crowd in Jerusalem was doing. You can open the text and lean in and listen.
Now here’s where it gets interesting, and a little uncomfortable.
The crowd in Jerusalem had no trouble recognizing what they were experiencing. Luke has told us twice early in the story that the crowds were amazed at his words (Luke 4:32), saying after one moment, “What words these are” (Luke 4:36). And Matthew adds a little more: the people were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes (Matthew 7:28-29). The people listening knew. They couldn’t have explained it theologically, but they knew. Something was happening when Jesus spoke that wasn’t happening anywhere else, and they wanted more of it.
The leaders either refused to see it, or couldn’t see it. Maybe both.
And I want to be careful here, because it’s easy to turn this into a simple story about bad guys and good guys. But what Luke is showing us is something more subtle and more sobering than that. The people at the top were so invested in protecting their position, so occupied with managing the institution, guarding the boundaries, maintaining the order of things, that they had lost the capacity to recognize the voice of God when it was standing right in front of them.
They weren’t hanging on Jesus’ words. They were hanging on their own. Amy Carmichael, that fierce little missionary who gave her life to the forgotten children of India, wrote of people who had heard themselves “sung as mighty in the land.” That’s the sound of top-down. That’s what had replaced the voice of God in the ears of the leaders.
You can tell the difference, by the way. You know you’re in a top-down movement when the people on top are more concerned with protecting their position than with sitting at the feet of Jesus. When they want you hanging on their words instead of his. When the conversation is always about what they think, what they have done, what they have decided. Jesus might be invoked, but in reality he matters little — dragged out occasionally, shoved back into the corner when he’s no longer useful.
The top-down crowd didn’t stay in the first century. A well-known cultural commentator said in 2023 that anyone who actually believes the Bible is “really, really, scary.” No argument mounted. Just that quiet verdict delivered out loud: a person who takes these old words seriously has become the thing you whisper about.
I’ve sat in graduate school classrooms, and later stood at the front of them in Christian universities and colleges, and watched this play out up close. I’ve heard professors, credentialed and confident, explain to a room full of students that the key elements of the Jesus story they grew up believing never actually happened. The bottom-up students in those rooms get very quiet. Sadly, some of them walk out of those programs having set down the faith that got them there. But not all of them. Some of them, like the crowd swelling around Jesus in that temple court, know what they’ve seen. They know what they’ve heard. And they want more, not less
So here’s where I want to leave you, as we’re finishing our coffees and the morning is getting away from us.
If you find yourself in a top-down environment, a church, a workplace, a school, a community, where the people holding power seem more interested in their own authority than in the authority of Jesus, you may eventually feel like you have to leave. And there may come a time when that’s exactly the right call.
But before you go, it’s worth sitting quietly with a different question. Is it possible that staying is the assignment? Is it possible that God is calling you to be a bottom-up, word-hanging soul-missionary right where you are, praying that the eyes and ears of people on top will open, the way eyes and ears sometimes do?
I’m not romanticizing it. That is genuinely hard work. It costs something. And I’m not saying it’s for everyone.
I think of a small group of people who came to see me years ago. There were six or seven of them, from a church that had once been deeply rooted in Jesus. The leaders had drifted far from Jesus. Almost any kind of worship was embraced except worship that glorified Jesus. The leaders slammed that door shut at every turn. And this little cluster of ordinary believers sat in my office wrestling out loud with whether they were called to stay as a quiet, praying, bottom-up presence, or whether the time had come to go. I won’t tell you what they decided. That’s not really the point. What stayed with me was the quality of their deliberation. They weren’t reactionary. They weren’t bitter. They were genuinely asking what God was up to. That question had the ring of truth.
What I will say is this: wherever you land, you need a community of people somewhere who are hanging on Jesus’ words the way that Jerusalem crowd was hanging on them. That community may not be large or famous or well-funded. They may not show up easily in a search. But they are near you. Hunger for Jesus, real, unmanufactured hunger, is growing almost everywhere right now. Look around. God will lead you to them. And when you find them, spend as much time there as you can.
The communion you find will fill you with resilience and spirit.
It’s worth reading one more time before you close your Bible and get on with your day:
All the people hung on Jesus’ words.
May that be said of us.
Don’t let this stay in your head. Turn whatever stirred in you into a conversation with Jesus himself. Holy Week isn’t only about reading about Jesus. It’s about sitting with him the way that crowd sat with him in the temple courts and letting his words do what words do when they come from the mouth of God.
Gratefully,
— Gene