Leadership, Jesus' Style

We glorify wealth, strength, and fame. We take people who already have those attributes and lift them higher as our leaders, our examples, our heroes. We like a take-no-prisoners attitude. We like the rough and tumble cowboy who dusts himself off after a fight and takes on the next challenge with little concern over who was injured moments before.

Then Jesus comes along. We rush to see him at the courts of the Temple, turning over the tables of the money changers and running off those selling animals for sacrifice. Then we turn a blind eye to all Jesus had to say in regard to leadership, violence, peace, and the attitudes that God prizes. We ignore the character and attitudes he prizes among the disciples and his categorization of what he wanted of those who would lead and be at the head of the mission of spreading the reach of God’s Reign on earth.

Jesus called common men to follow him as disciples charged with learning, retaining, and transmitting his teachings and embodying the character of the gospel. They were rough-cut and nothing special in the eyes of society. They were relatively uneducated. They were working men of a common class. They were not wealthy. They were not powerful. They were not famous. They were deemed of no account when called before the Jewish authorities, nothing special other than having been in Jesus’ inner circle.

We find Nicodemus, an educated leader among the Jews, within the larger circle of Jesus’ followers. We find Joseph of Arimathea within that same circle of followers, a wealthy man, but neither of these was among those cast as central to the leadership structure Jesus established for the movement charged with extending Jesus’ gospel of God’s Reign on earth.

When Jesus talked about leadership and prominence in God’s Reign, he spoke of those who placed themselves in service to others. He spoke of following his own example in washing the feet of his own inner circle as a model of leadership. He lived a life that evidenced the elevating of compassion for others as central to the character of leadership he prizes. Jesus evidenced the elevation of all those who found themselves marginalized as a central tenet of God’s Reign. This was key to his own leadership style and central to how he taught his disciples to respond to those with whom they interfaced.

Leadership for Jesus began with character, but it presents with much more than simply character and morality. It presents with an attitude of selflessness, placing the needs of others on a par with one’s own, and inviting their growth as a shared value. Jesus invited all to belong, to grow, to be transformed by grace, love, and acceptance into the best version of themselves. Its focus is always external. It gives. It shares. It lifts. It encourages. It comforts and strengthens.

This is all antithetical to the concepts underpinning social norms of leadership and leadership character. The gospel values do not call attention to self. They are not self-promoting ahead of those who are led. The contrast could not be greater.

Jesus was great. Jesus was central to the gospel. Jesus played a role that required that we pay very special attention to him as primary in all of our lives. Amid that, the intent and focus of his ministry consistently elevated others. Time after time, he elevated Samaritans, women, lepers, working people, children, outsiders, and reputed sinners, along with the infirm, disabled, and poor. Though he was central to all God was doing, his leadership focused energy, attention, and affirmation upon all of those the leaders all around him despised and neglected as unworthy of their own eminence.

It was the coordination of these principles of leadership that drove the development and growth of the early church. The disciples became leaders who did not call attention to themselves, rather extending the reach of the movement to meet the needs and challenges facing all those who gathered under the name of Jesus. They led the church to share not only their material resources, but also their new-found purpose in extending the grace of God in offering acceptance and inclusion indiscriminately to all.

When Jesus spoke with Pilate, he discussed a distinction with the way of God’s Reign in contrast to the world of politics all around us. The power structures of this world are wrapped up in systems that elevate all the wrong values from Jesus’ perspective. They call out as leaders those more wrapped up in self-promotion than in service, in ego than in humility, in self-aggrandizement than in uplifting those cast aside. When Jesus calls for leaders and responsible care-takers of God’s Reign and mission, he called for those who would be willing to set self aside for the higher calling of making God’s mission of reconciliation primary.

If we want to look for gospel principles to under-gird our political lives, that is a good place to start. God’s Reign is not invested in the political structures of the world around us. It does not seek to wield power for the promotion of some ahead of others. It does not seek to elevate some on the backs of others. Instead, it seeks to elevate those most neglected, scorned, ostracized, and debased into full participation in the blessings of life in community. Those values should be front and center in all aspects and arenas of our living and relating.

“Have this mindset in yourselves that we see so vividly in Christ Jesus, who let go of self for the benefit of others in humble service, placing his own living in subjection to God’s reconciling mission. By doing this and living as our own example, he earned the position and right of being the leader to whom all should bow in subservience.”

If Christians want to elect political leaders as an expression of faith, this is the kind of leaders we need to be looking for. Leaders who embody this attitude of empathy, compassion, humility, service, and inclusion are those whose lives promote the principles of the gospel Jesus preached. As the early church discovered, it is a welcome change from the status quo of the political realities that so often surround us. Unfortunately, such leadership tends to be rare, if for no other reason than we do not promote and elevate people with those qualities Jesus so prized. We prefer heroes who embody other principles, principles that are opposed to all Jesus stood for. If we elevate wolves to lead us, we should not be surprised when we wind up as prey.

— ©Copyright 2020, Christopher B. Harbin

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