If you were concerned to buttress your credentials as the leaders of a new religious movement, you wouldn’t sanction the circulation of a gospel like St Mark’s. Time and again even Peter, James and John, the three disciples closest to Jesus, are shown to have utterly failed to understand him. They simply don’t get it. This is now the third time that Jesus has tried to tell them that his mission will end in suffering and humiliation, the certainty of death and the mystery of resurrection, but they are still on another planet altogether, manoeuvring to secure for themselves the seats on either side of him in his glory, the top positions in his future government. How on earth could this lot ever become the bearers of his message to the rest of the world, when they could not begin to get their heads around it themselves?
Sadly the Church has all too often lost the plot as utterly as James and John. I have just been visiting, in Cordoba and Seville, some of the monuments by which the Church proclaimed its dominance over the Moors who had ruled much of Spain for some 500 years. Not only were the victorious Christians guilty of obliterating some of the jewels of a precious architectural inheritance, but ultimately they would also eliminate the tolerance which the Moors had often shown for Christians and Jews. Nor has the Catholic Church been alone in using wealth and power to reinforce one another, to exclude dissenting voices, to exploit the faithful, and to keep the poor in their place. All institutions, including the Anglican Communion, tend to use their power to control dissent, and to exclude those who refuse to toe the party line, even if nowadays it is more likely to be done with motions and resolutions than with swords and siege engines. ‘It is not so among you’ we read (Mark 10.43). However, as a Church we have found it much easier to pen scathing criticisms of bankers for the Parliamentary Commission charged with examining reform, than we did to respond coherently to the Occupy Movement when it challenged us more directly, as an institution with close links to the City, by camping on the steps of St Paul’s. ‘It is not so among you’? Jesus wanted his followers – the community which would become the church – to behave differently. By contrast with the ways of the world as they were then and as they are now, he advocated leadership on the basis of giving his life in service to others, rather than demanding that others should give their lives in service to him. ‘For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’ (Mark 10.45). There can be no doubt that he practised what he preached. Yet his culture of service to others, in obedience to what he perceived as the will of God his Father, did not compromise his role as leader of the little group of disciples which was to be the nucleus and model of his kingdom.
If this analysis is right, it is of the highest importance to us as his followers, to understand what he meant by service. In particular how did he manage to keep service and leadership in balance? How are we to avoid falling into the traps of power and control laid for us by the models of leadership which we encounter on every side, the models which he rejected for himself, and called on us to reject?
Seeking implicitly to answer this question, our lectionary points us firmly in the direction of Isaiah’s poems about the Suffering Servant, of which the one we read this morning is the best known. It is clear enough from the references in the gospels that the early church, and presumably Jesus himself thought that these poems, as an expression of the mind and purpose of God for his Servant, were important and relevant to his mission. They speak both of the tragic experience and the supreme triumph of the loyal, faithful and obedient Servant in a world which ignores God, but which God loves and is resolved to save and reconcile to himself. The poem begins and ends in triumph and vindication, but we joined the poem in its central section where the Servant is not only humiliated and suffering, but is seen as one who is afflicted by God, presumably on account of his sins. Suddenly there is a shift of perception as it is seen that his sufferings are the result not of his sins but ours. The Servant suffers voluntarily on our behalf, and this is seen as the means whereby God will reconcile us and all the world to himself, overcoming the estrangement that must otherwise result from our sinfulness, our persistent tendency to worship – that is to say, to put first in our lives – the gods of power, wealth and fame which are such dangerous illusions. Some commentators have taken the view that an implacable God, demanding a sacrifice for such sinfulness, accepted the life of the Suffering Servant in substitution for that of us sinners, but the poem is much more subtle than that. The Servant is not so much a substitute as a representative figure, who identifies himself with godless mankind in all our ugliness and pitiful need, so that we in our turn may be identified with his loyal obedience to God, the bridge across which reconciliation can flow. My prose is unavoidably leaden-footed. Go back to the poetry of the Biblical text, rejoicing in the variety of translations which struggle to convey the sense of the original Hebrew, and accept if you can that the poet has caught some glimmer of the truth which could only find full expression in a life.
The life and death of Jesus is the best guide, the only guide we have to true leadership. Jesus was not a masochist. He loved life; he loved people. He will not have sought to suffer, much less to die, as an end in itself. The ‘end in itself’ was to do whatever had to be done in order to give the joyful life he knew to the group of very ordinary, rather unpromising men and women he had chosen as his disciples, and doubtless come to love despite all their failings. If that meant identifying with all their failings, and through them identifying with the grosser failings of all mankind, so that we might all be identified with him in his love and goodness, then he would not shrink from death, even the appallingly painful and shameful death of crucifixion. And that is the path we are all called to tread, not seeking suffering, not making martyrs of ourselves, just doing what we have to do for love’s sake, without regret, through dedicated lives of ordinary, humble service. But if we are right about the exercise of leadership in God’s world, it may be that the treading of that difficult path by Christian bankers quietly determined to apply Christian standards of behaviour to all they do will, by God’s grace, do more to advance the cause of banking reform than a sharply worded report from the Mission and Public Affairs Division. But it may of course be a risky path to tread. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.