What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him? (Matt 8.27)
Both our readings this evening bear witness to a god of awesome power. The mountain smokes and shakes with a force that will destroy any who come too near. The storm tosses the disciples’ little boat about so that they fear for their lives, but Jesus exercises a power that is even greater than that of the storm, and the disciples are shaken to the core. Next, at his command the evil spirits forsake the two demoniacs, and a whole herd of swine rush headlong over a cliff. The people beg him to go away, and we too prefer to turn the pages of our gospel, to find Jesus surrounded by children, healing and teaching, showing us God’s mercy and his love.
Yet I want to suggest this evening that our understanding of the nature of God is seriously out of balance if we ignore the dimension of terrifying, infinite power that is present even in the Jesus that we encounter in the gospels. Getting the balance right, or at least redressing it a little, is important for two reasons first because it is always wrong to close our eyes to aspects of the truth just because they are inconvenient or unpalatable; and secondly, because it seems to me that an overemphasis on the suffering, compassionate side of God’s nature valuable as it has been has tended to leave people in positions of leadership without a Christ-like, Christ-centred role model for those parts of their lives where they may be entrusted with considerable power over a company and its employees, over a government or part of a government, perhaps even over groups of armed men who must carry out orders. What does Christianity have to say about the exercise of power and authority in circumstances such as these? The caring, compassionate Christ is a great role model for any of us, male or female, when we need to be caring and compassionate; but there are other times when we need to be supported in a rough old world by a well-rounded understanding of the sheer power which Jesus could command, and how he used it.
We can derive some guidance from the way Jesus wrestled with power in his temptations. First, and most obviously, we are not given power to use it for our own benefit, to turn stones into bread to relieve our own hunger. We are not given power to line our own pockets, but to serve others. Once we start to think about what we can do for ourselves, we are facing in the wrong direction, and we will soon lose the plot altogether. Second, Jesus refused to use his miraculous powers to attract attention, for example by jumping off the roof of the Temple. He shunned the public acclaim that would have made him a popular hero, and vastly increased his following, because he knew that the roar of the crowd was a delusion, and a distraction from his true mission. His priority was to do the work, not to grab the headlines. We all want our work to be seen in a good light. We want recognition for ourselves, and we persuade ourselves that good publicity will make it easier to take the next step in the direction we want to go. But we have also seen how this approach, understandable as it may be, leads ultimately to the subordination of policy to spin, the fatal confusion of good publicity for ourselves with the progress of our cause. Finally, Jesus knew there could be no expedient compromise with the enemy. He refused utterly to gain a short-term advantage, however attractive it might seem, by bowing down in worship to the devil. That is the line which none of us must cross. Three simple rules then no compromise with the enemy, do it for real and not for show, use your power to serve others, not yourself.
I do not need to tell you how Jesus worked all this out in the conduct of his own life and mission. The evidence leaps out at us from almost every page of the gospel. Sensitive as he was in his dealings with the poor and the vulnerable, patient and supportive in his dealings with his friends, there is a steely toughness about the way he carries out his mission from which any leader could learn. He accepts those who attach themselves to him, flawed as they may be, he trains them and affirms them, but he is also capable of rebuking them sternly when they disappoint him, or misunderstand him, or risk diverting him from his task and that applies to his closest associates as well as his nearest family. Yet he never abandons or discourages them, taking pride in the fact that he has failed with none of them except Judas. Without being strident or aggressive he leads from the front. At Nazareth he sets out his mission statement, knowing that parts of it will prove controversial. He is not disconcerted, much less blown off course, when his actions provoke opposition from vested interests in church and state. He engages them in vigorous debate. On at least one occasion he uses controlled anger to make a dramatic point. When he judges that the time has come for the final confrontation, he walks into it with calm resolution, preparing his associates for the denouement he anticipates, assisting the prosecution at his own trial, unflinching at the last in the face of the most appalling physical pain as well as the greatest imaginable psychological trauma. He goes down into the darkness of death, not knowing, humanly, whether his life has been thrown away, but clinging resolutely to the conviction that he has done what he set out to do. It would be difficult to find a better model of strong and ultimately successful leadership.
We can learn from many aspects of his example, but I want to focus now on the point which I believe was absolutely fundamental to his leadership model. When I was discussing his temptations, I noted that the third was: no compromise with the enemy’ – the devil, or whatever name you care to give to the forces of evil. As you will recall, Jesus dismissed any suggestion of a Faustian pact by declaring roundly: Thou shalt worship the Lord Thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.’ When faced with the temptation in such stark terms, we would all know how to respond. It would be so easy if the devil could be relied on to turn up with horns and a long tail, but he doesn’t do that. He is rather good at disguising himself to attract those who most want to do good. Faust of course was seeking complete satisfaction, however fleeting it might be, through the search for knowledge or beauty or truth. He thought his curiosity and appetite were so insatiable that he could risk doing a deal with the devil who would aid him in his quest. Like Faust we all have things we want to achieve, things that we think will make ourselves and perhaps others happier, things that we hope will make the world a better place. Many of our goals may be perfectly legitimate, and the devil seems to offer us a few harmless short cuts. The rot sets in as soon as we allow any secondary objective, however noble, to loom larger in our lives than the serious business of finding out and then carrying out what God wants us to do with the scraps of power, resource and responsibility large or small – that may have been placed in our hands.
Jesus must have had to wrestle with this temptation long and hard. Teaching and healing didn’t have to lead to bitter confrontation. There were plenty of Messianic prophecies which would have been consistent with a dazzling career, and might even have held out the hope, eventually, of a restored Jewish state. Jesus distanced himself from such ambitions because he sensed that his Messiahship should take a different form, based on the disturbing prophecies concerning the suffering servant. We believe that he was able to arrive at this understanding because he spent time, lots of time, alone in prayerful communication with his Father. His most important motivation was to do his Father’s will to do that was to serve God; to adopt any other priority was to serve some other god, which he would refuse to do.
What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him? Jesus could give a strong lead because he knew that his one overriding priority was to do what his Father wanted. He invested a great deal of time and strenuous prayerful effort in working out what that was. Remember not just the agony of his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, but also how often he withdrew into the desert to be alone in prayer. Having done that, having tested his conviction from every possible point of view, he could act on it with quiet and steady confidence, even when it led to what must have seemed to be, at least possibly, the utter defeat and annihilation of the Cross.
And that, I suggest, is the true model for our own leadership. Of course we must serve others, not ourselves. Of course we must concentrate on the reality, not the spin. But above all else we must take the time, searching our hearts in prayerful thought, to discover what it is that our God wants us to do with this little bit of power that has been entrusted to us. If we listen carefully, if we don’t make up our minds before we start, if we really want to know, he will tell us. And then we can set about doing it, quietly, steadily, confidently, with or without the approbation of our peers, but continually testing our own provisional understanding against our deepening knowledge of the nature of the god we serve.
What sort of man is this? His leadership is of course an impossibly tough act to follow, but if we will let his spirit of truth come to us in the storms of our life, his inner calm will still the tumult, and enable us to bring our little ship to land.