What a Marxist liked about Jesus

In my November column, I made a brief reference to servant leadership. The question the article asked was how one can be a servant leader and be effective in getting others to act or follow.

Did Jesus say that as a Christian leader you should allow everyone to despise you, spit on you and walk all over you? In an attempt to answer this question, some of the articles in this column will try to give some insight on the leadership style and qualities of Jesus himself. In this article the focus will be on his character.

We know that Jesus did not hold a leadership position in Jewish society. Jesus had no office and no secretary. He did not even have a house not even a shack that he could claim as his own abode: Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (Mt 8:20).

Furthermore, Jesus never coerced anybody to follow him, nor did he impose his teaching on anyone. And yet he had a large following. Wherever he went, he drew crowds to himself and the disciples went with him wherever he went. After his death, the faith he founded spread like wild fire. What, then, was his secret of success as a leader?

There are two types of leaders who are diametrically opposed to one another: leaders who coerce and oppress, and leaders who inspire. The former use force, threats and other tactics to make other people follow them or vote for them. The latter get support by influencing and inspiring others. John Maxwell, the American guru on leadership, has said: The true measure of leadership is influence nothing more, nothing less. At the Lead and Inspire Institute we have maxim: The mark of true leadership is the power to lead and inspire!

An important requirement for one to be a leader who inspires is character. John Maxwell has correctly said: Character makes trust possible and trust makes leadership possible. Implicit in this is that followers lose trust in a leader who is inconsistent, who cannot be trusted; who says one thing and does another.

Character is built on the qualities of integrity, honesty, accountability, consistency and moral uprightness. An essential aspect of character is modelling being a role model. A true leader is not only a person of character, but someone who embodies his or her vision. He or she is a leader who walks his or her talk. True leadership is not an act to impress followers, but a demonstration of one’s conviction, beliefs and personality.

Jesus had many strong leadership qualities. A characteristic that impressed a Marxist thinker who does not believe in God and who looks at Jesus purely as a historical human figure, is the quality of being a person of character who embodied what he taught. In his book, A Marxist Looks at Jesus, Milan Machovec in part attempts to answer the question: What was Jesus’ secret of success? Why did Jesus have such a grip on his disciples that they were prepared to follow him through thick and thin and to lay down their lives for him?

Machovec found part of the answer in the kind of person that Jesus was. He succeeded in making the disciples so loyal to him because he was their role model whose life was a demonstration of his personality and vision. He preached about the things of God and he behaved like a man from God. He was the very embodiment of the values of the Kingdom he preached.

Machovec says the disciples saw in Jesus what it meant to be full of grace, what it meant to be not only a preacher, but himself the product of his preaching.  Consequently Jesus touched the hearts and minds of his disciples. He influenced them, inspired them and helped them to see that they had the power to do more than catch fish.

Jesus was the kind of leader that John Adair defines in his book Effective Strategic Leadership where he says: A good leader is someone whom people will follow through thick and thin, in good times and in bad, because they have confidence in him as a person, his ability and his knowledge of the job and because they know they matter to him.

In this sense we can say that Christian leaders who follow the example of Jesus and practise servant leadership as he did, are more powerful than those leaders who coerce others to follow them or vote for them.