Where Everybody's Crazy

When I was at Bible college, we did an essay for the leadership course on "transformational and transactional leadership in the life of Jesus". To define those terms a bit, transactional leadership is leadership which sets conditions and rewards to get a goal done. Tell the men that if build this ship for you, you will pay them. Transformational leadership is that which inspires a team to want what you want. Teach the men, as Saint-Exupery put it, "to yearn for the vast and endless sea." In transformational leadership, the team is the real end product; even if you don't build the ship, you may well have built the men.

I argued in my essay that Jesus used a mixture of transformational and transactional leadership styles, but on the whole he was a transformational leader. Which is not surprising, because I think of myself as a transformational leader. Everyone knows, of course, that Jesus was interested in building people up more than getting stuff done. Right?

I wonder now how, in my essay, I could have missed the entire book of Matthew.

Matthew is an odd gospel. OK, we think it's written as an introduction to Jesus for a Jewish audience, and so it works almost as a restatement of the Law in Jesus' terms. Jesus deepens the Law: used to be you couldn't murder, now you can't get angry; used to be you couldn't covet, now you can't get lustful. So naturally, it's going to come across in pretty harsh, transactional terms. It's actually quite hard stuff: "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." "Unless your righteousness exceeds the scribes and the Pharisees, you will in no way enter into the kingdom of heaven." (When was the last time you heard a sermon on that verse?)

This got me thinking about the whole leadership thing again, and I realised something: where are the disciples? In Mark and Luke we see Jesus sending out the disciples, hearing about how their mission trips went, encouraging them, taking them off for retreats, teaching them privately, answering their questions individually. In Matthew, they hardly make an appearance. Only one disciple interacts with Jesus individually - Peter - and that's only a handful of times.

There's apocalyptic, there's rebuke, there's woe, and there's an awful lot of commands to be adhered to if you want to call yourself one of Jesus' followers. The Matthean Jesus was not, compared to the other accounts, a particularly friendly and encouraging guy to work for. Transformational leadership? Maybe not.