Where Everybody's Crazy

[In as much as] Many people have tried to set down a record of all the things that were played out here among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word right from the start passed them on to us. So it seemed good for me too to write to you, having researched everything carefully from the beginning so that you, honourable Theophilus, might know about the accuracy of the things you have been instructed. (Luke 1:1-4)

Right at the start of this Gospel, we have a challenge. Why are we reading this? What do we expect to ``get out'' of reading the Bible? Should we expect to get anything out of it?

To think about such questions is to approach the Bible as a personal communication between us and God. In such a view, the Church is sidelined. In contrast, Luke emphasises two things. He speaks about the accuracy and the historical reliability of his gospel. It is right that we read his words in the knowledge that they are authenticated by eyewitnesses and researched by the author, and that we can claim the historicity of the Gospel for ourselves. What we are about to read actually happened, two thousand years ago. But at the same time Luke emphasises that his research was done for the purpose of confirming and reinforcing teaching, to confirm to `Theophilus' that what he has been hearing is indeed true; the Gospel is there, as Newman put it, to prove what the Church teaches. It is not an end unto itself, nor something separable from the teaching of the Church, but stands as the test and the standard of what is taught.

Luke's introduction contends with both the evangelical position which places the Bible above the Church, and with the liberal position which subjugates the Bible to the teaching of the Church. Instead the Bible stands by the side of the Church, in dialogue, informing it and challenging it to remain true. As we continue to read the Gospel, and yes, to use it in our devotions, we must remember to balance the truth of the Gospel and the teaching of the worldwide Church, past and present.

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.