This Is Not the One You Seek | Sojourners

This Is Not the One You Seek

The Nation's Scramble to Find a Good Leader
Crowd at a Marco Rubio rally
Crowd at a Marco Rubio rally Feb. 27 in Kennesaw, Ga., Michael Powell / Shutterstock.com

Nearly everyone I know believes that one or more of the presidential candidates is an exceptionally bad leader, and this leaves us to grapple with why so many of our fellow Americans support them. Personally, I reject public stupidity as an explanation for anything. Our people deserve a more generous attempt to understand them. So let us look deeper.

Disaffected people have rallied to bad leaders before. We know this because we read history. They buy bad leadership for the same reason that ailing people buy bad medicine. The promise may be false, they say, but what we have now does not work. At least this person offers hope, and a risky hope is better than no hope.

The trick of the bad salesman is to listen carefully. Find out what troubles a person and then promise that the thing you are selling will solve it. Bad salesmen scratch the same place in our psyche that is open to the occult — the itching place that drives us to look for an exception to the drab rules of our world.

One candidate claims that we are ailing because our presidents are not tough enough, another because they are not progressive enough, and a third because they are not conservative or Christian enough. And the chorus of commentators who have always talked at the people and told them what is good for them are talking still and telling them these leaders are not good.

But what answer is this? If they succeed, the commentators will exorcise the demon. But can they fill the emptied heart with something good? They may chase off the miracle-pill salesman but can they supply a wise doctor?

Flocking to bad leaders is, like rioting, a language of the unheard. And the only right response to unheard people is to displace the destructive language with a better language.

Great leaders also ask their people to speak. They also listen until they find the thing that troubles their people. But, instead of false promises, they shape their cure to match the problem.

Anyone who has lost a loved one, anyone fasting from food or raised with an absent parent, knows that an absence can be the sharpest presence. So much grief and so much dysfunction can be traced to absences and, in such cases, we should feel around the edges of the absence and determine its shape so that, when someone claims to provide what is missing, we can judge whether the claim is true.

The good news is that, if disaffected people — people suffering from an undefined absence — are vulnerable to bad leadership, they are also vulnerable to good leadership. We learn this from the less shocking — and therefore less read — chapters of history.

We can look in our recent history for the picture of a good leader who would fill our absence. But instead, let us look far away to those who built Judaism and Christianity — leaders who, perhaps, if we have the faith to believe it — acted uncorrupted in the hand of God.

Jesus met his people at a time when they were disaffected and down on their luck and they fantasized openly that he would make Israel great again. They identified him as the Son of David. It is impossible to overstate the toughness associated with that label. David: a man who bragged to King Saul that he had killed a bear and a lion — by seizing it by the beard and striking it down (I Sam 17:34-36). And, when David returned, carrying Goliath’s crusted head, to claim the king’s daughter, Saul demanded a gruesome dowry. So “David arose and went, he and his men, and killed two hundred men of the Philistines. And David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full count to the king, that he might become the King’s son-in-law” (I Sam 18:27).

 

And how did Jesus follow David’s legacy? He gathered the disaffected people. He healed them, taught them, and fed them. He shamed the most strident of the Jewish leaders and, when the people only wanted food, he offended them so they would leave (John 6). He disappointed their hope that he would lead Israel to victory over its enemies, telling them that his kingdom is not of this world, and then he explained his leadership to his disciples like this: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).

Moses, also found his people in dire straits. Moses was born a Jew at a time when the law required Egyptian midwives to kill all Jewish boys at birth. Then, 80 years later, he led his disaffected people from slavery into the desert and, when his father-in-law came to visit him, Moses described his leadership like this: “When [the people] have difficulty, they come to me, and I judge between one and another; and I make known the statutes of God and His laws” (Exodus 18:15-16).

Moses’ brother Aaron offers a contrast. In his brief stint as interim leader, Aaron listened to his restless people and granted them what they asked. They demanded an idol so Aaron made them a golden calf. And he excused himself to Moses: “Do not let the anger of my lord become hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil” (Exodus 32:22).

Both brothers listened to the people. One gave them what they asked. The other listened and then taught them what was good:

“Then [Moses] took the calf which they had made, burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder; and he scattered it on the water and made the children of Israel drink it” (Exodus 32:20).

And then, when he had done this, Moses appealed to God for his people. “If now I have found grace in Your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us, even though we are a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your inheritance” (Exodus 34:9).

I am humbled beyond words at this picture of Moses — a man who took no part in worshiping the idol and yet he still owned his people to God, made no excuse for them, and beseeched God to still be their God and let them continue as God’s people. Moses owned the people’s fault because they were his people. I long for a leader with the fortitude to do this for us even now, as we embrace the idols of our day.

But the story did not end there. Moses had exorcised the demon, he had crushed the idol, and he was left with a void in his people’s heart—the void they had tried to fill with the golden calf.

The chapters that follow the golden calf are less shocking — and therefore less read. They provide the portrait of a strong leader offering his people food to match their hunger — medicine to match the illness. Where Aaron had collected gold from the people to build an idol, Moses collected it to build a tabernacle, an altar, and an ark to the Lord. The same people who had grown itchy and rebellious under Aaron now gave freely until Moses said, “‘Let neither man nor woman do any more work for the offering of the sanctuary.’ And the people were restrained from bringing, for the material they had was sufficient for all the work to be done — indeed too much” (Exodus 37:6-7).

And, when the work was completed in all its exquisite detail, “Moses looked over all the work, and indeed they had done it; as the Lord had commanded, just so they had done it. And Moses blessed them” (Exodus 39:43). He had given them a good thing that fit the void in their lives.

Our presidential candidates have shown us an absence in the hearts of our people, and for this we can thank them. As we search for the right leaders to fill this void, I leave you with the statements of two great leaders. Whether pastor, politician, artist, entertainer, or commentator, let us look for people who can say with Moses, “When [the people] have difficulty, they come to me, and I judge between one and another; and I make known the statutes of God and His laws” (Exodus 18:15-16). Or with Jesus, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). As we seek to understand and fill the absence in our lives, let us look for humble leaders who know us, speak the truth to us, and own us with all our flaws because we are their people.