The Birth of Jesus and Servant Leadership

I have heard much about Jesus during this Christmas season. Some of what I have heard focuses on Jesus Christ, the son of God. Another focus has been on Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph and Mary. It is this second focus, Jesus as human that I find most relevant to servant leadership. It is the struggles of human life, which force us to look for better ways to live.

The gospels don’t tell us much about the early life of Jesus, but like all of us, he likely struggled much with the same things we still struggle with today. It was through these struggles and his awareness of the struggles of others that he came up with his teachings that are often ripe with servant leadership.

It was the way he modeled these teachings through the way he lived that helped inspire Robert Greenleaf to develop his concept of servant leadership. In his biography of Greenleaf , Don Frick writes about Greenleaf confiding in his friend Bill Bottum, that “the image of Jesus washing the feet of disciples, as described in John: 13 , was one source of the idea of the servant-leader” (page 279). The biography also includes an excerpt from some writing Greenleaf had done on Robert Frost’s poem “Directive” . Greenleaf's thoughts on the poem included the following (page 236):

The tradition built around the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, the one in which I grew up and which has the greatest symbolic meaning for me now, seems especially emphatic on this point. Jesus seemed only to have at heart our getting lost; he was mostly concerned with what must be taken away rather then with what would be gained. […].

To be on the journey one must have an attitude toward loss and being lost, a view of oneself in which powerful symbols like [quoting from the poem] burned, dissolved, broken off – however painful their impact is seen to be - do not appear as senseless or destructive. Rather the losses they suggest are seen as opening the way for new creative acts, for receiving of priceless gifts. Loss, every loss the mind of man can conceive of, creates a vacuum into which will come (if allowed) something new and fresh and beautiful, something unforeseen – and the greatest of these is love.

As we move through the holiday seasons, the birth, life, and death of Jesus remind us to embrace our losses, our struggles, and be open to the opportunities that life provides us to grow.