If you’ve been a leader for more than a minute, you know the pain of someone leaving. Someone uno longer able or willing to follow you. Someone in disagreement with your ideas, your practices, your decisions, your new haircut, your whatever. It stings every time—even those times when the sting of loss is mixed with a sigh of relief.
Sometimes people leave your leadership because you messed up. Own up to that. Learn from it. Process it internally; make changes externally. Move on.
But sometimes people leave precisely when you’re doing your best.
One of Jesus’ most poignant and classsic teachings in the gospel of John comes in chapter 6: After miraculously feeding thousands of people using only a little boy’s lunch, he sees a teachable moment and says, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” And what was the result? Being Jesus, we might expect that there would be thousands of converts after such a display of power and a powerful sermon. But no. Whatever credibility his food services had gained him was quickly lost as the conversation turned to cannibalism.
Jesus knew that it was offending some of them. He tried to have a dialog about it, but still, “from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” The net sum of disciples after feeding thousands of people was negative. He walked away with fewer followers than he showed up with.
Things were not looking good. Nothing was trending up and to the right except for full bellies and former disciples.
At this moment Jesus turned to those still present, (back down to just the twelve, or maybe a handful more), and posed a remarkably vulnerable question: “You do not want to leave too, do you?”
Pause.
Don’t rush on to Simon Peter’s insightful and passionately loyal response. Pause on the question: “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Was this rhetorical? Did Jesus already know how Simon (and presumably he others) would respond? Or was he offering a genuine out?
Jesus was a world-class rhetoritician. He knew exactly what he was saying with the whole flesh-blood meataphor. He was aware of the shock factor. He was understanding when that kind of talk was simply too much for some to swallow. (Pun intended). Our post-crucifixion hindsight has the negative effect of dulling us to the shock of such a statement.
I believe that Jesus had compassion for those genuinely wrestling with the challenges of following him—not least the intellectual and existential challenge of cannibalistic metaphors. He was not in the business of breaking bruised reeds or of snuffing out smoldering wicks. So even in this question to the twelve, “You do not want to leave too, do you?” I hear his compassion. He is giving them an honest out. He called them with an invitation, “Follow me,” to which they could have said, “No thank you.” And he continues to bid them to follow him of their own volition. No assumption. No manipulation. No guilt. No threats.
They could go if they wanted to.
It’s hard to let people go. Yet Jesus would not be another Pharaoh, holding onto people for his own purposes. They were not slaves, but disciples. As Jesus later told the twelve, “I no longer call you servants (alternatively ‘slaves’?) but friends.” Jesus leads his disciples not with an iron fist, but with an open hand.
It is the Christ-like leader who can learn to say, “I will let my people go.”
