Roughly seventeen years and two churches ago, I started off with a five-week series on this passage. Since it was the beginning of the year, one of those services included the ordination and installation of a new elder. That got me thinking about Jesus as a human leader of a group of oddly-assorted people on a trying journey through challenging circumstances. It’s not a new idea, to be sure, but it wasn’t an angle I had spent a lot of time considering; and the more I thought about it in the light of Matthew 4, the more I came to think that if we want to learn about leadership from Jesus, our passage this morning is where we must begin.
When I say that, you might be looking back down at the text and wondering where I’m getting that, and the answer is: not in the text. It’s in the context. Look what comes next in this chapter. First, John the Baptist gets thrown in prison, prompting Jesus to move to the cities around the Sea of Galilee, start his preaching career, and recruit his first disciples. Then we see the early success—at least as those disciples probably saw it—of Jesus’ preaching career, as he starts drawing large, adoring crowds. That is followed in turn by the first great act of leadership of Jesus’ career, the Sermon on the Mount, which is designed in part to force those adoring crowds to make a choice: either follow Jesus as committed disciples, or abandon him. People following him for the sake of the stuff he’s doing doesn’t serve his purpose at all.Read more
