by Chief
Justice Reynato S. Puno,
Supreme Court
Our
theme is “Descending to Greatness”. Allow me therefore
to give a message on servant leadership. Let me, however, dispose
of certain preliminary considerations before one can be a servant
leader.
First. I like to think that when we say leaders,
we are not merely referring to a few elite; we are not talking
only of those on top of the line. Rather, I like to think that
leader refers to everybody, to all of us. For,
according to Webster, a leader is one who guides, one who directs.
On the basis of this definition, we are all leaders; for whatever
is our station in life, there will always be a time, an occasion
when we have to guide or direct somebody else.
We are all leaders, either for good or for ill. If you are a father
or a mother, you lead the members of your family. If you are a
big brother or a big sister, you lead your kid brother or little
sister. If you are a professional, like a teacher, you lead your
students. If you are a non-professional, you are still a leader,
for you cannot avoid guiding others. You may technically be at
the bottom or near the bottom of life’s totem pole, but
that does not mean you cannot lead; it does not mean you have
no influence over others. We honor all who lead well, not only
our great leaders. When we honor outstanding employees in our
office, we are honoring little men and women who have done so
much for our lives and for the lives of others – the messengers,
the typists, the telephone operators, the drivers, the janitors,
who lighten our jobs and make our lives more livable.
Have you watched the most prestigious tennis tournament in the
world, the Wimbledon? The last day of the two-week tournament
is the most important, for it determines the champion in the men’s
and women’s divisions. It is attended by the Queen or the
King of England who personally awards the trophy to the champion.
But note that before the King or the Queen honors the winners,
the royalty first shakes the hands and engages in shop talk with
the little people: the linesmen, the umpires, and the referees.
The King and the Queen of England make very few public appearances,
and they do not shake the hands of commoners. One occasion they
do is when they honor these little people their seemingly insignificant
acts, without which there will be no Wimbledon.
The short point is that the principles of leadership ought to
concern us, for we are all leaders. The things we do,
the things we say are never neutral. They will impact
on others, either positively or negatively. They will lead others
aright or mislead them astray. We are therefore all leaders --
leaders for good or leaders for ill. And life is a contiuing fight
for good or for ill; a fight in which you have to take a side,
a fight in which you cannot stay in the safety of the sidelines;
a fight in which you can’t be neutral and later join the
bandwagon of the winners; a fight which is your fight; a fight
which you have to fight under the banner of God.
Second. We are all leaders, but I like to submit
further that our places of leadership, our roles in life, have
been assigned by God. God has a divine purpose for each of us,
a divine purpose which fits His overall plan for humanity. We
worship no ordinary deity. Our God is omnipotent and omniscient,
all-powerful and all-knowing. The Holy Scriptures tell us that
God, a perfect God, designed our lives, fixed the contours of
our future, even before we were born. In Isaiah 44:2, God tells
us and assures, “I am your Creator. You were on my care
even before you were born.” The events
in our lives, their ups and downs, are therefore no accidents.
God has a purpose for all of us, the high and the lowly, the prince
and the pauper, the powerful and the powerless. The genius, Albert
Einstein, put it best when he said, “God does not
play dice with our fortunes.” To be sure, it is
not only our lives that God created and directed, but the whole
universe. Consider the numerous planets, the millions of stars
and their order of orbit and appearance, and you will never doubt
a God in control of our destinies.
Third. The call for leadership is a call from
God, and our antennae must be sensitive to this call. In the old
days, it was easy to call, and you didn’t pay to call. To
make a call, you just yell and they will hear you. Today, we have
telephones, and cellphones; but paradoxically,
it is more difficult to make a call. Sometimes the line is busy;
sometimes the phone is out of order; sometimes the sound is fuzzy
because somebody else is listening; and sometimes the area is
inaccessible. And we get a lot of calls, wrong calls, crank calls.
The end result is a tragedy even God is having a hard time making
a call to us.
If we have to stress the obvious, it is that leaders need to listen,
to have a separate time for the Lord, a quiet moment to listen
to His voice, a time to catch His call, a time reserved for Him
alone. Humans are supremely superior to animals in many respects,
but not in the art of listening. Animals have greater ear power;
they can pick up small sounds better than we can. For this reason,
the old Chinese rely on animals to predict an earthquake, as there
is no technology that can warn of an incoming earthquake. Before
an earthquake comes, some animals hear its rumblings, and out
of fear howl and make a lot of noises; some run for safety; some
rush to caves; some climb trees. Listening to animals to save
them from the dangers of nature is a crude way of predicting the
coming of earthquakes; but in a good number of times, it has worked
for the Chinese.
The obvious point is that there is value in listening and one
of the tragedies of the modern world is that humans have lost
the art of listening. If Satan is winning on earth, it is because
he has stolen our time with God. We are always busy, but not busy
with God and for God. We must therefore recover the art of listening,
for we cannot be deaf to the voice of God. We cannot be good leaders
unless we devote some quiet, quality time to commune with God;
to feel His awesome presence; to feel Him tug at our hearts; and
to listen to His whispers to our conscience. “Be still,”
He said, “. . . and know I am God.” We cannot be leaders
unless we listen to God, and we cannot listen to God unless we
are still.
Fourth. God calls us every day to lead, to be
leaders of others. A call from God is different from other calls.
It is different if only for the reason that it is and will always
be a correct call; otherwise, we will have a God who is not all-knowing
-- and a God who can be wrong is no God at all. Sometimes, we
doubt the omniscience of God and that is the reason we hesitate
to respond to His call; or worse, we reject His call.
Even the legendary characters of the Bible had this attitude of
ambivalence, of doubt, especially when the task given to them
appeared to be beyond their human capability to fulfill. God asked
Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. He asked Moses to challenge
Pharaoh and lead the Jews out of Egypt. Daniel was asked to stop
worshipping God or be thrown into the lion’s den. It was
all too human for Abraham, Moses and Daniel to respond to these
calls. For how can a God of love ask you to sacrifice your only
son? How can an omniscient God pick a powerless Moses to challenge
the all-powerful Pharaohs? How can a God of mercy allow Daniel
to be devoured by lions?
Truly, God’s calls under those circumstances were beyond
human comprehension. But Abraham, Moses and Daniel showed us the
value of obedience; they proved to all that one can never be wrong
with God. They trusted God’s wisdom and not their own understanding;
they put their fate in His hands and not in their own hands and
the result proved that when God calls, His call is correct. Isaac,
Abraham’s son, was spared; and Abraham was blessed by God,
and his descendants became the great nation of Israel. Moses led
the nation of Israel out of Egypt to the promised land. Daniel
was not touched by the lions and God was glorified.
Let us, therefore, remember that when God calls us to lead, God
will take care of equipping us with the skills of a leader. That
is the story of all whom He has called to lead. All were ordinary
men and women, and all succeeded as leaders. Let us take care
of His call; and He will take care of our incapacities, our limitations,
all our needs to succeed. No one can say he has little to offer
to God by way of leadership, for even nothing is something to
God. We worship a God of Power, a God of Might, a God of the Impossible.
Finally, let me illustrate the difference between
leaders and of leadership in the material world and those in the
spiritual world. Leaders in the material world become leaders
by the process of ascending the ladder of power; by allying themselves
with the powerful vested interests of society; by kowtowing to
the majority even if it is wrong; by following the fashion of
the time; by continuously pushing themselves up and pushing down
those against them. Leaders of the spiritual world are different.
They lead by descending to the ladder of power; they descend to
ally themselves not with the powerful but with the powerless;
they do not follow the fad and the fashion of the time but what
is right and righteous for all time; they do not push themselves
up but down so that others may be elevated. I draw your attention
to the life of two kings, and see how they handled the levers
of power as leaders.
The first is King Herod, who reigned over Judea from 37 to 4 B.C.
He represented the temporal king, today’s tyrannical head
of state. To them, power is everything. For as correctly observed,
power is the single greatest catalyst of history, which is driven
by the desire for power. Adler termed it as the great human obsession.
Kissinger described it as the ultimate aphrodisiac.
King Herod did everything to gain leadership and his way was going
up, up, and up the totem pole of power. He used all means, both
fair and foul, to succeed. By the fair means, he built a city
and an excellent harbor along the Mediterranean coast to promote
trade in his domain. During times of famine, he devised a food
and clothing distribution system to help the distressed. But he
was also adept in the use of foul means to gain power. He had
10 marriages, and most of them were contracted to gain political
advantage. They were calculated to gain political strength. Indeed,
when his rule was threatened by marriage, he had no qualms about
murdering his wife, mother-in-law and 3 sons whom he suspected
were out to dethrone him. He was the same king who felt so disturbed
by the birth of Jesus. To eliminate Jesus tried his darndest best
to find out where He would be born. When he failed, he ordered
the killing, in Bethlehem and in its vicinity, of all the boys
two years old and under. In fine, Herod’s style of leadership
is to ascend to reach the top, to stay on top and never to descend
from the top come what may. He desired leadership not to serve
others but to serve his selfish interest. He ascended to the top,
using fair and foul means and defied the law of gravity. That
kind of leader, that style of leadership does not last long; it
is the kind most vulnerable to the law of gravity, the law that
dictates that everything that goes up must come down. He never
realized that when one is on the level with people, one can never
be pulled down, for that is the point of exemption from the law
of gravity. In 30 years, he was down and out of the list of the
beloved, a forgettable footnote, a negligible item of the museum.
And now, let us see the other kind of leader, the other type of
leadership exemplified by another kind, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Their styles of leadership were in contrast. King Herod’s
idea of leadership was ascending the ladder of power to rule and
staying there for good. Jesus’ concept of leadership was
descending from the top to the bottom of society, not to rule
but to serve. It was a descent from heaven to earth; a descent
from the throne to the cross, a descent from power to powerlessness;
a descent from kingship to servanthood; a descent
to greatness, the real greatness. Rev. Bill Hybells described
the difference in their leadership as follows:
x x x
Both
Herod and Jesus possessed immense power but how they chose to
use it revealed the hearts of two radically different men. Herod
was bent on promotion, Jesus bended in devotion. Herod was a
tyrant, Jesus a servant. Herod was consumed with self-interest,
Jesus focused on God and others instead of himself. Herod manipulated,
slandered, deceived and coerced; Jesus healed, touched, taught
and loved.
The ends of these two leaders, two kings, speak for themselves.
Continued Reverend Hybells:
Herod with all his wealth, high position and possession, ended
in ruin. In the final year of his life, his body was infected
with disease; his pain was so bad that in the middle of the night,
his screams would be heard in the palace. He died alone, despised
in history.
x x x
On the other hand, by yielding His power, Jesus proved His trust
in God’s plan. God said the downward path would lead to
fulfillment and life and Jesus believed Him. x x x For Jesus
the end was not the end; He became the most celebrated man in
history.
God
needs leaders -- not leaders of any kind, but servant leaders.
As He said; “in this world, the Kings and great men order
their slaves around and their slaves have no choice but to like
it. But among you, the one who serves you best will be your leader.”
(Luke 22:25-27)
A blessed day to all of you.
