When you earnestly seek to do what’s right, inside a system you do not recognize as broken, you’re asking to be blindsided.

When you implicitly trust leaders who depend on the system for power, image and funds, you’re asking to be betrayed.

Seeking to do right, you’re apt to expose what someone in power does not want to be seen – to endanger what they’re determined not to lose. And once you do that, you’re likely to be branded as unsubmissive and treated as a traitor.

Not seeing what you need to see, you won’t have a clue what’s going on.

“I’m getting rid of you!”

Witness the unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison’s powerful novel, Invisible Man.¹

How had I come to this? I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do— (p. 146)

It’s the early 1950’s, and an earnest young scholarship student has just been expelled from an all-black Southern college with a decidedly Christian bent.

How had it happened? One of the founders, a millionaire from New York named Mr. Norton, came to visit the college for a week. The young scholar was assigned to drive him. One day when they set out, Mr. Norton said to go “anywhere you like.”

Obligingly, the young black man took the elderly white man off the well-manicured campus onto the surrounding roads. There, the Northern gentleman heard and saw things he did not want to hear and see. Visibly shaken, he cut short his visit and left for home.

Though innocent, the young man felt guilty. Deeply distressed, he wailed:

Although I had not intended it, any act that endangered the continuity of the [institution] was an act of treason. (p. 134)

When the college president summoned him, he felt dread, yet hope. Dr. Bledsoe had always treated him kindly. And before going back to New York, the founder had assured the president that the young man did nothing wrong.

But Dr. Bledsoe was not the person the young man thought. Bledsoe lived to protect his institution, the flow of its donations and most of all, his prestige and his job.

“Boy, I’m getting rid of you!” he cried.

Suddenly, mid-tantrum, the president calmed down. He gave the young man hope of returning to school in the fall – if he would move to New York for the summer and earn enough money to re-enroll. Bledsoe even offered to write letters of introduction to help him get a job.

Despite my anguish and anger, I knew of no other way of living, nor other forms of success available to such as me. (p. 147)

And so the young exile spent what money he had to go North. He hand-delivered the sealed letters Bledsoe had sent. He waited weeks with no job offers but lots of promises to get back with him soon.

Then someone showed him one of the letters. The leader the young man had trusted had falsely accused him. In fact, Bledsoe had written:

One for whom we held great expectations has gone grievously astray.

The bearer of this letter is a former student of ours (I say former because he shall never, under any circumstances, be enrolled as a student here again) who has been expelled for a most serious defection from our strictest rules of deportment …

It is indeed his hope to return here to his classes in the fall. However, it is to the best interests of the great work which we are dedicated to perform, that he continue undisturbed in these vain hopes while remaining as far as possible from our midst. (p. 190)

Oh my, can I identify! I know what it is to try to honor leaders who have turned on you, yet who claim to want what’s best for you.

While they work to strip you of community, identity and any possibility for future ministry, you may still believe them trustworthy. You may bend over backward to show them that you’re trustworthy too.

You may think you have no other valid choice – especially if you see no future for yourself, outside of the only world you know; especially if you believe submitting the only godly thing to do.

What did Jesus do?

Jesus in his humanity faced leaders such as this.

Jesus is Lord. Yet also, when he came to earth, he “emptied himself … by sharing in human nature.”² While here, he did not stop being God. Yet he chose to live from his humanness, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to teach us what it looks like, to show us it can be done.

Jesus grew to manhood within a system that he, as God, had instigated – and people had hijacked to use for their own ends. So what did Jesus do?

He saw what he was seeing

What may take us forever to realize, Jesus saw from the start.

In the earliest days of his ministry, he went to Jerusalem for Passover. There, he saw that those supposed to lead in worship had turned his Father’s house into a business. Furious, Jesus drove out the vendors they had employed.

When the people who had gathered for the Feast saw this, and other “signs he was performing,” many “believed in his name.”³

But Jesus didn’t entrust his life to them. He knew them inside and out, knew how untrustworthy they were. He didn’t need any help in seeing right through them. (John 2:24-25 MSG)

Nor did Jesus cow before the livid leaders who demanded: “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

Knowing the religious would reject the most powerful proof, but his followers would recognize it when it occurred, Jesus said what the sign would be: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

Jesus saw.

He saw when people had perverted what God had set in place. He recognized when leaders entrusted with God’s flock instead used their positions to manipulate and dominate others and to benefit themselves.

He knew when self-seeking permeated a culture God had called to be his own.

And he saw where that would lead.

He obeyed God rather than people

Repeatedly, Jesus healed people on the Sabbath – people who otherwise would never have gotten well. The hardhearted accused him of breaking God’s Law. Yet Jesus never broke the Sabbath. He broke the hurtful man-made rules that had been attached to Sabbath.

Jesus knew God’s Word in truth, and he knew his Father’s voice. He shared his Father’s character and his deep, unfathomable love.

Jesus spoke and acted when his Father said, where his Father said – no matter who might be riled. He did what his Father told him even when it angered the leaders supposed to represent God.

When Jesus bucked the system, he wasn’t being unruly. He was acting justly, showing mercy. He wasn’t being unsubmissive. He was choosing to whom he would submit.

Always, he obeyed the One who sent him. Never did he excuse himself from doing what was good and godly because a human leader told him to do something else.⁴

He received authority from his Father rather than people

Jesus entered the temple courts, and, while he was teaching, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you this authority?” (Matt. 21:23)

They certainly hadn’t given Jesus permission to teach, to heal, to disrupt the temple, to ignore their rules. And, in their thinking, if it hadn’t come through them, it hadn’t come from God. To their minds, Jesus stepped out of line every time he dared to do what they had neither initiated nor approved. In their thinking, Jesus himself was illegitimate, and so was his ministry.

Notice what Jesus did not do in response to their questions: He did not enroll in the seminary of the Sadducees. He did not seek the endorsement of the Pharisees, or apply for a position in the Sanhedrin. He did not try to gain power in or through the religious system – even a system originally established by the one true God.

Jesus operated in the authority given him by his Father, and he did so outside a structure that tried to force him to play by a human misappropriation of God’s ways.⁵

By doing right, Jesus exposed what the religious leaders didn’t want seen. He endangered what they were determined not to lose. Together, they planned to kill him. Then they carried out their plan.

And so, for the moment, they kept their place in their broken system. And those whose hearts remained hard got their reward in full.

Yet what they meant for evil, God used for good. And later, some of them realized Jesus had not set out to show them up, or tear them down. Oh no. He had so loved them too.⁶

He fulfilled everything he was born to do

When all hell broke loose against Jesus, just surviving seemed impossible; success, out of the question.

He was hated and rejected by people. He had much pain and suffering. People would not even look at him. (Isa. 53:3 NCV)

He came to his own people, but they didn’t want him. (John 1:11 MSG)

“We’re getting rid of you!” they cried.

And they did. But they did not.

What was designed to take him out, only propelled him forward, into the joy for which he had come.

Clear-eyed, Spirit-filled, Jesus pressed in through the agony of shunning and abuse. Even when powerful leaders went after him, fickle crowds turned on him and friends betrayed him or fled, none of it could erase his life, or his work, or the relationships he is ever building with anyone who will open their heart.

Sharing in human nature, Jesus showed us where we too can find real being, true belonging, fruitful ministry and authentic authority.

Dying, rising, sending his Spirit to live within, he empowers all who will follow him out of bondage and illusion, into love and life.

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Portions of this post were adapted from Chapter 14 of What About Women: A Spirit-to-spirit Exposé.

Image by Selling of my photos with StockAgencies is not permitted from Pixabay

See also

• I choose light: I have been so blind. I have been so stuck. I am choosing life.
• The world in church clothing
• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Shunning in the church
• Bullying in the church
• Adulthood and the church
• Sort of like frog gigging: How religion kills rest

Footnotes

1. Quotations are from Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison (New York: Second Vintage International Edition, March 1995). ↩︎
2. See Philippians 2:6-7 NET. ↩︎
3. John 2:23. Also quoted: verses 18, 19. See verses 13-22. ↩︎
4. Nor does God tell us to blindly obey “spiritual authorities.” See “That ‘obey your leaders and submit to their authority’ Scripture: examining Hebrews 13:17,” by Rebecca Davis. ↩︎
5. In John’s Gospel, Jesus deals with this subject at length. See, for example, John 5:30-47; 6:27, 37-40; 8:16-18, 25-29, 42, 54. ↩︎
6. See Acts 6:7. ↩︎