Many years ago, I was invited to participate in a “group relations conference” over the course of a weekend at the University of San Diego in California. It was recommended to me by a well regarded Jesuit professor of mine, who knew that I had an interest in leadership studies. Brian said to me, if you want to really understand leadership, you need to understand group dynamics. So, with the permission of my superiors, I headed across the country to sunny California for what I thought might be an easy, pleasant conference in a lovely setting with ocean views.
Well, it was a lovely setting with ocean views. But “easy” and “pleasant” weren’t the words that came to mind to describe what was in fact one of the more challenging and disorienting experiences I’d had in my Jesuit formation. The theme of the conference was “Power and Authority,” and the gathering included nearly 100 participants from many different sectors, including the military, police, health care professionals, therapists, educators, and one of two of us “church folk.”
Within the first thirty minutes of the gathering, the group was in tension, with an emerging anticipation of conflict between the administrators and staff of the conference and the participants. In fact, very quickly, it began to feel like the familiar tensions that I had experienced between faculty and staff in the schools where I had taught. Others made the comparison to the experience of working in hospitals, where nurses and staff find it difficult to exercise their voice in the presence of doctors. Those in the military and police forces expressed the same sense of tension and conflict between and among their ranks.
“Who’s really in charge here, and can I trust them?” This was a common question. On one hand, we were told by the administration that we had a great deal of freedom to conduct ourselves as we thought best, and experiment with how we took up our informal roles, expressed our views, and interacted with the other members, all within the bounds of some simple ground rules. But many of us struggled to accept this freedom, and continued to act as if the administrators and staff were oppressing us with their authority, or neglecting us in a way that felt like abandonment.
I remember one small group where we fell into a heated debate as to whether power was located only in those with formal authority, or whether it was with the people. This debate went around and around with increasing intensity, as if there were a clear answer. The consultant present in the group was quiet the whole time, but sitting in the group with a placid grin on his face. I wished that he would intervene and give us the answer, but was afraid to ask, because I didn’t want to reveal my confusion, nor my feeling of dependence on “the leader.” What a bind to be in!
Fortunately, one of the women in the group did ask the consultant the question that I was holding. And he continued to sit there smiling but quiet. At that moment, we all realised that we had been stuck in a dilemma that wasn’t an “either/or” question at all. Of course, both formal authority, authorised “from above” and informal authority, “from below,” are both true, and in fact, both exist in every human social group. While the proportion of these two forms of power may indeed vary from one group to the next, where one group may be more hierarchical, and another more “flat” and led through the participation of members, there are very few examples of groups that can function with only one form of authority and not the other.
What does all this have to do with the Gospel, where the Pharisees try to entrap Jesus with the dilemma: will Jesus comply with the authority of the Roman occupation, or resist this authority on the grounds of some higher principle or law? Their aim was to force Jesus into a corner by demanding a black-and-white answer. Either answer would be a problem for Jesus. Answering that Caesar was entitled to his taxes would suggest that Jesus was in favor of the occupation and that by honoring Caesar, that he was acknowledging Caesar’s self proclaimed status as a god. But if Jesus denies the legitimacy of the tax, he could be accused of sowing seeds of resistance and revolt.
But we know that Jesus evades their trap, first of all by turning the tables on them. For a Law-abiding Jew, carrying Caesar’s coins would be considered a source of impurity, yet clearly these Pharisees had this unclean money in their pockets. Perhaps they realized that they had been “caught in the act” of their own hypocrisy. On this point, it is very difficult to avoid hypocrisy when we try to simplify the world into black and white categories. Think of all the examples of religious and political leaders who speak out in a bold and judgemental style on issues of morality, but who are later found to be guilty of their own imperfections.
And then, there is the creative way in which Jesus outmaneuvers the simple, binary logic of the Pharisees by saying, “yes, pay the tax to whom it is owed in this worldly system in which we live, AND be faithful to God, in whose Creation this system exists, and from whom all authority comes.” Jesus has the wider, more complex perspective which can contain the paradox, relativize subordinate values, and stay focused on the horizon of God’s desire and will. Essentially, he has the capacity to outsmart his adversaries by seeing the bigger picture, and thinking in more flexible and creative ways. There are many examples of Jesus’ creative capacity, including the episode with the woman caught in adultery, or his instructions for dealing with the oppressive tactics of the Romans.
So, what are we to make of Jesus’ example of engaging these dilemmas, these seemingly contradictory values and paradoxes? As leaders, we are constantly confronted with such situations. We might begin by first understanding the nature and the sources of the tensions we’re facing. Then we might embrace the dilemmas, appreciating the potential generativity of the tensions we face, and avoiding seeing them only as problems to be solved. By taking a both/and perspective as Jesus does, we can find creative approaches that help us to see, for instance, that authority and power have both hierarchical and participative dimensions, that both the secular, temporal order and the divine, spiritual order are important, even if the first is subordinate to the latter.
Living in groups, or larger, complex organizations, we know that dilemmas, paradoxes, and polarities are unavoidable. As leaders, our capacity to see the bigger picture, think in flexible, both/and manners, and discern how to act can evolve and expand under the right conditions. And given the problems and perils of the world today, much depends on this capacity. What dilemmas am I invited to hold in this way? What polarities must I navigate?
With you on the road,
