Enough Light to See

The Crowd, the Prophet, and the Way Forward

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.

— Exodus 16

And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?

— Jonah 4

Yesterday, on Holy Cross Day, we ended our three-day detour through the Church calendar thinking about Light. Jesus spoke of being lifted up, of drawing people toward Himself, and then of walking while we have the Light.

This morning I happened to hear an old Glen Campbell song, “Walking in the Sun.” One line stopped me: “Even a blind man can tell when he's walking in the sun.”

There's something worth carrying forward from yesterday. Light does more than give us something to look at. We experience what it does. We feel its warmth. We notice what it reaches. Even after our Holy Cross observance has ended and we return to the regular Sunday readings, perhaps some of that Light can spill into the next room.

And what a room we enter.

“The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.”

Not a handful of troublemakers. Not the usual malcontents. The whole congregation.

During my years in corporate leadership development, I learned a great deal about the different ways people respond to change. Some people thrive on risk and novelty. Many others place tremendous value on stability, predictability, cooperation and safety. That's not weakness. Somebody has to remember that bills must be paid, families must be fed and tomorrow morning is still coming.

So I have some sympathy for the Israelites.

Egypt had been bondage, but Egypt was known. The wilderness offered freedom, but freedom didn't appear to come with a pantry. If Moses had stopped along the journey and taken a vote—Continue into this uncertain wilderness, or return to the place where at least we knew where our next meal was coming from?—I suspect there were days when Egypt might have won overwhelmingly.

And here's one of the difficulties of leadership: sometimes the crowd is accurately reporting the problem without accurately identifying the solution.

“We're hungry” was true. “Therefore we should have stayed in Egypt” didn't necessarily follow.

The alternate Old Testament reading gives us another crowd and another difficult leader. Jonah has preached to Nineveh, and remarkably, the people listen. The city repents. But Jonah isn't delighted by his successful ministry. He wanted God to follow through with the promised destruction.

God sees something Jonah doesn't.

He sees more than 120,000 people who, as the wonderful expression puts it, “do not know their right hand from their left.”

And God even mentions the animals.

So Scripture doesn't give us the easy lesson that crowds are foolish while brave individualists are wise. Sometimes Moses has to stand against the crowd. Sometimes Jonah has to stand against the crowd. And sometimes, after the crowd changes direction, Jonah is the one God still has to straighten out.

That complicates things.

We live in societies that properly place considerable value upon hearing the voices of the people. I've also spent enough time working with teams to value collaboration. Listen. Ask questions. Find out what people need. A leader who never listens to the people being led is probably not much of a leader.

But neither popularity nor unpopularity guarantees wisdom.

The majority can be wrong. The lone dissenter can be wrong. A charismatic leader can see something nobody else sees, or lead thousands of people somewhere they never should have gone. A crowd can become a mob, but it can also recognize something the person standing alone has failed to understand.

Perhaps the difficult work is discernment.

Listen to the many without assuming the many are always right. Listen to the lone voice without automatically declaring that person a prophet. Leave room for Moses to say, “Keep going,” when everybody wants to turn around. But leave room for Nineveh to change—and for Jonah to discover that perhaps the people he was sent to correct have learned something before he has.

Yesterday we lifted up the Cross and talked about walking toward the Light. Today we discover that walking in the Light doesn't necessarily mean walking with the crowd, and it doesn't necessarily mean walking against it.

Sometimes the crowd knows something.

Sometimes Moses knows something.

Sometimes Jonah knows something.

And sometimes Nineveh understands before Jonah does.

Perhaps faith requires something harder than simply following the crowd or resisting it.

It requires enough Light to see where we're going.

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