Why We Elect the Reluctant
Every Kenyan election season stages the same small play. A man who has spent two years and a great deal of money building a campaign stands before a crowd and explains that he never wanted any of this. The elders came to his home. The youth would not leave his gate. The people have spoken, and he, reluctantly, will serve. Nobody in the crowd believes him, and nobody minds. The performance is not meant to deceive. It is meant to show that he knows the rules.
The rules are older than any republic he hopes to serve. In the first book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that good men do not want to govern, because “money and honour have no attraction for them.” So “necessity must be laid upon them”, and what finally moves them is the prospect that “he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself.” Then comes the line that has outlived Athens: if a city were made entirely of good men, “to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to obtain office is at present” (Jowett’s translation).
We have absorbed the logic even where nobody has read the book. Wanting the job too much reads as a warning: a man who wants power will want what power brings. The one who has to be persuaded seems safer, because if he did not seek the office, the office cannot own him. Church communities act on this instinct as faithfully as constituencies do. The member slowest to raise his hand is the member everyone turns to look at.
The opposite case deserves a hearing, and Scripture makes it. “If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth good work” (1 Timothy 3:1; this and the quotations below are from the Douay-Rheims). Paul does not treat the wish as a symptom. Most of what works in the world is done by people who wanted to do it. An employer who asked “Why do you want this job?” and hired the candidate who said “I don’t” would not stay in business long, and a parish led by people who would rather be elsewhere gets leadership that is elsewhere.
Nor does the Bible settle the argument in favour of the unwilling, though it is crowded with them. Moses at the burning bush raises four objections before arriving at the plainest one: “I beseech thee, Lord, send whom thou wilt send” (Exodus 4:13). The next verse records that the Lord was angry. Jeremiah protests, “Ah, ah, ah, Lord God: behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child” (Jeremiah 1:6), and God does not argue with him. He touches the young man’s mouth (1:9). One reluctance is fear, and it is rebuked. The other is an honest measure of smallness, and it is answered.
Saul, chosen by lot to be Israel’s first king, cannot be found when his name is called; he has hidden himself (1 Samuel 10:21–22). Whether that was modesty, nerves or theatre, the text does not say. What it does show is that the reluctance proved nothing about the reign. Saul becomes the king the book regrets. And Jonah, who ran from Nineveh to Tharsis, explains himself only at the end, after the city has repented and been spared: “I know that thou art a gracious and merciful God, patient, and of much compassion, and easy to forgive evil” (Jonah 4:2). He did not run from hard work. He ran because he suspected God would be kinder to the people than Jonah wanted to be.
Fear, humility, nerves, disapproval. Reluctance is not a virtue. It is a symptom, and the same symptom accompanies several conditions. A community that elects the reluctant because they are reluctant has decided to trust a symptom.
I know this from the inside. My small Christian community once elected me treasurer at a meeting I did not attend. I said I had no time, which was true, and some months later I resigned, then withdrew the resignation. For a long while I filed my reluctance under humility. It was rereading Jonah that made me ask whether some of it was about the people: the pledges I would have to chase, the meetings I would have to sit through, the members I would rather not owe anything. From the outside my reluctance looked like modesty. From the inside it had felt like modesty. Jonah suggested a third possibility, and I did not enjoy it.
The Church’s most practical answer came from a man who tried the same escape. When Gregory the Great was chosen bishop of Rome in 590, he tried to refuse. The Pastoral Rule, which he wrote soon afterwards, opens by answering a friend who had reproached him “for having wished by hiding myself to fly from the burdens of pastoral care.” Gregory does not defend the flight. He tests it. Those who fly from rule out of humility, he writes, “are then truly humble when they resist not the divine decrees” (Part I, chapter 6). The test is not whether you wanted the office. It is whether your refusal survives a real call.
The Church ends its year this Sunday with the feast of Christ the King, and the king it crowns once ran from a crown. After he had fed five thousand people on a hillside, John records, “Jesus therefore, when he knew that they would come to take him by force, and make him king, fled again into the mountain himself alone” (John 6:15). The crowd was offering a crown on the easiest terms any king has been offered: keep feeding us. He ran.
In this Sunday’s Gospel he does not run. He stands before Pilate, bound, and is asked directly: “Art thou a king then?” He answers, “Thou sayest that I am a king” (John 18:37). The same man, the same title. He fled it from a crowd that wanted bread and accepted it in front of a governor who would have him killed. “My kingdom is not of this world” (18:36) is usually read as a statement about where. It reads just as well as a statement about terms.
On Sunday the hymns will be about thrones. The Gospel will show a man alone on a mountain, and later the same man, alone again, in front of a governor, saying yes to the title he once ran from.