Putting People on Pedestals That Don’t Belong There

People on pedestals have a
disturbing habit of falling.

Hero worship. It’s a national pastime. Fan magazines are filled with supposed “heroes.” We even like them super-sized – these days you can’t go to a movie theater that doesn’t offer some new “superhero” film. We idolize people – real or fictional – placing them on pedestals so they can more easily bask in our adoration. The problem is, they don’t belong there. 

That’s because all of us – even the rich, famous and powerful – are broken, flawed and fallible, anything but perfect. And we have the disconcerting tendency of proving it. When heroes fall, they leave scores of disillusioned admirers in their wake.

 

It’s not hard to find stories on TV, magazines or the Internet about how an A-list celebrity has gotten caught up in some kind of scandal. You can probably think of several examples right now. The media seem to revel in reports of Christian leaders who fall, as if to say, “See, he/she isn’t the godly person they claim to be!” Even if the disgraced persons never actually made that claim.

 

It does hurt to hear about these failures. These folks – whether pastors, entertainers, authors or conference speakers – are supposed to be setting the example for the rest of us, right?

 

We also provide pedestals for people whose names aren’t in the “Who’s Who” of society. It might be a parent, sibling, uncle or aunt, a mentor, Sunday school teacher, co-worker or boss. We give them places of honor in our minds, holding them to the loftiest standards. If and when they fall, their crash seems of seismic proportions.

 

A number of folks have toppled from my own imagined pedestals. That was largely my fault, however, since they never asked to be put up there. Hearkening back to my student journalism days at Ohio State, I covered the football team and had the opportunity to interact face-to-face with the legendary Woody Hayes. Sadly, for many people his name evokes the image of an aging coach, in frustration, throwing a punch at a Clemson football player who sealed the Buckeyes’ defeat in a bowl game. Understandably, that was his last day as a football coach. Talk about dropping from a pedestal!

 

Years ago, soon after accepting a job to work in vocational ministry as a magazine editor, I talked with a pastor friend about his experiences in parachurch ministry. Harry offered some valuable advice. He said not to expect to find any perfect people, walking around in flowing robes and hands always folded in piety. “They’ll be normal human beings, filled with flaws just as we are.” How true those words proved to be. 

 

In the Bible, God minces no words about this reality. Romans 3:23, for example, tells us, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Earlier in the chapter the writer, the apostle Paul, declares, “There is no one righteous, not even one…” (Romans 3:10). 

 

Years after his dramatic conversion from persecutor of Christians to fervent ambassador for Jesus Christ, Paul still confessed, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me” (7:15-21). Wow! If this was the case for one of Jesus’ foremost apostles, what hope do we have?

 

But that’s the point – apart from the power of Jesus Christ through His indwelling Spirit, we’ll never measure up. As devotional writer Oswald Chambers said, “All of God’s people are ordinary people who have been made extraordinary for the purpose He has given them.”

 

If we’re honest, we won’t want anyone placing us on a pedestal. Even though we may put up a good front, we all struggle inwardly, alternately succeeding and failing to live as we know God wants us to live. The adage, “Do as I say, not as I do,” is a terrible philosophy. It’s better not to point to ourselves at all, but always to Jesus.

 

The apostle might have been addressing this pedestal problem when he rebuked believers in the ancient city of Corinth: “…One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.’ Is Christ divided?” (1 Corinthians 1:11-13).

 

Even today, we find it tempting to become disciples of one compelling preacher or another, accepting their particular theological slant as holy writ. There again, that’s placing them on pedestals extremely unstable at best.

 

Instead, we’d be wise to do as Paul humbly declared, “For I resolved to nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified…. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power” (1 Corinthians 2:2-5). We need only one pedestal, one that’s reserved for the Lord alone.