The Teacher

John 13:12-17

 

 

          School is back in session. Last week we blessed backpacks and school buses and teachers and students. We wished them well as they all set off for a new year of learning. Now that the learning process is officially underway again, it seems like a good time to ask why. Why do we send our children to school? What do we expect will happen? Well, of course, we send them to school to learn. But what is it we want them to learn and when they learn it, exactly what is it that we expect them to do with it? If learning is the object of teaching, then what exactly is teaching and what is its intended outcome?

         The Greek word for teacher is didaskalos (δίδασκαλσς). Jesus was called Teacher by his disciples and many others.  In the Gospels, Jesus was addressed directly about 90 times. Of all those occasions, he was called Teacher over 60 times. He didn’t have a college degree. In fact, he didn’t have a high school diploma or a GED. And yet he has been acclaimed as the greatest teacher in history and with good reason.

          In the gospels, Jesus uses a number of different methods to reach his audience. He realizes, as does any trained teacher, that people learn in different ways. Modern education recognizes many different learning styles or variations of them. Most educators agree that there are at least three or four main categories. There is visual. If you learn this way, you respond to pictures and charts and graphs, but you don’t much like listening to a long explanation. There is auditory. Auditory learners prefer listening to explanations over reading. There is kinesthetic. Lots of us are kinesthetic learners. We like to learn by doing and touching. We are hands on. Things make sense to us that way. Lots of times, we don’t much like school because everything is visual and auditory and we want to touch it. Last, but not least, there is a reading and writing style. As you might expect, this style does best in school.

          Jesus didn’t get any formal training on learning styles, but he sure seemed to be aware of their existence in his audiences. His teaching reflects that he used all the standard learning styles plus some variations on them.

          For instance, look at Matthew 6: 25.  Jesus is on a mountain, delivering the Sermon on the Mount. He tells the crowd there gathered to consider the birds of the air, the lilies of the field. He talks about how splendid they are adorned and uses that example to remind the crowd that God loves people much more than birds and flowers. Jesus used the visual learning style to make his point about trusting God in a way that people could relate to. In Luke 21, a widow deposits two small coppers in the offering plate. It is probably the last money she has. Jesus sees her action and remarks on her giving from the depths instead of from abundance. It is a visual lesson which needs no words to teach.  

          In that same Sermon on the Mount and other sayings covering Matthew 5-7, in Jesus’ Upper Room discourse in John 13-17, in all the parables, Jesus is teaching in an auditory learning style. The scripture from Matthew tells that he “opened his mouth and taught them.” His disciples and followers listen to him. His words will not be written down for many years, yet when they are recorded by the evangelists writing the gospels, the power of those auditory moments is recorded into written form for others to read and respond to.

          Jesus wasn’t big on just talking the talk. He walked the walk too. The gospels are laden with events where Jesus was hands on. His mighty acts and deeds and his miracles speak beyond words to the proofs of what he said. He turned water to wine, healed the sick, the blind, the crippled, the paralyzed, even the dead. He disappeared from crowds and walked on water. He even died on a Roman cross and was resurrected. Some would call that kinesthetic teaching; others relational or experiential. Whatever label you assign it, Jesus did it and did it like no one else in history. Some educators now call this “social learning,” learning by watching someone else do the job.

          But Jesus wasn’t just a kinesthetic teacher, he wanted kinesthetic learners. So he sent the disciples out. In Mark 6: 7, Jesus sends the disciples out in pairs. He gives them authority to heal and heal they do. In the fourth chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus and the disciples are in forbidden Samaria and Jesus has the encounter with the woman at the well. Then, for the next two days, John tells us that Jesus and the disciples stayed and labored among the people; that the Samaritans believed, not because of the woman’s testimony, but because of what they heard for themselves. In the tenth chapter of Luke, Jesus sends out not the twelve, but another seventy-two, also in pairs, throughout the region. He gives them authority to heal and heal they do. On their return, they report to him that “even the demons are subject to us in your name.” This is kinesthetic learning on turbo. In the past, we would have called it on the job training, or interning. In their book Teaching the Faith, Gary Parrett and Steve Kang call it “engaging our hands and feet.”

          Now, what’s all this about? In the beginning, we said that we wanted to find out what teaching was and what its intended outcome would be. Well, maybe we found out what teaching was, at least some of the ways that it occurs. When it comes from what we hear, we label it auditory. When it comes from what we see, we call it visual. When it comes from what we touch, we call it kinesthetic. All of it is learning. God just builds us differently. If our wiring is different, then sometimes a good teacher has to use a different switch to turn us on. Jesus was all that and more. Jesus wasn’t just a master teacher; he is the Master himself.

        Why did Jesus teach? He didn’t do it just to hear himself talk. He did it for a reason. He wanted us, his children, to learn, and what he wanted us to learn was who he was. Back in Luke 10, when the seventy two returned home with the news of casting out demons, Jesus told them this: “…do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

          The intended outcome that Jesus sought in all his teaching to the disciples, to the people, to the crowds, to the religious leaders and to us, is that we will come not only to know him, but to take his message to all with whom we come in contact. In the thirteenth chapter of John, Jesus takes teaching perhaps to its highest level when he allows his disciples to experience him and his selfless love. He does so by washing their feet, an act of total humility. It is visual, kinesthetic, even auditory as the disciples most assuredly gasp at this unselfish act. And then Jesus tells them why. “You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet…If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.”

        That’s teaching, Jesus style! And that’s why he did.