You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am.
—John 13:13
In autumn 1964, I started kindergarten. The first day was unlike any other day of my life. My mother walked me to school with my baby sister in a carriage and my toddler brother holding her hand. I led the familial parade, determined as always, unwilling to let my fear show, toting a pink Barbie lunch box and a small book bag.
When we approached the classroom, Miss Kinersley, my new teacher, came out and welcomed me, as another teacher had welcomed my father to that same classroom twenty-five years earlier. I felt suddenly shy and hid behind my mother’s skirt. But Miss Kinersley took my hand, instructed me to place my things in the cubby marked “Diana,” and told me to take my seat.
When all the students were sitting in neat rows of tiny desks, she announced: “These are the classroom rules.” She read us a list of “dos” and “don’ts,” so we would know how to behave. On the wall hung a big chart with each student’s name, along with places for little checks and stars to track our progress in following the rules. And thus school began.
That fall, Sunday school changed too. We still sat on a carpet in a circle and sang songs about Jesus while Miss Jean read to us during Bible story time. But there were little desks in the new room, not just blocks and toys. In addition to stories about Jesus, we now had lessons about what Jesus taught. There were Sunday school worksheets and coloring assignments, all to help us learn things about the Bible, about being Methodist, and about Jesus. And there was a chart with checks and stars on the wall—very like the one in Miss Kinersley’s room—to track our progress in church school. Suddenly, my world was filled with desks, charts, and homework.
One other thing changed at church. For the first time, I was allowed to go upstairs to the big church with my mother. The sanctuary was a bit like a schoolroom—with people sitting in rows on hard seats so they would pay attention. But it was different too. The windows were colored glass and, when light fell through them, it made rainbow patterns on the red carpet. We sang, a choir sang, and we said prayers. At the center of grown-up church was a preacher. He seemed a bit like a teacher, even though he insisted that Jesus was really the Teacher. At grown-up church, there were fewer stories involving Jesus. Instead, the minister gave short lectures about what Jesus taught. This was new to me. Life was a school, and there was much to learn.
* * *
Although Christians call Jesus by many names, those who knew him best mostly called him “teacher.” Of the ninety or so times Jesus is addressed directly in the New Testament, roughly sixty refer to him as “teacher,” “rabbi,” “great one,” or “master” (as in the British sense of “schoolmaster”). In the gospels, the preponderance of action that occurs is Jesus teaching. He teaches at the Temple, on a hillside, by a lake, in a field, by a campfire, at a dinner table, while at a wedding, and in the center of the city. He teaches individuals, his disciples, large crowds, small groups, his friends, and his foes.
The only biblical story we have of Jesus’s childhood is one in which he is teaching. When he was merely twelve, his parents took him to Jerusalem, where they promptly lost him. They searched for their son for three days and finally found him in the Temple, “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions,” causing these learned ones to be “amazed at his understanding and his answers” (Luke 2:41–50).
We hear nothing else of him until more than a decade later when his cousin John baptized him, and in the aftermath of that spiritually transforming event Jesus walked into a local synagogue and began to teach. His words so upset his neighbors that they ran him out of town. Following this unhappy pedagogical debut, Jesus was forced into his ultimate profession as an itinerant rabbi. Jesus was a born teacher and a born-again one, and he was still teaching on the night before he was arrested and even while being tortured by the Romans. He lived and died a teacher.
Many years after Sunday school, I learned that some Christians dislike calling Jesus “teacher,” citing the term as inadequate and the source of tepid moralism over against a more robust understanding of who Jesus was in view of his divinity. But that misses the point. The word typically translated as “teacher” was the title “rabbi” or “rabbouni,” a fairly new—and even revolutionary—term in the first century. The word “rabbi” did not mean a Jewish clergyperson, as it does today, nor did the title appear in the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, it was just coming into use during Jesus’s time for one whose teachings bore spiritual authority—a sage, a storyteller, an insightful interpreter of the Law, or a particularly wise elder.
Oddly enough, the Christian scriptures may contain some of the most ancient evidence of this Jewish development, and Jesus himself was the “earliest attested person in literature to bear the title ‘Rabbi.’”1 To be a rabbi in the first century was to be a teacher who was crafting a new approach to Hebrew texts, traditions, and interpretations. And, sadly, both Christians and Jews have forgotten how completely innovative and challenging Jesus was as a rabbi. Jewish scholar Amy-Jill Levine calls both to account for missing the point of Jesus: “He must, in the Christian tradition, be more than just a really fine Jewish teacher. But he must be that Jewish teacher as well.”2
About a decade ago, a rabbi reminded me of Jesus the Jewish teacher. I had been asked to address a group of rabbis on retreat, an invitation that both honored and humbled me. The days together were wonderful. After a particularly beautiful time of prayer and song, I blurted out to one of the rabbis, “I want to be Jewish!”
He looked at me with a glimmer of laughter in his eyes and inquired, “You follow Jesus, right?”
“Yes,” I responded.
“He was a rabbi, you know,” he said. “Follow him. Listen to his teaching, and you’ll do just fine.”
From that day on, I understood that Jesus was indeed my rabbi. He had been for a long time. Follow his teachings—the rules and commands—listen to the stories, embrace the word, and live his wisdom. Rabbi Jesus shows the way.
The Rules
If you had asked me as a child where Jesus lived, I might have replied that he lived on the flannel board in the Sunday school classroom. Sometimes, sheep or birds would accompany him. Perhaps he was on a boat or at the edge of a lake. He might have been holding bread. But mostly he stood in front of a small group listening intently to him—teaching.
I imagined him telling people what they should and should not do, just like my parents or my teachers at school and in church. Jesus instructed us on how we should treat people and how to follow him. Like all teachers, he made sure we knew the rules. Miss Jean said that although Jesus taught many things, being Christian came down to a single tenet called the Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31).
When you are little, rules make sense. Life was made up of rules, like “Hang up your jacket,” “Brush your teeth before you go to bed,” “Pick up your toys,” and “Don’t fight with your brother.” There were school rules and rules at home. There were lists of instructions to follow each day; if I did certain things, I got a check mark from my teacher or gold star from my mother. The Sunday school gave gold stars too, for attendance, mostly. There were also stars for reading from the Bible, cleaning up after the snack, and for nice artwork. But Sunday school teachers could not give gold stars for “Do unto others.” How would you check that off a list? The Golden Rule was quite unlike any other rule in my six-year-old life. Okay, so Jesus had a rule, but his was, well, weird. Surely, this was going to take some explaining.
And explain the church did. The Golden Rule was twinned with something called the Great Command: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27). Oh! I was to be nice to others, as I wanted others to be nice to me. The Golden Rule was tied up with loving my family and friends, and that love was somehow part of loving God. Most of the rules in my young life seemed based on capricious adult demands (why, after all, must a girl put away her toys every night?), but Jesus’s rule made some sense—love makes for more love. This was surprisingly logical even if there were no gold stars. The Golden Rule explained the “neighbor part” of the Great Command.
I noticed, however, the church added its own rules to being a Christian. Church rules were more like those of home or school: don’t talk in worship; don’t wiggle in the pew; don’t run in the “big” church when the preacher is talking; don’t snack on the crackers and grape juice. At times, the adults would laugh about breaking church rules—about going to dances, drinking martinis, or smoking cigarettes. When I asked about this, my mother replied that there were Jesus’s rules and there were Methodist rules. The first set, apparently, were inviolate; and the second, not so much. She said that Methodist rules were “old-fashioned.” This was confusing and made me wonder what other rules could be ignored or were out-of-date and who got to decide.
Since I was six, I did not have to worry about the dancing, drinking, and smoking rules yet, so I paid attention to Jesus’s rules. Eventually, some of Moses’s rules got added to Jesus’s list, rules about not killing people or stealing things or doing something called adultery, which no one would explain to me. For the most part, these rules seemed based on love too and made sense. Except for the rule about honoring my parents. There were lots of days I did not want to do that and secretly felt mad at my mother and father. I hoped nobody noticed. I was a rule breaker too.
When I was a bit older, I asked grown-ups—either a Sunday school teacher or my parents—who Jesus was. They all agreed: Jesus was a good moral teacher. The best. Better than any other teacher who ever lived. We should do what he taught, follow his example. Early on, however, I noticed a problem—the people around me did not seem to heed their own advice except on Sundays. No one would ever party on a Sunday or light up in the sanctuary. They kept the Methodist rules one day a week. I began to wonder if the same was true for Jesus’s rules about love and doing nice things for others. Did grown-ups keep the rules in church and play by a different set the rest of the time?
There wasn’t much following of the Methodist rules, and I began to notice that following of Jesus’s rules was sort of rare too. As I became more aware of the world beyond school and church, I could not figure out how it was loving to the Black people who came into my grandfather’s store to make them use the back door. I could not figure out how it was loving to cheer a cruel sheriff on the news using water cannons on kids my own age. I could not figure out how it was loving to insult women with opinions and tell them to get back into the kitchen. I could not figure out how it was loving to shoot people in some far-off place named Vietnam. I did not think Jesus taught any of this. Yet the good Methodists around me either did these things or supported others who did them. Children are logical, if nothing else. They pay attention to teachers. They notice when grown-ups break their own rules. If there had been gold stars for Jesus’s rule of love, some of the adults I knew failed to earn them.
In 1963, just a couple years before my childhood observations about rules and teachers, John A. T. Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich in the Church of England, published a book called Honest to God, one of the bestselling and most widely read religion books of the twentieth century. Among many things the bishop criticized about Christianity was the church’s view that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, a view, he said, that would result in powerless faith and always devolve into moralism (following a list of dos and don’ts). Instead, Robinson claimed that Jesus did not merely teach love; he embodied it. “Christ was utterly and completely ‘the man for others,’” he wrote, “because he was love.”3 Jesus did not issue rules to be ticked off on a list; Jesus embodied the rule of love, a way of life to be followed, and to be fully, completely human.
The Golden Rule is not a “rule” as we generally think of laws. Instead, it is the “utter openness in love to the ‘other’ for his own sake.”4 Robinson went on to claim “nothing” is prescribed “except love.”5 Jesus did not only teach an ethics of love to follow; he embodied the love that he spoke of in his stories and sermons. Jesus, who was complete love, the man for others, taught us to go and be likewise. He did not teach rules. He taught that love ruled. He lived what he taught.
It would be years before I read Honest to God. I have always wondered if some brave young preacher proclaimed these ideas at the church. I think I would have heard them if he did—because I liked going to the grown-up church to listen to the sermons. Jesus was, indeed, a teacher, one who taught from his heart and whose words and deeds were completely coherent. Sort of like Miss Jean. He did not tell us what to do. Instead, he asked us to be love, as he had been. I had to learn more, and I knew I wanted Jesus to be my teacher always.
The Commands
In Sunday school, we learned about Jesus and the New Testament, but we also learned about the Old Testament. The only gold star I ever received for memorization was successfully learning the names and the right order of the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. For fun, I threw in Joshua, Judges, and Ruth as well. I’m pretty sure that’s what earned me the star.
The Bible presented to me in September 1967, “On the Occasion of Promotion to Elementary III,” was a confusing book. We learned about Jesus, who seemed the most important character in the book, long before I actually had a copy in hand. As I turned the pages of my new Bible, it was vaguely shocking to see that Jesus did not actually show up until page 757 of its nearly 1,000 pages. Three-quarters of the Bible was not about Jesus at all. There were other stories, other teachers. There was Jesus’s Great Command. And, even though I was not sure where those Methodist rules were in the Bible, it became clear in short order that there were other rules in the Bible—those rules of Moses that had been added to Jesus’s rules—ten big ones found in the book of Exodus and repeated in the book of Deuteronomy: “You shall have no other gods before me; you shall make no graven images; you shall not take the Lord’s name in vain; remember the Sabbath; honor your father and mother; you shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; you shall not covet.”
Years later, I would find out that Jesus’s Great Command—the New Testament’s one big rule—was actually a summary of those ten commands and that Jesus himself was quoting from both Deuteronomy and Leviticus in his own version of a theological remix when he said, “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.” But at the time, I was confused. A few months before receiving my third-grade Bible, my mother had taken me to the movies to see The Ten Commandments. In full Technicolor glory at the local theater, Sunday school unfolded before my eyes. The flannel board had nothing on this—pyramids and Pharaoh’s army, the miracle of the Red Sea, Moses on the mountain, the Golden Calf. But one thing bothered me. I may have gotten a gold star for memorizing the books of the Old Testament, but for the life of me, at eight years old, I could not tell the difference between Jesus and Moses. As far as I could figure, Charlton Heston and Jesus were the same character—robes, rules, commandments, and all.
I was not the first or the last Christian to notice the similarity between Moses and Jesus. Indeed, the gospel of Matthew, written between 80 and 90 CE, makes an explicit comparison between the two. In its opening chapters, the gospel presents Jesus’s birth by echoing the birth of Moses in Exodus 1–2. In both cases, an evil king is bent on destroying the intended savior of God’s people by killing all the firstborn Jewish male babies and young children. In the stories of Moses and Jesus, each boy is protected by divine directive and savvy parental resistance. “From the very beginning of his life,” writes New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, “Jesus was already the new Moses and Herod was the new Pharaoh . . . a new Moses leading a new exodus from a new pharaoh into a new way of life.”6
Moses was, of course, more than the liberator of the Jews. He was also the giver of the Law, the one who handed down the Torah, the teachings from God contained in the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, the names of which I memorized in Sunday school. In the same way that Matthew compares Moses and Jesus as liberating saviors, the gospel also makes a direct comparison between Moses and Jesus as teachers, the ones who speak on behalf of God’s law and interpret it for a freed people. In the Old Testament, Moses’s teaching is shared in five books; in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus’s teaching is structured into five discourses, five short “books” on different themes. The fivefold form clearly echoes that of the law of Moses, a point that Matthew intends to make.
The most substantial teaching section is found in Matthew 5–7, chapters commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount. This section opens with Jesus going “up the mountain,” a deliberate choice that ancient Jewish Christians would have recognized as aligning Moses and Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount opens with blessings—on the poor, those who mourn, the meek, and those who hunger—in the same way that Moses pronounces blessings on the people of Israel as they prepare to enter the land of milk and honey in Deuteronomy 28; the blessings are a result of following the commandments. The blessings of Moses and those of Jesus are an interesting contrast, Moses’s clearly aimed at an Israel whose people would prosper in their own land, and Jesus’s directed at an Israel whose people were oppressed by Rome in an occupied land.
Yet Jesus’s first hearers would have understood what he was doing. Jesus was restating the written Torah, the passed-down law of Moses, in the words of his own “oral Torah,” a practice common in Judaism. In Matthew, Jesus places himself in the line of authoritative voices in the Hebrew tradition. Although this was done throughout the history of Israel by teachers, scribes, and prophets, including the most revered leaders, when Jesus claimed to join the ranks of these teachers, it was a pretty gutsy thing to do.
Thus, the Sermon on the Mount opens with a specific comparison between Moses on the mountain and Jesus on the mountain, with each proclaiming blessings as a result of following the way of God. Jesus goes on to say that he loves the law and considers that his teaching fulfills it, carefully explicating specific directives in the law of Moses on murder, adultery, false witness, and other issues of Jewish law like divorce, vengeance, love of neighbor, prayer, fasting, and dealing with money. Near the end of the sermon, Jesus states the Golden Rule, the foundation of all the commandments: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and prophets” (7:12). Upon the conclusion of the sermon, Matthew relates: “Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes” (7:28–29). Or, as Amy-Jill Levine puts it, “He spoke without citing his teachers and without always offering scriptural precedent or justification.”7 The crowds got it—Jesus the rabbi was at work renewing and reinterpreting the law and, in the process, claiming the divine authority to do so: a teacher and a prophet.
The identification of Moses and Jesus is a common confusion of Sunday school children, a deliberate theological choice on Matthew’s part, and created a deadly problem in Christian history. Too many Christians argue that Jesus as teacher was also the Son of God, which, from their perspective, means that Jesus replaced Moses. Somehow, Jesus’s law was superior, and perhaps even contrary, to the law of Moses, and these two great figures, however much one might have thought them the same after watching The Ten Commandments, offered competing visions of truth. This twisted understanding birthed Christian anti-Semitism, with its thousands of persecutions, pogroms, and crusades against the Jews.
Jesus, however, as eloquently maintained by Levine, was a teacher within a tradition and in a community in which one “argues with the text and with fellow Jews about the text, and . . . in some cases multiple meanings are possible.”8 As a teacher, Jesus is not contradicting Moses or demeaning other Jewish teachers. He is offering his interpretation of the law, teachings that surprised his followers with their originality and insight. To understand Jesus as a teacher in this sense—even if one does consider him divine—is to remember that teachers, even those with great authority, teach within a long line of communal interpretation, something that Jesus himself would have known. Jesus does not replace. Jesus reimagines and expands, inviting an alternative and often innovative reading of Jewish tradition.
Jesus’s teaching, like the teaching of Moses, includes commands, a big list of dos and don’ts. Although I have sometimes heard Christians say that Christianity is not about rules and commands, the Sermon on the Mount has quite a few, things like: be reconciled to your brother or sister; do not look at a woman with lust; do not get divorced; do not swear at all; let your yes be yes and your no be no; if someone wants your coat, give him your cloak as well; give to everyone who begs from you; pray in secret; do not store up treasures on earth; you cannot serve God and wealth; do not worry about tomorrow; do not judge; and ask and it will be given to you.
As a rabbi, Jesus was remarkable, challenging, and inventive. His teachings remain compelling, influencing people throughout the ages and well beyond Christianity; and those teachings stand on their own as beautiful without needing to diminish others. “I saw that the Sermon on the Mount was the whole of Christianity for those who wanted to live a Christian life,” recalled Mahatma Gandhi. “It is that Sermon which has endeared Jesus to me.”9 Perhaps, even as Gandhi himself bemoaned, if Christians really followed the one they claimed as Teacher, the world would be a more just and loving place.
The Stories
The New Testament recounts many stories about Jesus, but it also contains many stories by Jesus. Christian Sunday school lessons are replete with them, these memorable stories about all sorts of seemingly mundane things—seeds, baking bread, lost coins, bad bosses, equal pay, lighting lamps, weddings, and parties. The stories are often like this one:
With what can we compare the kingdom of God . . . ? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. (Mark 4:30–32)
Although I cannot remember when I first heard this story, I do remember the teacher passing out tiny seeds to us. I looked at them in my palm, marveling that these small things would become large plants, so that birds would make nests in their branches. As I listened to the story, I felt surprised, sensing something just beyond my ability to name or explain. Later, I would learn the words that captured how I felt: mystery, wonder, and awe.
Jesus’s stories are called parables. They are not rules, commands, or doctrine. Instead, they are open-ended tales that invite us to struggle with their meaning, to wonder, to see the world from unexpected angles. Amy-Jill Levine says they are “mysterious,” in that parables “challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives. They bring to the surface unasked questions, and they reveal the answers we have always known, but refuse to acknowledge.”10 Parables are fiction, as Levine says, “short stories by Jesus,” or, as New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan puts it, “fictional events about fictional characters.”11
As stories go, I particularly love mysteries. When I was a girl, my favorite books were the Nancy Drew mysteries. Containing puzzles, riddles, and challenges, they were stories that beckoned me to look beneath the surface and discover the truth of the thing. Youthful mysteries are full of morals and meanings, opening up ways of thinking about the world and encouraging critical exploration that sharpen both the mind and the heart.
No wonder I loved the biblical parables; they are mini mysteries. Jesus teaches through detection. In the Nancy Drew books, everyday things like old clocks, secret doors, and lost wills prompted the imagination to see beyond the shape of things; parables do the same. Yet unlike those Nancy Drew books, whose hidden facts always add up to a familiar solution to the mystery—the good person did not commit the crime; the rightful heir to a fortune could be found—Jesus’s detective tales layer surprises and twists leading to a myriad of different potential endings.
In Nancy Drew, the old clock’s secret will always reward the kind relatives; in the New Testament, the tale of the persistent widow or the Good Samaritan has no similar ending. Nancy Drew always has a clear resolution; at the end, we know that truth has won, that justice has been done, and we breathe easy. Jesus’s detective fiction gives us no neat solutions; instead, it asks us to dive more deeply into the questions, to wrestle with the parable again and again. The kingdom of God is like that—a different kind of mystery, one that invites listeners to be part of the story.
Many Christians are under the misimpression that the parables are like Nancy Drew mysteries—that they bear one meaning, that there is a single solution to these gospel puzzles. During a recent fall, I preached for six weeks on the parables from the gospel of Luke and posted bits of those sermons on Twitter. Those tweets came to be the bane of my existence, especially when I tweeted about Jesus’s story of a Pharisee and a tax collector. The standard interpretation (and the one too many church people seem to think is the only legitimate one) is that Jesus criticizes the Pharisee as a hypocrite and praises the tax collector as a true saint. For years I thought the same. But when I looked at the story anew, it struck me that both Pharisee and tax collector are accepted and loved, one as a faithful believer, the other as a repentant sinner. The tale of the Pharisee and tax collector was not an “either-or” choice, but a “both-and” mystery.
I learned something from that sermon, an exciting possibility that challenged my understanding of piety and grace, of how God loves and whom God accepts. When I shared it on social media, however, my Twitter feed blew up. Three or four days of attacks ensued (mostly from clergy!) about how wrong I was, how the parable was as clear as a bell, how I had violated the whole of Christian tradition. “You can’t say that!” “Don’t you read the Bible?” “Block the heretic” (which is, I suppose, a bit gentler than the medieval alternative of burning heretics). And those were the nice tweets.
“Parable” comes from two Greek terms, para, meaning “to come alongside,” and ballein, meaning “to throw,” and is itself a paradoxical word. A parable is intended to be a story that comes alongside our regular understanding and, frankly, upsets it. It uses ordinary things to draw us to extraordinary ones and crafts understanding using the seen to explain the unseen. In effect, the parables are Jesus coming alongside us and ripping off our cozy theological comforters. Parables should leave us gasping, out in the doctrinal cold, and shaking with anger, awe, or surprise. Nothing is as we thought. The whole point of a parable is to disturb and perplex us, shaking up what we believe to be true, all without providing an easy answer or simple moral to fall back upon.
The parables are neither Nancy Drew nor Aesop’s fables. Ultimately, they are more like the koans of Eastern religions, for example:
Once a monk made a request of Joshu.
“I have just entered the monastery,” he said. “Please give me instructions, Master.”
Joshu said, “Have you had your breakfast?”
“Yes, I have,” replied the monk.
“Then,” said Joshu, “wash your bowls.”
The monk had an insight.12
Jesus’s stories are more like that, but in the context of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish practice. “Wash your bowls” sounds remarkably like, “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matt. 13:33), engendering a response like “WTF” or an almost unfathomable “Aha.”
If you grew up in Sunday school, you might think you understand the parables. There is a reason for that. Teachers and preachers not only taught the parables, but they also gave students and congregants an approved interpretation, a way of understanding the story, one often passed down through generations, that we have come to accept as the only interpretation. Thus, if you are a Christian, the familiar parables you think you know are subjected to conventional interpretations, almost like a Rosetta Stone of secret knowledge: the persistent widow is always about faithfulness in prayer; parables about Pharisees are always about hypocrites; when the rich are condemned, it is always a metaphor.
Imposing interpretations on the parables is an ancient practice. Indeed, Luke employed it when he reported the original Jesus stories in his gospel. For almost every parable, Luke prefaces the story with what he wants you to think about it, he recounts the story told by Jesus, and then he finishes by restating what he (that is, Luke) thinks the story means. Throughout the gospel of Luke, the same pattern occurs: Luke, Jesus, Luke. In other words, the parables were so upsetting and so uncontrollable that even the disciples worked to neaten them up so early audiences would understand. To experience the parable as it was first told, however, one needs to lift the frame from the story and set Jesus’s words free to do their wilding work of imagination, without the gospel writer’s editorial intrusion.
Children seem to like parables, because when we are little, we have no fixed ideas to defend. When I preached about the Pharisee and the tax collector, I asked the congregation: “Who does God love in this story?”
A little boy shouted back, “Both of them!”
“Well, you just preached my entire sermon,” I responded.
Children appreciate a great mustard tree and do not question a God who loves both Pharisee and tax collector. But grown-ups? Not so much. We have to explain that the mustard tree really is not the biggest tree in the world and that it is fine to exclude those we deem hypocrites. The mystery, after all, has to be solved, the puzzle unpacked, all tension resolved. We have to arrive at the right answer. The possibility of multiple meanings is hard to imagine, especially for those schooled in the notion that texts can only be interpreted in one way, usually by employing some test of source criticism or demanding submission to a particular authoritative tradition. Because pastor says.
But being one who “comes alongside” and “throws down” is a perfect description of both a great mystery writer and a great guru. Jesus, the teller of parables, is both. And that makes Jesus the teacher pretty hard to take.
The Bible
At the end of elementary school, my parents insisted that both my brother and I be confirmed. In churches that practice infant baptism (like the Methodists), Confirmation is the ritual whereby young people “take on” the vows that their parents made for them at baptism. Most churches invite children around twelve to participate, to explore what it means to be a Christian and a church member and adopt the responsibilities of such for oneself. I was in eighth grade, and my brother in sixth. Confirmation class lasted many weeks, a semester, if I rightly recall.
Two particular moments stand out for me. The first was learning that we were called Methodists as an insult. John Wesley, the founder of our church, prayed and studied the Bible methodically, and his opponents took to calling him and his followers “those Methodists” with a sort of sneer. I laughed at that. I rued it as well, knowing that I had never been able to follow any sort of method or program (much less one of prayer). Thus I feared I might have been born into the wrong church.
The second thing I remember was the minister teaching us about the Bible. My parents were, if it is to be told truthfully, vaguely secular Methodists in the early 1970s. They went to church and fulfilled certain religious duties, including making sure their children went to church, but that seemed the extent of it. Conversations about faith, prayer, or the Bible were rare. My parents, however, developed a particularly unique approach to the Bible—they hid it. Yes, the family Bible lived in a cabinet under a bookshelf behind a recliner in the living room. You had to make a real effort to get to it, pull it out, and read it. There were a few smaller Bibles around the house, but somehow they wound up in that bottom cabinet as well. Apparently we had a Bible hider in our family, who took great pains to disappear the Word of God.
As a result, I would search out the Bible and sneak away to read it. There is nothing like a forbidden book to entice a child. Once, when I was in sixth grade, sitting in the warm Maryland woods reading the book of Acts about the coming of the Holy Spirit, a bird pooped on my head. No fire, just feces. I suppose that might have persuaded another person to become an atheist, but it only made me more persistent in my secret sacred reading sessions—and it made me wear a hat when doing so.
I loved reading the Bible, and I knew it was important. But I did not understand what it was or where it came from. In Confirmation class, our pastor said, “God gave us the Bible.”
I asked, “But how? How does God give the Bible?”
He replied, “From his hand in heaven.”
This was less than satisfactory. I felt puzzled. Did God write the Bible? Was that even possible? I wanted to pursue these issues.
I noticed that my brother was scribbling something down. I thought he was taking notes. A few minutes later, he nudged me and passed me a piece of paper. It was a drawing. At the top there was a cloud with a big disembodied hand coming out of it. A book—HOLY BIBLE—was falling from the sky toward a boy who was ducking to avoid being pelted by the heavenly volume. We both giggled.
The pastor frowned. “What’s wrong?” he quizzed us.
We stuffed the artwork in my brother’s class folder. I felt as if we had done something wrong, something oddly sacrilegious. God wrote the Bible, the Hand dropped it. No questions allowed. This was the Word of God.
Most of the pastors in my childhood churches were not fundamentalist Christians of any sort. From the pulpit, they preached some form of biblical criticism, incorporating historical and cultural contexts of scripture into practical messages of either piety or doing good. My parents took pride in being part of a church with an educated clergy—in the mid-twentieth century there were still plenty of churches without seminary-trained ministers—and the intellectual sermons they offered, even when they disagreed with the pastor’s conclusions (especially regarding politics). In those years, most of the Methodist clergy in our area went to either Wesley Seminary, in Washington, DC, or Yale Divinity School, both of which taught ministers in traditions of Protestant liberalism or the newer theologies of Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr. A few of our pastors even raised provocative questions; in fact, one caused quite a stir in 1966 when he held up TIME magazine emblazoned with “Is God Dead?” on its cover.
But all those things were for the grown-ups. In Sunday school and Confirmation classes, our teachers still taught us God dropped a handwritten, leather-bound, red-letter version of the book from the sky. Looking back, I think that at least some of them were uncomfortable with this. Even Sunday school teachers skirted around questions about a seven-day creation story, a literal Adam and Eve, a flood that engulfed the world, a boat holding a single pair of every animal in the world, and a Jesus who walked across a lake. When some brave student attempted to raise a question, teachers would retreat to safer territory like reviewing the Ten Commandments, having us memorize the kings of Israel, or pointing out Paul’s journeys on the Bible land maps in the classroom. I once asked my own mother how, if Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, he could write that he died at the end of Deuteronomy. Wouldn’t he have been dead? She quickly handed out pictures of Moses and the burning bush for us to color. I wondered if the grown-ups even knew how to answer the questions, if they were even listening to sermons burnished in the traditions of Protestant historical criticism.
And therein was the problem. It was pretty clear that we were not fundamentalists, who took the Bible literally, but we did not really know who we were (other than something called “Methodists”) or how to engage questions about the Bible. Because of this lack of clarity, all the churches of my childhood reflected a more general cultural understanding of the Bible as a book literally written by God and delivered from heaven to a surprised people below. Americans are de facto biblical literalists, whether they are Christians or atheists or some other religion.
American folk religion—Protestant fundamentalism—calls itself “Bible believing” and takes every iota of scripture as literal, factual, scientific truth, from a snake with legs who tempts Eve to sin in a garden four thousand years ago to the four horseback riders who will gallop down from the heavens to destroy humankind at some point in the apocalyptic future. But you do not have to be a fundamentalist to place the Bible on a golden pillow on a special stand in church, allow it to be read in worship only by specially trained people, designate ordained ministers to preach from it, or have a robed clergyperson hold it high above a bowing congregation intoning “the word of the Lord” as it processes down the aisle. Most American Christians are bibliolaters of a sort.
Understanding the Bible is key to understanding Jesus. The writings of the Hebrew Bible formed him as teacher, and the writings of the New Testament contain his teachings and the earliest Christian interpretations of those teachings. When the Bible is worshipped and taken literally, however, problems arise—many people do not know what to do with the Bible, whether they are inclined to accept it or dispute it. Part of the misconstrual of Jesus and the Bible comes from the Bible itself, from an often-quoted verse from of the gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). Like millions of Christians before me, when I first heard that text—most likely during a childhood Christmas—I thought it referred to the Bible. After all, we were taught that the Bible was the word of God.
And there it was: John’s magisterial and mystical opening—the Word was God. Somehow, God and the Bible were indeed one. Maybe, I mused, that is why my parents hid the Bible. It was so special, so holy, and so sacred that it should not sit on a shelf or coffee table with any other book. It needed to be hidden, like the face of God, behind a veil, gazed upon by only those ordained to do so. The Bible was with God, and the Bible was God. It is almost as if the Bible itself were a fourth member of the Trinity, which is peculiar in every way possible.
That is completely wrong. Much of what we think about the Bible is the result of a horrible theological mix-up based on the English translation, “Word.” The Greek term that John used was logos. Logos means “ground” or “speech” or “expectation,” among other things. It does not mean “word” as a part of speech made up of alphabetic letters, like the words I am writing on this page or the words in a book. The Greek term for that sort of “word” was lexis, not logos. John said, “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God.” Not lexis, but logos—the very ground of divine being, the breath of God, the presence of the holy in and through all things.
John equated Jesus with the logos. If John had meant for us to conflate Jesus and God and the Bible, John should have made himself much clearer and simply called Jesus the biblion, the “book” or “scroll,” of God: “In the beginning was the biblion, and the biblion was with God, and the biblion was God.” But logos is neither lexis (a word on the page) nor biblion (a book made up of words). Rather, John’s statement is a radical, mystical philosophical claim: the God who breathed the whole of the cosmos into existence has been embodied in the human Jesus.
So that begs that question: What is the Bible anyway? Scholars have been arguing about the nature of the Bible for centuries, using terms like “inerrant,” “infallible,” “authoritative,” and “God-breathed” to describe it. Some say that these terms apply to “everything” in its pages, while others insist that these adjectives pertain only in matters of “faith and salvation” found therein (leaving science and history to scientists and historians). Still others argue it is a collection of wisdom and historical texts from ancient Israel and early Christian communities imbued with meaning through centuries of liturgical and ethical engagement. Others still insist that it is a book of books, a variety of genres to be read and understood in a myriad of literary ways, offering a wide range of spiritual insights over time and space. It has a narrative arc, or maybe it has many. It is full of contradictions; some maintain every inconsistency can be reconciled.
Over the years I have wrestled with scripture, argued and learned from different colleagues, preachers, and scholars, and settled into an understanding of the Bible as a collection of inspired and extraordinary texts that rehearse the spiritual experiences of two ancient faith communities—Jews and Christians—and all the tensions, conflicts, and struggles within and between them. My friend Bible scholar Peter Enns describes this much more simply: “The Bible is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.” Like him, I have come to experience the Bible as “an invitation to join an ancient, well-traveled, and sacred quest to know God, the world we live in, and our place in it.”13 I wish someone had told me that in Confirmation class. I am certain I would have understood that at thirteen.
A month or two after the theological shame of laughing at God dropping the Bible on my brother’s head, I stood in front of the congregation as the pastor posed a Confirmation question: “Do you receive and profess the Christian faith as contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments?”
It was not framed as an invitation. It sounded a bit like a threat, but it was intended as a vow. At least the authorities did not ask if the Bible was the Word of God. They wanted an answer, however, not an RSVP.
“I do,” was my solemn response.
I had no idea what he meant or where such a promise would take me. What I wanted to say was that I would keep showing up. And keep learning from the Word.
The Sage
Confirmation was important to me. Unlike some of my peers who went through the rite and then left church, I became more interested in spiritual things. About a year after being confirmed, I had an argument with a friend at school. My friend, a conservative evangelical, found my Methodist theological education wanting.
“Who is Jesus?” he asked me.
“Well,” I replied, “Jesus was a great teacher. The Golden Rule. You know.”
The next day, he brought me a book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell. First published in 1972, it was a work of popular apologetics, intended to make the case to an increasingly skeptical world that Jesus was God. The evangelical magazine Christianity Today would eventually place it at number 13 on its list of “most influential” Christian books of the twentieth century.
“Read this,” he instructed. He pointed to a section with a long quote from C. S. Lewis, a British author I had not heard of until then:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.14
Why was it so wrong, I wondered, to think of Jesus as a “great moral teacher”? The Golden Rule, the commands about love, the parables, the New Testament itself? So much teaching, so many challenging ideas. I did not understand.
I had, of course, stumbled into an argument that I did not know existed. Although I had an inkling of some sort of rift in Protestant Christianity, I was unaware that “Jesus as teacher” triggered strong theological reactions, one of the ideas that had for nearly a century driven a wedge between conservative and liberal Protestants. My Methodist upbringing emphasized Jesus as the model teacher—and this was intellectually and morally important. Jesus as teacher did not stop us from singing hymns about his being born in a manger or celebrating the Resurrection on Easter. It did not seem to contradict other things the church taught about Jesus or recited in creeds. Rather, the teacher Jesus somehow existed alongside the Son of God Jesus without much of a second thought. To diminish “teacher” in favor of, say, “Lord,” made little sense to me.
But my friend was mad—mad—that I thought of Jesus as teacher. He wanted to correct my bad theology, make sure I knew the right doctrine about Jesus. Jesus was Lord, and that was it. “Teacher” was weak, incomplete, and dangerous. He pressed on me Lewis’s logic of Lord, liar, or “lunatic” (Lewis’s word). Those were the choices. Moral teacher was not on the list. Jesus as teacher was what liberals thought, what heretics believed. He continued, “You don’t want to be one of those, do you?”
When you are fifteen and someone you desperately want to impress asks such a question, there is only one way to answer. No, I did not want to be a liberal or a heretic. I wanted to be part of his group, to go to his church, where another boy I had a crush on went, to sit in the circle and hold hands while singing, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” It must be bad, I thought, to be Christian and a liberal or a heretic. This C. S. Lewis fellow thought it was bad, as Josh McDowell so logically explained. If I had three choices—Lord, liar, or lunatic—and Jesus the great moral teacher has been crossed off the list, it was not hard to choose. I said goodbye to the Jesus I had known. Holding hands with the cute boy in Bible study beckoned.
Although I had grown from child to teenager with Jesus the teacher, I had limited notions of what a teacher was. As far as I knew, a teacher was a rule keeper, a tool giver, and a content provider, maybe a sort of third parent or good storyteller. Perhaps my friend was right. Jesus was much more than a teacher, and it diminished him to call him such. Over the years, however, I have come to understand that the problem was more in my definition of “teacher” than with Jesus.
Like many others, I mostly thought of teachers as guardians of a set of middle-class values and civic virtue, as those who instilled conventional ideas about citizenship and history. This is not a particularly bad designation, but it inhibits creativity and questioning, often reducing education to a set of fairly benign principles about conformity and acceptability. That was a real problem when I was growing up in the 1960s—when what happened in the schoolroom echoed morals in books from decades earlier instead of the chants for peace and justice in America’s streets. As one friend of mine quipped, “The problem with ‘Jesus as teacher’ is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s shallow.”15 At least it was for a couple generations of Americans who found themselves in classrooms in the mid- to late-twentieth century.
As I made my way through high school, college, seminary, and graduate school and finally into classrooms where I stood in front of the students, I learned that teachers were far more than dispensers of information or guardians of civic orthodoxy. The best ones did not teach to anybody’s test. Instead, they taught from the heart by raising questions and presenting material in surprising ways. Great teachers opened their homes and tables and modeled a generosity of knowledge and spirit that transformed the lives of their students. Indeed, the best teachers I have ever known—as well as the teacher I aspired to be—nurtured a way of being in the world, a way that treasured questions and logic, research and study, critical thinking, and a love of words. I heard it said of one such master teacher, a professor whose dinners with students were legendary, at his memorial service: “He gave us instructions and he set us free.”16 That is what it means to teach: to instruct and liberate.
In Jesus: A New Vision, Marcus Borg wrote:
Jesus was a sage, a teacher of wisdom. Regularly addressed as “teacher” during his lifetime by followers, opponents, and interested inquirers alike, he has been hailed by subsequent generations of Christians as more than a teacher, as indeed he was. Nevertheless, he was not less than a teacher.
Then, to the point, Borg added an important question: “But what was he a teacher of?”
Borg was not asking about Jesus’s subject matter. As a teacher himself, Professor Borg was aware that great teachers go well beyond ideas and morals:
Jesus was not primarily a teacher of either correct beliefs or right morals. Rather, he was a teacher of a way or path, specifically a way of transformation.17
The definition of a sage is a “profoundly wise” person, “one distinguished for wisdom.” A sage is a certain kind of teacher, one who upsets convention by offering a different way of understanding and living, a way that embodies wisdom. Sages teach justice, with compassion. Sages set people free.
Jesus was that sort of teacher. He taught radical interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish practice that inspired people to actually leave their homes and follow him. He invited them into a way of life based on a vision of a wildly gifting God, who created everything, who turns authority upside down, who shatters the pretenses of power, who proclaims a kingdom of the heart, and who brings the poor, the outcast, the forgotten, and the mourning to a table set with an endless feast. And he taught this by holding forth the rule of love, extending the purview of divine commands, and speaking in proverbs, poetry, paradox, and parables to confound the learned and compel the curious. With all due respect to C. S. Lewis and Josh McDowell, it was, to use their term, “mad.” There is nothing really logical about it. Instead, this teacher called followers into a way that promised loss and self-sacrifice and the possibility of the cross in his revolution of love. He was a teacher, yes. And a sage. Jesus, the wisdom teacher.18 And people followed. He had lots of students.
* * *
Teachers are often our first heroes. They give us the tools to read and write and do math; they introduce us to the basics of history and science. They stand up for us when we are bullied, encourage us when we feel the sting of failure, and open our imaginations to a bigger and better world. Without good teachers, those grown-up guides on a path toward work and adulthood, most of us would not be the people we have become.
My grandmother wanted to be a teacher, but she never made it beyond eighth grade. My mother wanted to be a teacher, but she did not know how to apply to college. By the sheer good luck of being born when I was and armed with the insistence and persistence of the older women in my life, I became a teacher, a college professor. I taught for several years in the formal academy, and for the last fifteen years I have been in alternative settings, as an itinerant teacher.
Wherever I found myself, no matter the classroom, I remember the privilege of bearing the title of teacher. It bewilders me that teachers are so undervalued, even ridiculed in our society. At every level, they are overworked, underpaid, and taken for granted. Although teaching is a great responsibility and (I think) a deeply spiritual calling, it is also hard, often gut-wrenching, work to accompany students on a journey of learning, especially when your profession is made a scapegoat for all of society’s ills by angry parents or greedy politicians. We have forgotten the honor of the title “teacher.”
When I get down about the fact that teachers fail to get the respect they deserve, I remember a story reminding me that being called “teacher” is a holy thing. In July 2016, I was worshipping at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, DC. When the senior pastor, Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, called the little ones forward for the children’s sermon, about a dozen preschoolers gathered on the chancel steps.
The pastor asked, “Where is the candle? Do you see the candle?”
The children looked around. One sharp-eyed boy said, “There it is.”
“Would you get it?” the pastor asked. The boy retrieved the candle and handed it to her.
“Where is the white bowl?” she then asked. It was located and retrieved.
“Where are the silver and gold beads?” Same thing again.
“Where is something that reminds you of Christmas?” Also gotten.
Finally she asked, “Where is God?”
The children looked about—up, down, all around. There were a few bewildered looks, some shrugged shoulders. Then a small boy in a plaid shirt, about three years old, said, “I know!”
The pastor said, “You do?”
The little boy looked excited, insisting, “Yes! Yes!”
“Where?” asked the pastor.
And the little boy replied, “I’ll go get God!”
He jumped up from the chancel stairs and ran down the center aisle. His father, obviously worried about the open doors at the back of the sanctuary, leaped out of his pew to fetch his son.
Before he got very far, however, the little boy had returned. He was holding the hand of a kind-looking woman in her sixties or seventies, literally pulling her down the aisle. “Here!” he cried, “Here’s God! She’s here!”
The pastor looked puzzled. “Miss Jean?”
The boy pointed at her. “There she is! God! God!”19
She was his Sunday school teacher.
At the time, there was not a dry eye in the congregation. Since then, I have wondered if this was how people responded to Jesus—pointing at their beloved teacher, the one who instructed them in a way of love, and crying out, “Here! Here’s God! God!”
We so often forget how beautiful that is, until the mystery of it overtakes us again. Jesus the Teacher.
I would miss him in the coming years.