{"id":32808,"date":"2024-08-20T06:00:29","date_gmt":"2024-08-20T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/?p=32808"},"modified":"2024-08-19T14:25:50","modified_gmt":"2024-08-19T18:25:50","slug":"jesus-the-teacher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/jesus-the-teacher\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesus the Teacher"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I begin the first chapter of my teaching memoir Nice Work If You Can Get It<\/em> with a scene from my favorite television show. In an early, first-season episode of The West Wing<\/em>,<\/em> \u00a0presidential speech writer Sam Seaborn is attracted to Mallory O\u2019Brien, a fifth-grade teacher who is also the daughter of White House chief of staff Leo McGarry. Sam has managed to offend Mallory unintentionally and wants her to know what he really <\/strong>thinks about teachers:<\/p>\n

Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don\u2019t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That\u2019s my position. I just haven\u2019t figured out how to do it yet.<\/strong><\/p>\n

From your words to God\u2019s ears, Sam. If teachers ruled the world . . .<\/p>\n

The fall semester begins in a couple of weeks, so as usual in the middle of August my thoughts turn to returning to the classroom. As it turns out, I am currently reading Diana Butler Bass\u2019s Freeing Jesus<\/em>, in which she explores several different paradigms for understanding Jesus outside typical religious frameworks. The chapter titles are not particularly promising (\u201cFriend,\u201d \u201cSavior,\u201d \u201cLord,\u201d for instance) because they bring me back to my evangelical, fundamentalist upbringing in which I would rather not spend any more time. But Butler Bass has experience in the world I come from, so her emergence to new and creative insights is inspiring so far (I\u2019m only halfway through the book).\"\"<\/p>\n

Her chapter titled \u201cTeacher\u201d gave me new ways to think about my own vocation which now extends more than thirty-five years. She grew up in a Methodist religious world in which Jesus as an inspired teacher was an acceptable paradigm for understanding him. The best teachers are moral and intellectual exemplars, inviting us to stretch ourselves and explore places we might never encounter without a teacher as our guide. It was not until her teenage years, when encountering conservative evangelical Christianity, that she learned that \u201cJesus as teacher . . . [is] one of the ideas that had for nearly a century driven a wedge between conservative and liberal Protestants.\u201d<\/p>\n

For evangelicals, \u201cJesus as teacher\u201d is far too weak and non-exclusive. Certainly Jesus is more than Gandhi, Mohammed, or MLK Jr. who could all fit the definition of \u201cgreat teacher.\u201d If Jesus was the Son of God and the Savior of the world, then calling him \u201cteacher\u201d is far too diminishing, perhaps even blasphemous or heretical. Over the years, though, as Diana Butler Bass became a college professor herself, she came to realize that her \u201cproblem was more in my definition of \u2018teacher\u2019 than with Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n

If one\u2019s definition of a teacher is one who purveys information while also safeguarding traditional values and standards of citizenship, then it might be correct to say, as one of Diana Butler Bass\u2019s friends quipped, that \u201cthe problem with \u2018Jesus as teacher\u2019 is not that it\u2019s wrong, but that it\u2019s shallow.\u201d I\u2019m reminded of something that philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote about the process of education. He said that the purpose of primary and secondary education is to produce \u201cliterate citizens,\u201d to mold and shape young people into functioning members of society by teaching them the basic norms and principles required to get along in our culture.<\/p>\n

But Rorty continued by suggesting that the point of non-vocational higher education is to empower the student to directly question and challenge everything she or he learned in primary and secondary school, \u201cto help students realize that they can reshape themselves\u2014that they can rework the self-image foisted on them by their past, the self-image that makes them competent citizens, into a new self-image, one that they themselves have helped to create.\u201d Diana Butler Bass learned that teachers are more than purveyors of information and guardians of the status quo. She learned that \u201cgreat teachers . . . modeled a generosity of knowledge and spirit that transformed the lives of their students. Indeed, the best teachers I have ever known\u2014as well as the teacher I aspired to be\u2014nurtured a way of being in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I was the director of my college\u2019s large interdisciplinary program required of all students in their freshman and sophomore years, I often told the faculty that in my estimation what we were doing in the classroom had far less to do with content and far more to do with equipping our students with the tools of lifetime learning. As Marcus Borg writes, this opens the door to a much richer understanding of \u201cJesus as teacher.\u201d \u201cJesus 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jesus invited his students and invites us into a way of life based on a vision of a radically generous God who created everything, turns authority upside down, shatters the pretenses of power, proclaims a kingdom of the heart, and who places the poor, the widows, the orphans, and all those who are disenfranchised in the center of our attention. He calls his followers\u2014his students\u2014into a way of joy and hope, as well as of loss, self-sacrifice, and the cross. All of this fits a full-bodied definition of \u201cteacher.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toward the end of her chapter \u201cTeacher,\u201d Diana Butler Bass reflects on some features of the teaching life with which, after thirty-five years in the college classroom, I strongly resonate.<\/p>\n

Although teaching is a great responsibility and 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\u2019s ills by angry parents or greedy politicians. We have forgotten the honor of the title \u201cteacher.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

And yet, as I often say, it is nice work if you can get it.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I begin the first chapter of my teaching memoir Nice Work If You Can Get It with a scene from my favorite television show. In an early, first-season episode of The West Wing, \u00a0presidential speech writer Sam Seaborn is attracted to Mallory O\u2019Brien, a fifth-grade teacher who is also the daughter of White House chief […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":32811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14,21,30,40,94],"tags":[169,1230,242,289,463],"class_list":["post-32808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible","category-books","category-christianity","category-ethics","category-god","category-teaching","tag-christianity","tag-diana-butler-bass","tag-god","tag-jesus","tag-teaching"],"yoast_head":"\nJesus the Teacher<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Diana Butler Bass: Although teaching is a great responsibility and 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\u2019s ills by angry parents or greedy politicians. 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