JESUS THE MASTER TEACHER – Matthew 5:1-12
The Rev. Dr. Richard W. Reifsnyder
1st Presbyterian Church
Winchester, VA
May 20, 2012
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled
Matthew 5:6
It is one of the great illusions of those who have never done it that teaching isn’t all that hard. But you only need to watch a master teacher work her magic with 20 wiggling 5 years olds, or a dynamic history teacher get cocky seniors excited about a discussion on race relations in the United States, or an inspired professor energize partied out 20 year olds with the intricacies of fish biology to realize how special good teaching is.
Jesus, we recognize, was a master teacher, the primary reason he attracted such vast crowds.
Now of course, throughout history there have always been those who have reduced Jesus to being only a teacher, that is to say, a moral example, who gives us good and pithy advice for living, without needing all that supernatural stuff. Long ago, C.S.Lewis responded to this corruption in his famous verdict that either Jesus was who he said he was—savior of the cosmos, ruler over the kingdom of God, resurrection and life and so forth---or else he couldn’t be a good teacher because he was either lying (so why would we trust his teaching?) or a lunatic (on the order of a person who called himself a poached egg). Lewis made it clear we must make a choice. Either Jesus was and is truly the Son of God, or else he was misguided, deranged, or something worse. The authority of what Jesus taught was inextricably connected to who he claimed he was.
That being said, Jesus was an extraordinary teacher, whose methods were unconventional, mysterious, and even befuddling.
What makes for a good teacher? Sometimes it is an ability to impart content, knowledge in a clear lucid way, to explicate difficult ideas, whether that be calculus, the origin of the civil war, or the aerodynamics of airplanes. Sometimes it is a matter of imparting a skill—how to write a computer program, how to balance the books properly, how to make a piece of furniture.
But Jesus’ teaching seems to do something different. Jesus made clear that in his coming, God’s kingdom was being brought to the world. In a variety of ways the gospels are a narrative of intrusion, invasion, taking the world back for God. Whatever else was going on, however strong Rome and the other powers of the world seemed to be, the kingdom of God was breaking in—and would not be stopped. We’re invited to be part of this new kingdom---and here’s what it’s going to look like.
And that’s a lot of what Jesus’ teaching involves—and where it gets dicey. So much of teaching we experience is intended to help us fit it, get along, accommodate, be successful in this world. But Jesus' teaching is instruction in how to be different, to recognize that we belong to God’s kingdom, and that’s not just our world view writ large.
Take for example our text for today, the Beatitudes. Years ago Robert Schuller did a disservice to them in a book he called the “be-happy attitudes.” In some translations, the Greek word makarios is given as “happy,” but that doesn’t seem to me to have to same connotation as “blessed.” Jesus’ goal is not that we go around with a smile on our face at all times, whatever life brings—but rather that we’ll know the blessing of God, the blessedness of God in all things. And when we realize what sort of qualities Jesus offers in this opening to the Sermon on the Mount, it takes us back….blessed are the poor in spirit, they’ll discover God’s kingdom…blessed are those mourn, who lament their own pain or that of others, for they will find comfort…blessed are those who are hungry that justice be done, they will be satisfied….blessed are those who are persecuted for what is right, they will gain entry into God’s kingdom. Why these, Jesus, might be our natural response? In developing these dispositions we experience God’s blessing? The is teaching which is counter intuitive.
Jesus’ most characteristic form of teaching were parables. It used to be assumed that Jesus told stories grounded in every day experience to make it easier for his listeners to relate to and understand. Except that the stories were anything but plain.
Here's a parable Jesus told that you'll recognize.
An agricultural entrepreneur needs worker to pick strawberries in his field. He goes to the town center at 6 a.m. and hires 10 men who are eager to work, but by noon realizes he needs more and hire another 10, but then rain is predicted and the strawberries will be past if he doesn't get them in, so he goes back at 3 p.m. and then 5 p.m. to gather the stragglers. The work gets done, but when the guys open their pay envelopes they all get the same amount. You’ve never heard such howling. God’s kingdom is like this?.
You surely have heard the one about the guy traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, who is mugged, beaten, stripped naked and left like a dog to die in a ditch. Now by chance, a priest, a man who makes his living off God, comes down the road, and sees the man, bleeding, moaning—but he has a service to do and passes on by. Then comes a pious Presbyterian elder, religious but not showy, who gets a whiff of the broken guy, and being a cautious kind of guy, wondering if it’s a set up (I'll stop to help and thieves waiting behind the rocks, will mug me), and so he moves quickly on.
Imagine you are the man lying in that ditch, dying, and you spot a guy coming down the road—and is it a nice looking, well dressed, somebody like you kind of guy? No, you see a despised, good for nothing, theologically ill-informed, racially impure Samaritan. Your last chance is a man who you despise. And when he comes over you are tempted to say it is OK, it is nothing, this Samaritan rips apart his suit, and makes bandages, and gets you cleaned up and gets you to the best medical practice in town and gives them his credit card and tells them to spare no expense.
God’s kingdom is like this? Jesus says, “go and do likewise.”
Or touching on prayer, A desperate widow pleads her case before a scoundrel of a judge. But she gets nowhere. So she shows up at his residence in the middle of the night, beating on the front door, screaming at the top of her lungs, “help me. Give me justice.” And the judge, who doesn’t give a rip about this widow, yet because of her persistence, he says, I’ll get up and give her what she wants.
God is like this?
Jesus never seems to give us examples of good, upstanding, moral, just like me kind of people, when he teaches.
We could go on. The most familiar of all stories Jesus told involved two brothers. And the one demands his inheritance of his father, in essence saying drop dead—I want out of here, but with a nice stipend to enjoy life, and I want it now. And we read he goes to New York, or Vegas, and wastes it all in “loose living”—you can pick your poison about what that means—loose women, the bar scene, too much chocolate cake and fatty foods. And when he has sunk to the bottom, he comes to his senses and remembers he has a family. He has his speech all prepared—he considers giving all the tired excuses, but finally decides to come clean, “I have sinned, and am not worthy to be your son.” But before he gets the words out, the Father (who is the real center of this story) runs to him and embraces him and tells everyone he’s throwing a big party to celebrate.
Now here’s where the story starts to shock us. We thought Jesus' teaching was intended to shore up our ethical standards, put a little backbone in our moral fiber. Here the homecoming of a ne’er do well is a party. It isn’t what we expect. We want to father to be gracious, but not overly so. We want to be sure that scoundrel learned his lesson. In other words we want to ask the same questions as the older brother. Jesus in telling the story goes on and on giving the details of the party he’s giving. And this just frosts the responsible, stay at home brother. “We’ve got work to do—and because of this lousy brother of mine I've had to shoulder more of the load around here. You think I’m going to be happy with this turn of events? And the Father does his best to reassure that brother of his place in the family.
God is like that? Living in the kingdom is like that?
Characteristic of Jesus’ teaching, his stories is that they are open ended. We don’t know how they finish. Does the younger son, now home, straighten up for good and join the family business? Does the older son loosen up and join the party? Does either get just how extravagant the father is? We don’t know, because we’re the ones who are supposed to finish the story.
Jesus doesn’t teach like most sermons, my own included, too often do—try to explain, boil down Christian living offer three simple points, issue unarguable assertions which make absolute sense and are compelling.
But what if Jesus' point, Jesus way of teaching, is not to make it simpler, to insure we have it all figured out, to have it all make sense so we think we can have Jesus in a box, wrapped up, tied in a ribbon and put on the shelf to pull out at opportune moments? Maybe our response to the teaching of Jesus is not so much to be able to say “I got it,” and to expose us to the adventure of what happens when “Jesus gets us.” Maybe Jesus teaches us in such a way as to make us characters in his story, in order that we might put our life into the grand narrative of God’s salvation, God’s kingdom building in the world.
We can't always predict where teaching will lead. A New Yorker cartoon I saw many years ago, showed an aging hippie couple, flower children, dressed in the attire of the 60s and 70s, free spirited, bearded, long hair, jeans with the peace symbol sewed on, faded peasant dress, incense burning. The Woodstock generation. And in walks their 10 year old child, dressed in a three piece business suit, carrying a brief case and a Bible under his arms. And the husband looks woefully at his wife and says, “where did we go wrong and fail to teach him right? Now he’s even joined the Presbyterians!”
Now I’m not sure I like the stereotype of Presbyterian implied there, but the point is true that Jesus’ teaching is not intended to just make us fit in comfortably with the culture, to accommodate to our world easily, but rather to learn to dare to be different. You shall know the truth, novelist Flannery O’Connor put it, and "the truth will make you odd."
That’s not a goal most of us would have. And I don’t think Jesus is asking us to be weird and obnoxious—as some religious people become. But Jesus’ teaching invites us to a way of life that does not come naturally. Jesus invites us to a truth which is concrete, close to the stuff of daily life, yet enigmatic, beyond daily life, demanding rumination and interpretation and response. To be shaped and formed by his teaching is to be forced to review our inherited assessment of the world, to learn what it is to be fully involved in the world, without being co-opted or corrupted by its questionable values. We never fully master Jesus’ teachings, but we have become part of an incredible journey whenever we discover that they have taken hold of us.
THANKS BE TO GOD WHO GIVES US THE VICTORY THROUGH JESUS CHRIST
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