02 - Chapter 02
CHAPTER II THE TEACHING METHODS OF JESUS (continued} JESUS discouraged foolish questions. ’ Lord, are there few that be saved? “ (Luk 13:23).
Jesus’ answer is apposite to many of the futile speculations which occupy the time and energy of multitudes in our day, and have become in some parts of the world a formidable menace to the effectiveness of the Church: the possibility of communication with the dead, the date and manner of the Second Coming, the proper day of the week for the public worship of God, the whereabouts of the “ lost ten tribes.” “ We are living,” says Jesus in effect, “ in a serious world where only strenuous work and the grace of God can save anybody.” Our Lord was practising one of the great principles of pedagogy when he varied his methods to suit individual cases. He did this in all his intercourse with men, in the healing ministry for example. The ostracised leper he touches; to the despairing paralytic his words are: ’ Courage, child; ’ the prostrate daughter of Jairus he takes by the hand. His methods of dealing with potential disciples are well illustrated by the passage Luk 9:57-62. The man who has a dilettante interest in the Gospel but has never counted the cost is reminded that there is a kind of intellectual enthusiasm even for Jesus which is speedily disillusioned by the stern experiences of actual discipleship. To the man who will come by-and-by, who will follow “ when the old man dies,” Jesus urges that now, while discipleship is still a living force, is the time to preach to the living men who are dying for want of the good news; as in war, the living and the dying come before the dead. The ploughman who tries to face both ways gets the message that straight furrows are not made in that way. The Gospel records preserve traces of the way in which Jesus used the personal name, sometimes repeating it with peculiar impressiveness.
“ Simon, I have somewhat to say unto you ’ (Luk 7:40). “ Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things ’ (Luk 10:41). ’ Simon, Simon, lo! Satan’s prayer has been granted that he might sift you all like wheat” (Luk 22:31). Three verses later, as Plummer has pointed out, Jesus, for the only time in the Gospel records, addresses Simon by the name he had himself given him, Peter, the Rock, to remind him how far he was falling from his rock-like character. In the fourth Gospel, on the resurrection morning, when Mary was in despair because they had taken away her Lord and she did not know where they had placed him, it was the sound of her name, in the same accents as had pronounced it once before on a well-remembered day, that roused her to the consciousness that she was in the presence of the Master. “ Jesus saith to her * Mary ’ (John 20:16). The educational system in the public schools of Great Britain has made wide use of the educational value of personal intercourse between pupil and pupil, between pupil and teacher. In recent years the Church in her foreign work has made large and increasing use of this factor in education. Everywhere we see residential colleges, hostels, and boarding-schools being founded or developed. In this we are only rediscovering one of the teaching methods of Jesus. Mark tells us that the first object of the call of the twelve was “ that they might be with him ’ (Mark 3:14); that in daily and hourly intercourse with him they might absorb something of his spirit, something of his thought of God and of men, of the things and events of life.
Much of the impressiveness of Jesus as a teacher lay in his manner: his way of speech, his gestures, his look, his whole appearance.
We have seen the effect produced by the repetition of the name of the person he was addressing, “ Simon, Simon,” “ Martha, Martha.” His use of the repeated “ Verily ’ to introduce some memorable saying was so characteristic that apparently the early Church felt it must be reserved for him alone. When he looked on Peter after the cock-crowing, we gather that the memory of that look haunted Peter long years afterwards. His thanksgiving at the time of the feeding of the multitude was so unforgettable that, generations after the event, the scene of it was described as “ the place where they had eaten bread after the Lord had given thanks ’ (John 6:23). When he spoke in the synagogue at Nazareth, he had the congregation spell-bound before he began. Something in the occasion, his appearance and manner, the reputation he had already acquired, the passage he read, his opening sentence, the closing of the book with its halfunderstood significance, all contributed to the atmosphere of expectancy which is one of the preacher’s greatest assets.
One characteristic of educational work to-day is the extent to which, where climatic conditions permit, it is conducted in the open air. Might we not have guessed, even if we had never been told, that much of the teaching of Jesus, with its breezy freshness, its contact with reality and its sense of the divine, its big views and far horizons, w’T as given by the lake-side and in the field; that some of the most characteristic teaching was given on a hill, a hill where one breathes the pure air of God and sees things in their perspective, the big things in all their bigness, the little things in all their littleness? Our Lord made the disciples collaborate in the work. At the feeding of the five thousand it is one of the disciples who discovers a possible source of supplies. The disciples count and arrange the people, distribute the food and gather up the fragments. They are expected to carry on their Master’s work (Luke x. i6ff.) and even to rise to achievements impossible within the limitations of his earthly life (John 14:12). The teacher crowns his work by handing on the torch to his disciples. From Jesus, again, we learn the place of the common table in education. In India the common meal is one of the bonds of the caste, and this is only an extreme example of the sacred relations which so many people have understood to exist among those who have eaten together.
Until lately one of the difficulties of establishing friendly social relations between Indians and Europeans was that caste regulations forbade the Hindu to eat with the foreigner. In many cases he would take from the hands of the “ unclean ’ European only those kinds of fruit which have a thick rind, as in that case the defilement was confined to the rind, which is thrown away. To partake of a common meal is to establish an intimacy not easily reached by any other means. Some of Jesus’ most memorable teaching was given at feasts, and the last meal which he shared with his disciples obtained a significance for all time.
Jesus did not regard his work as finished till his pupils understood (Matt, 18:51). ’ Have you understood all these things? ’ ’ They say to him ’ Yes.’ “
One of the tests of a successful educational institution is the extent to which esprit decorps is established among the pupils. ’ The twelve ’ was something more than a title. Whatever jealousies and rivalries there may have been among them, “ the twelve “ were a brotherhood with a common spirit. The camaraderie of the pupils had its source and life in their common devotion to the teacher. “.Lord, to whom else shall we go? Thou hast words of eternal life.” Their enthusiasm was for the teacher even more than for the teaching; or rather the two were inseparable. Every record we have of the ministry shows us Jesus not only leading men to God, but leading them to God through him. In one important point the attitude of Jesus to study was poles apart from that of the modern educationalist. No maxim is now more persistently inculcated on the student than that he must approach every subject in a scientific spirit, which is understood to mean, among other things, without bias or presuppositions of any kind. With regard to the biggest things in life, it seems clear that Jesus would hardly have understood what this demand meant. To him the whole world is God’s world; men are God’s children.
One does not approach without presuppositions the question of his father’s existence or of his mother’s character. Nor does one reach judgments on such questions by conscious reasoning.
We cannot even imagine Jesus facing theological questions in what is now known as the scientific spirit. To Jesus all study has but one end and aim, what it can tell us about God. The birds, the flowers, the rain, the sunshine, what we call accidents and disasters, the physical constitution and needs of man: there are many points of view from which we can study them; but to Jesus they all tell the same story of the love and the care and the large-heartedness of God.
It is a reasonable inference from the records of his ministry that Jesus would have attached high importance to the training of the emotions. His indignation is repeatedly recorded, excited by official misrepresentation of God’s love and goodness and God’s desire for the welfare and happiness of his children: in the matter of the Sabbath for example. In the story of the ten lepers he gives a lesson on gratitude. Our Lord knew that generous emotion which does not issue in generous action is not only negatively valueless, but is positively hurtful.
One has read of Russian ladies in the theatres of St. Petersburg weeping over the fictitious sorrows of a stage heroine while their own coachmen were freezing to death outside. After leading the lawyer to sympathize with the Samaritan’s treatment of the wounded traveller, Jesus added the admonition: “ Go, and do you likewise.” The last of Jesus’ teaching methods to which it seems necessary to refer is his habitual use of figurative language. 1 The Western mind has a 1 This is discussed in the author’s Jesus and Luk 6:1-49. conviction which seems ineradicable that metaphorical language is less “ true ’ than the language of prose; but abstract language is ’ abstracted “ from the truth of things. Figurative language is at least suggestive of the truth, presents the truth not merely more vividly but more fully and therefore more accurately.
One of the tasks before the preacher of to-day is to convince men that the sayings of Jesus do not cease to have a meaning the moment they are understood to be figurative. The fires of Gehenna, which seemed to Jesus fit emblem of the torture of a lost soul, forfeit all their terrors for most the moment they are seen to be spiritual fires.