Jesus the Teacher

When Jesus began His public ministry, one of the first places He taught was His hometown of Nazareth. Archeologists estimate that it had between 200 and 400 inhabitants at the time.

He began His work in the small towns and in the countryside of Galilee, which was more rural in nature than Judea, which contain several larger towns or cities, including Jerusalem. As Jesus transitioned southward from Galilee to Judea, His audience changes.

In Jerusalem, at the Temple, He said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The pronoun ‘you’ occurs four times in this quote, and all four instances are plural.

Jesus speaks here of His ‘teaching,’ which would be Torah in the Hebrew or Aramaic original. The word Torah should be understood as ‘instruction’ or ‘direction,’ but is often misunderstood as ‘law.’

The English word ‘law’ connotes a reactive attempt to force a physical reality, whereas Torah is proactive, and attempts to guide or shape the heart, soul, mind, and spirit. For this reason, translations like ‘teaching’ or ‘instruction’ or ‘direction’ are preferable.

The word Torah, of course, plays a major role in the Old Testament as well. The giving of Torah to Moses and to the people at Sinai is a major event.

The order of events is significant. First, God saves the people, bringing them out of slavery and out of Egypt. Second, He gives them the Torah.

Because salvation precedes Torah, we see grace at work.

Torah leads to Shalom. God’s teaching causes wholeness and wellness.

A Midrash, a rabbinical teaching story, tells us that God wore a prayer shawl, a Tallit, when He gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai. When a rabbi was teaching, he typically wore a Tallit. The Midrash is telling us that God was a teacher to Moses.

Of course, a Midrash sometimes expounds fancifully on Scripture, but the point is valid. Jesus, too, came as a teacher.

If we examine the career of Jesus, then we note that teaching was one of His major activities, and measured by time, it was the activity which He perhaps did most. That’s why He spent as much time on earth as He did.

He wouldn’t have waited 33 years, if He only wanted to die and rise again. He spent time, moving through the land, because He wanted to get the word out.

Jesus wanted to teach first, before His death and resurrection, because He needed to get the news out. He is a teacher. By His example, He shows us that faith is faithfulness, that He persisted in His task.

“The words I have spoken to you — they are full of the Spirit and life,” says Jesus. He gives us Torah, and He is Torah.

[These thoughts taken from a talk given by Dwight Pryor on Friday, September 30, 1994]

Time and Peace

In the book of Genesis, we read that “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” Thus time itself is the first thing to be declared holy.

The Sabbath, pronounced Shabbat in Hebrew, begins at sunset on Friday, because the text says that “by” the seventh day, i.e., before sunset, God had finished His work of creation. The creativity continues, when humans create a 24-hour spiritual environment on the day of Sabbath.

Shalom is often translated as peace, not only external physical peace, but also inner spiritual peace. Yet while Shalom includes peace, it includes more - the broader meaning of Shalom is ‘wholeness’ or ‘wellness.’

The greeting for the Sabbath is, then, Shabbat Shalom, while on the other days of the week, people greet each other with simply Shalom. In the family Sabbath, there are roles: the children are blessed, the wife is praised, and the men go to synagogue.

These roles hint at the textual understanding of masculinity. By contrast, spirituality in modern and postmodern North America and Europe is often seen as feminized.

The incarnational relevance is that Jesus is a man. Exploring, but never quite solving, the mystery of incarnation, we recall the axiom that Jesus is 100% human and 100% God. As a fully human man, He takes His place in these roles.

In Paul’s letter to Timothy, he stresses the humanity, not the divinity, of Jesus when he writes that “there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Jesus.”

[These thoughts taken from a talk given by Dwight Pryor on Friday, September 30, 1994]

Second Person Plural

The simple English word ‘you’ hides a number of subtleties. Those who’ve studied other languages know that what grammarians call ‘the second person’ includes a number of variations, most notably between singular and plural.

In Spanish, this is the difference between tu and vosotros. In German, it’s du and ihr. In English, one says ‘you’ to one person, but also ‘you’ to a whole room full of people.

A manager might say ‘you have some really good work here!’ to one employee, or to a whole team of them. So when we translate God’s Word into English from its original Hebrew or Greek, we might lose something along the way: the difference between you and y’all.

Consider the stock phrase, ‘the Lord your God,’ used many times throughout the Bible. There are two versions of this phrase, one singular and one plural.

English translations hide the difference. Roughly, these two would be equivalent to der Herr dein Gott and der Herr euer Gott.

A mapping of the distribution of these two terms can be instructive. While used with approximately the same frequency in the book of Exodus, the plural is used six times before the singular form appears once, and that first occurrence of the singular is in chapter fifteen, almost halfway through the book.

Leviticus uses the plural exclusively, with no occurrences of the singular.

Deuteronomy uses both forms, uses them frequently, and uses them in close alternation.

What does this linguistic feature of the text reveal about God? The deliberate alternation between the singular and the plural suggests that God is emphasizing that followers of Jesus live in a balance between the corporate and the individual.

To speak of the “Lord your God” (der Herr dein Gott) in the singular is to accent the discrete, one-on-one, relation which God has with each human. (This relation is discrete, but not always discreet.) Although there are more than seven billion people on the planet, God knows each individual as an individual.

To speak of the “Lord y’all’s God” (der Herr euer Gott) in the plural is to remind the reader that we also have a corporate relationship with God. Jesus reminds us that there is a dynamic which occurs when “two or three are gathered in My name.”

This distinction between singular and plural also comes into play in imperatives: is a command given to each person individually, or to the group as a unit?

The second person pronoun as a direct object also shows this difference: If God says that He will “bless you” or “love you” or “lead you,” is the ‘you’ singular or plural?

Needless to say, this topic demands further investigation.