After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them."
-- John 13:12-17 (NRSV)
____________
Jesus never said, "I am the teacher." Precisely, he said, "You call me Teacher and Lord -- and you are right, for that is what I am." This chapter is an extension of the last one, "I Am The Servant." Here Jesus, the Great I AM is saying, "I expect you to be servants, too. Listen to what I say and do. Then follow what I have taught you. I am the teacher. You are my disciples." Guy Doud, 1986 National Teacher of the Year, said it well: "You can teach a wall, but when you help someone learn you have to get involved." Jesus got involved.
It is one thing to admire Jesus as a servant who gave up the power of being in the likeness of God to become a servant. It's another to follow him as a disciple. It's another to get involved.
Jesus, The Teacher
There are some people who admire Jesus as a teacher, but do not believe in him as Lord and Savior. They often say, "I like the morality of the Bible and I respect Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount, but I don't need a Savior; I don't want a Lord."
In the Bible where Jesus is called the Teacher, it doesn't just mean that he is a moral example. It means that the One who shaped heaven and earth descended to the depths, died for us on the cross, and showed us how to live. Without the cross of Christ, the teachings of Christ are just hollow humanism.
Humanism means trying to be good to our neighbors with no real reference to God. For the humanist, religion is a matter of doing good at the horizontal level, without the vertical dimension of trust in Christ. I know about humanism. I was a humanist for the first 18 years of my life.
My father was Jewish; my mother Irish Catholic. Since my father was opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, my mother stopped going. I had not attended church ten times before I started college at the University of Illinois in 1954. I was a good, moral person, but not a Christian before I was 18.
While studying to be an engineer at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, I picked up three books on topics which I thought would help me avoid the label of "a narrow-minded engineer": How To Know And Tell The Weather; The Universe And Dr. Einstein; and The Greatest Story Ever Told. I did not think that I wanted to become a Christian. I just wanted to know more about the teachings of Jesus.
I read the book on Albert Einstein first. Albert set me up to meet God by saying that everything is relative. "If everything is relative," I thought, "then why try to be rich and successful?" Then I read the book on Jesus. I never got to the book on the weather. I still have it on my book shelf. I hope to read it some day when I retire.
In The Greatest Story Ever Told, I met Jesus, the Teacher, but it was not the morality of Jesus which fascinated me. It was the Teacher himself and what he did. I began reading the Bible and found myself in almost every section except "the begats." The rest, as they say, is history. I left the University of Illinois and enrolled at Carthage College, Carthage, Illinois, to prepare for becoming a pastor. I discovered a new way of life through the Teacher. I got involved.
Jesus said, "You call me Teacher and so I am." We need to look at the teachings and the Teacher. The Teacher calls us across time and eternity to submit our stubborn willfulness and self-centeredness to him and follow him, not just his teachings. Like many humanists, I had been picking and choosing between the various ideas of the Bible which I tried to follow. I was trying to be good without God. Being good without God is not really possible. It's a way of life by which we try to stay in charge without letting God be God.
If we ignore the prime teaching of the Teacher, we do so to our destruction. The prime teaching of Jesus is that he is Savior and Lord.
Jesus, The Savior
That Jesus is Savior means that I need to be saved. Saved from what? From sin and from myself!
Sin is spelled S--I--N. The center of sin is "I." I had wanted to stay in the center and make my own decisions and go my own way. What I had to learn from the Teacher is that this way doesn't work.
No act of the self can lift the self out of the self by the self because the biggest problem I have is the self. That Jesus is Savior means that I have to submit myself to him daily and let him do what I can't do -- save me from certain destruction.
For a moment think of yourself in a burning building, six stories up. You run to the window. Smoke and fire. You run to the staircase. Smoke and fire. You don't know what to do. Remembering the moral teachings of Jesus won't help. You run back to the window, looking for some sign of hope. You can't see anyone because of the smoke, but you hear a still, small voice: "Jump, I'll catch you."
You either jump or die. I jumped. It's called the leap of faith. I discovered that God was there to catch me. That's what it means to have a Savior.
Think of yourself as having fallen to a shelf on a mountain top, clinging to a branch on the side of the mountain. You cry out, "Is there anyone up there?" "Yes," comes a booming voice from above. "I am here." "What should I do?" "Let go." After some hesitation, you may be tempted to cry out like many do, "Is there anyone else up there?"
To find Jesus as Savior means to let go and let God do what only God can do, save us.
Jesus is the Teacher. He is the Savior. He is also the Lord.
Jesus, My Lord
That Jesus is Lord means that he reigns. That Jesus is my Lord means that he reigns in my life. How different this is from merely being moral and trying to follow the teachings of Jesus.
The lordship of Christ means that the kingdom of God is my home. The kingdoms of this world are all temporary residences which do not satisfy our longing for home. Our tendency to try to have it "my way" is the very sin described in the first chapter of the Bible. Right from the beginning we see that, like Adam and Eve, we want to live life "my way." To submit to the lordship of Christ changes everything.
Gert Behanna was married and divorced three times. She was a millionaire. She had everything that people say they want. In her own words, she said that she had nothing. When she became a Christian and submitted to Christ's leadership of her life, she had everything.
Gert was an alcoholic. She had passed over that fine line of being a social drinker to being addicted to alcohol. After she tried suicide and failed at taking her life, a Christian friend wrote that she should come for a visit. She got drunk to meet her first Christians. "That's more of a commentary on us Christians than on us drunks," she said later. "So, you believe in Jesus, do you?" she said. "So, he helps you with your problems, does he?" she taunted. "Why don't you just turn your life over to him?" her friends said.
"Like I turn my luggage over to a porter?" she asked. "Yes," they said, "something like that." "These friends let me have our Lord as a porter," she said later. "They did not correct my theology. They let me start where I was." When she got home from her visit with her first Christians, she opened her mail and to her surprise she found a note from her friends and an article by Sam Shoemaker called, "It's Never Too Late To Begin Again." She read it and dropped to her knees. She started to pray the only prayer she had ever heard. "Our Father..." she said.
Then she stopped. "If I have a heavenly Father," she thought, "then all the people of the world are my brothers and sisters."
That's what it is like when Jesus becomes Teacher, Savior and Lord. We want to treat other people the way he did, as family. That's why we serve others. That's the way Jesus did it. He got involved. So do we.
Questions For Reflection Or Discussion
1. Were you raised as a Christian?
2. What do your humanist friends say about God? Jesus? Church?
3. From what does Jesus need to save us?
4. Do you have any alcoholics in your family or among your friends?
5. If so, what have they learned about God?
6. What can we learn from them?