Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Teacher’s marks
Luke 6:40
A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher.
I got to high school just over 40 years ago. There my life was changed. I met people, students and teachers, who have had a profound impact on how I view life and the world. Recently, one of our enterprising classmates started a WhatsApp Group with the intention of connecting as many of us a possible from that year in school.
We now have more than a third of the almost 100 students that entered “Saints” that year and we chat every day. Some of us probably chat more now than we did at school. As we travel, each of us makes an effort to connect with our classmates in whatever city we’re visiting. We’re spread out pretty wide across Guyana, the Caribbean, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia.
Whenever groups of us get together one of the things we inevitable talk about is our teachers. We remember, with good humour, the things they did to us, but more importantly, the things we did to them. One thing is clear though, our teachers had a profound impact on how we learned and who we have become. For many of us, those marks have been left.
For me, there are quite a few but Father Fred Rigby will always stand out. Father Rigby had a habit of riding his bicycle to the home of every one of the new students in his class. He was responsible for breaking in a group of just over 30. For the arrival of Father Rigby, my mother cleaned our house as if it was Christmas and my aunt practised her French, given that he was also the French Master.
The great welcome to the Graham home collapsed, however, when I lost patience. My mother had me showered and dressed too early and I couldn’t resist the temptation to get back to a cricket game with my friends. My neighbour hit the ball over the fence and into the dirty trench outside. I jumped in after it and as I raised up, poised to throw it at the wicket to get him out, I was facing the poised Father Rigby. My mother never got over her disappointment and embarrassment.
In a few incidents, too long to detail here, Father Rigby had a tremendous impact on how I view people, how to look for a philosophical framework for what is going on around me, how Scripture applies to life, and most importantly how to handle criticism. Whether we realise it or not our teachers leave those marks, not just on our test papers, but on our lives.
It seems that this is just the point that Jesus was making in that key verse today. That teachers leave their marks on us. We can be known by who our teachers were.
The Apostle Paul understood this perfectly and used it to his benefit. In Acts 21:37-22:3 we find Paul is in trouble, the people he once represented have all turned on him because he had become a Christian and was seeking to make the same of the whole world.
As he gets into difficulty in Jerusalem, he is arrested and goes through a series of trials and battles for his life. At this point in our story, he finds a way, through language and laws of citizenship, to address the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. He starts by giving his résumé. There was no one to introduce him properly so he was going to introduce himself.
The first three things he highlights were his ethnicity, nation and religion – I am a Jew, then his place of birth, – Tarsus of Cilicia, then his education – educated in this city at the feet of Gamaliel. He named his teacher.
At the time of a significant crisis in his life, possibly facing the end of his life, Paul appeals to the fact of who his teacher was as a basis on which he should be given a hearing and be accorded some credibility. On the basis of these claims, he was able to tell the whole story of how he met Jesus and how Jesus changed his life.
Very often teachers are viewed as mere means to an end, a mere utility, but the teacher must not just be the means to an end. The teacher must be transformational. The teacher should not be the one who just gives us information to memorise and regurgitate. The teacher must be the one who gives us the tools and skills to analyse and think beyond mere information.
Gamaliel gave Paul the tools and skills for studying and expounding the law. Read any of Paul’s many writings we have at our disposal and the matter of the results of Paul’s education will be settled once and for all. He was not one who merely regurgitated, rather he was an analyser, a skilled debater, an apologist, and teacher himself.
Scholars are hard pressed to find evidence of Gamaliel’s public teaching exploits and any of his writings, but from his student Paul, there is an abundance of both.
Paul, it is clear, was so equipped by his teacher that he surpassed his teacher. The student should be able to stand on the shoulders of a good teacher and reach even farther. When students start to exceed teachers’ accomplishments teaching and learning is taking place.
Too much of school and too much of church is filled with those who want us to memorise and regurgitate. Too few are teachers who we’d want to cite on our résumé as having shaped us into being better people and better Christians.
Think on these things:
- Which teacher had the greatest impact on you at school?
- Which teacher did you really want to be like, and why?
- Is there anyone you taught, or are teaching, that would be proud and confident to cite you in their résumé?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would be teachers who others would want to be like.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex
