Learning with Jesus

At the age of thirty, Jesus presented himself to the world as a teacher. To be a teacher - then as now - you need two things: some pupils and a subject.
For pupils, Jesus gathered an assortment of inquisitive men and women who lived near his new home in the bustling Galilean town of Capernaum. They were ordinary working folk who showed an active interest in Jesus’ specialist subject - the coming together of heaven with everyday life.
Jesus’ teaching quickly gained popularity. It wasn’t a high-brow, ivory tower education, with noses in books and heads in the clouds. Jesus taught people at their place of work, with examples taken from the everyday realities of farming, fishing and financial affairs.
If you were to attend one of Jesus’ lessons, this is the sort of thing you would learn:

• Everyone knows there’s a law against murder, but I say to you, don’t even insult people or be rude to them. God cares about that just as much.
• There’s no need to make oaths, simply be honest in everything you say.
• If someone does something bad to you, don’t take revenge, let it pass. That’s what God is like.
• Anyone can be friendly and generous to their friends or to people who will pay them back. Be different. Be friendly to your enemies and generous to people who can never pay you back.
• Don’t try to impress other people with your religion. They may be impressed, but God won’t be.
• Don’t worry about the future. Trust the future to God and focus on today. That’s quite enough to be worrying about!
• All in all - treat other people the way you would want them to treat you.

A great deal of religious teaching is about the things you supposedly need to do in order to get into heaven. Jesus’ teaching was different. He tells us about the things we need to do to bring heaven into our everyday lives.

Size Matters - Sunday 21st May 2017

In the world of education, size matters. The larger a class, the less efficiently pupils learn. Wealthy families pay significant sums of money to put their children in schools with small classes. Political parties promise huge sums of money to reduce class sizes in state run schools. Smaller is almost always better when it comes to learning groups.
Jesus knew this. As a rabbi, he was part of an adult education system that was committed to delivering high quality, wholistic, learning. But Jesus faced a serious problem: his teaching and message was so popular that he soon had too many pupils (disciples). As a result, his educational mission risked becoming inefficient and ineffective.
Rabbinic tradition advised that no rabbi should have more disciples than he could effectively teach. Following this principle, Jesus robustly cut his class size down to just twelve. There must have been a lot of disappointed men and women that day, but Jesus wasn’t trying to build a large movement; he was trying to teach a renewed philosophy of life and faith. At key moments Jesus cut that group down even further, to just three: Peter, James and John.
Most Christian churches fail to be Christlike in this matter. Churches like to be big, and big churches are considered to be successful. But the bigger a church grows, the less efficient it becomes at delivering Jesus’ teaching. Some growing churches wisely sub-divide themselves into small groups where effective learning can take place.
As a teacher, Jesus knew that size matters - smaller is better.