The Mission of Teaching and Learning

Matthew 28:16-20

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Gardner-Webb University Faculty Worship

Boiling Springs, N.C., August 18, 2010

Before I begin, I want to say two personal words. The first is a “thank you” to Doug Bryan and Carolyn Billings for the invitation. Doug can tell you that it took me no time at all to say yes, so fond are my memories of our days together at Ridgecrest several years ago. I also want to say “thank you” to Gayle Price and Frank Bonner, both of whom know enough about me to have brought forward grounds for rescinding the invitation; but they did not, and for that I am grateful as well. The second personal word is this. When I arrive at the crux of this sermon, I will lay claim to a storied Jewish (and occasionally Christian) mode of biblical interpretation. And as I do, I cannot help but remember our mutual colleagues and friends, the late Dan Goodman and Jack Partain. May our every remembrance of them be a reminder to us all to live and love and learn and teach so wisely and so well in the time we are given.

We human beings exhibit a curious capacity for learning, a capacity that derives especially from the operations of our cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain that controls higher-order functions such as information processing, problem solving, speech, language comprehension, and sensory integration. One of the distinctive physical features of the human cerebral cortex is how large and wrinkled it is. If our cerebral cortex “were flattened out, it would occupy four sheets of typing paper. A chimpanzee’s cortex would fit on one sheet, a monkey’s on a postcard, a rat’s on a stamp” (William Calvin, Scientific American 271.4: 101-107, October 1994). Our large and highly wrinkled cerebral cortex equips us especially well for learning.

As you are aware, however, there are people who take a “less is better” approach to the use of their cerebral cortex. A renowned American preacher and seminary professor was on a flight home from a conference. He was making good use of the time by editing a manuscript when the man sitting next to him asked him what his line of work was. He answered, “I’m a preacher and a seminary professor.” “I see,” said the man. “Well, in matters of religion, I think it is best to keep things simple: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ That’s what I always say.” “I see,” said the professor and preacher. “And what is your line of work?” “I’m an astronomer,” the man said. “Really?” said the preacher-professor. “Well, when it comes to astronomy, I think it’s best to keep things simple. ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”

As a faculty of an institution of higher education, you are in the business of teaching and learning the use of all four sheets of the cerebral cortex. Those of you who teach undergraduates have a particular challenge because your constituency is in a state of extended adolescence that makes them biblical jars of clay overflowing with decidedly unbiblical hormones. Still, it is a noble mission in which you are engaged at every level of the university. And in the tradition in which Gardner-Webb University was birthed, nurtured and has matured, the biblical locus of the greatest statement of mission of them all is in Matthew 28:16-20, “The Great Commission.” We have all learned that the Great Commission is for missionaries and preachers, but at the core of these five verses is the mission of teaching and learning. The evangelical scholar BenWitherington III points out in his recent commentary on the gospel of Matthew that the emphasis in the Great Commission is actually "on teaching rather than preaching" (Matthew [Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2006], p. 534). If these verses are any indication, "teaching and learning" is no less sacred a call and no less great a commission than evangelism and preaching.

Now, because there are among our company this morning the esteemed professors of the Department of Religion and Philosophy and the Divinity School, I am going to take the a moment to cover my exegetical flank by characterizing what I am about to do as an exercise in “homiletical midrash” (Gary Porton, “Midrash,” Anchor Bible Dictionary IV.818). Midrash seeks out meaning in a text beyond the “plain sense” or the pashat in Hebrew. In the rabbinic tradition, midrash attends with extraordinary care to every particularity and peculiarity of the text, to every turn of phrase, every choice of word, every “jot” and “tittle” (Matthew 5:18, KJV), on the assumption that there is something to be learned from every particularity and peculiarity of the text.

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Sandy Sasso, a rabbi and a writer of remarkable midrash for children has called midrash “God’s Echo.” It is what happens when a word previously spoken returns, reverberates and resonates in a new time, in a new context, in a new way, for a new audience. Midrash operates on the basis of a conviction that “What Moses delivered amidst the thunder and lightning of [Mount] Sinai was not a final product but rather the beginning of conversation between God and the people of Israel. . . . subsequent generations were to see themselves, like their ancestors as also standing at the foot of Sinai receiving Torah” (Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, God’s Echo: Exploring Scripture with Midrash [Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2007], p. 11). Or in our case this morning, standing at the foot of an unnamed mountain in the Galilee, which brings us back to the Great Commission as the mission of teaching and learning for a university faculty.

A first particularity and peculiarity of the Great Commission is that although the imperative expression, “Go, therefore,” is a road well worn in Christian preaching and teaching, the Greek word translated “Go,” poreuthéntes, is not an imperative verb form at all. It’s a participle. If we attend carefully to this particular peculiarity of the text, poreuthéntes is a circumstantial participle preceding the main verb. There is a grammatical and syntactical road less travelled that would begin the Great Commission this way: “As you go.” In his “Cotton Patch Gospel” of Matthew, Clarence Jordan translated it “As you travel . . .” (Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospel: Matthew and John [Macon, Ga.: Smyth & Helwys, 2004], p. 71). The pashat, the simple reading, then, of the beginning of the Great Commission is “As you go. . . .”

And now the darash, the meaning beyond the plain sense. The mission of teaching and learning is at its heart a peripatetic experience. It is Moses instructing a motley crew of refugees on their journey to and from Mount Sinai. It is Aristotle walking the garden path in the Lycaeum in Athens. It is Jesus of Nazareth traversing the Galilee and traveling to Jerusalem. It is Mahatma Gandhi walking to the sea, and Martin Luther King, Jr., marching from Selma to Montgomery. The teacher is on a journey no less arduous than the student is. For example, at the very least, your mission of teaching and learning is carried out on the moving platform of your life, the trajectory of your living, the effect of which you must never underestimate in yourself or in your colleagues.

One August, some years into my tenure as a faculty member at Furman, I pulled out my lectures for Religion 11, “Introduction to the Bible,” in preparation for teaching it for the twenty-something-nth time. I was surprised that day to see how many of the pages were dog-eared, grayed and yellowed with age and use. “O my God,” I said to myself. “I’m becoming one of them.” You know “them”: those professors you had in college whose lecture notes were so old that they crumbled like Dead Sea Scrolls. “I can’t become one of them,” I said. So I carried all three folders down the hall to the copier, and I copied every single page so that when I began the fall term my lectures were as fresh and bright as they ever were. And then I promptly signed up for a faculty development program in which I learned how to use a computer-projection software that allowed me to incorporate images and videos and outlines and quotations and visual effects into my lectures so as to at least delay the inevitable, as I traveled the professorial road of teaching and learning from young buck on the make to mature bull in the herd to aging stag lurching toward retirement. The teacher is on a journey no less arduous than the student is.

But here’s the thing: poreuthéntes, “as you go,” is a plural participle. It’s not “as you-singular go.” It’s “as you-plural go.” It’s y’all, y’all. It’s bucks and bulls and stags, it’s fillies and mares and nags all together. I recognize that I’m moving now from midrash to banality, but there is no “I” in faculty; there is no “I” in department; and there is no “I” in school. We all know there are far too many “I”’s in administration, but that’s another sermon for another retreat. More than any other single factor, the community that you-plural—y’all—cultivate and negotiate together “as you go” determines the character and quality of your experience in your mission of teaching and learning. That’s the darash: Along the way, it’s ya’ll, ya’ll.

Now to the main verb and a second particularity and peculiarity of the Great Commission. There is one and only command in the entire passage. It’s mathēteúsate, “make disciples.” In the context of Matthew’s gospel, the pashat is clear. The responsibility for creating future followers of the way of thinking and living and being taught by the teacher par excellence, is now being handed on to the followers that teacher created. That’s the pashat.

Now for the darash. The Greek word “disciple” means “learner.” The main verb in your mission is not “teach.” It is “making learners”: mathēteúsate. “Teaching” is a much easier enterprise than “making learners.” “Teaching” is an action the subject of which is the teacher, while the students are mere objects—and indirect objects at that. “Making learners” requires engaging students as the subjects in whom you elicit a reframing and reforming of their ways of seeing and hearing and thinking and being. That’s a daunting task because it's not about you; it's about them. It's not about what you do but about what they become on account of their relationship with you. When I arrived as an ambitious freshman at UNC Chapel Hill, I intended to double major in music and psychology. But when I discovered in my introductory course in psychology that I would spend more time studying rats and pigeons than human beings, I quickly abandoned the field. The problem, of course, was that in my self-absorption and self-possession I was unwilling to become a disciple, a learner schooled in the systematic methods of the discipline of experimental psychology. I was a student equivalent of the rich young ruler who went sadly away because he was unwilling to subject his old assumptions and his old possessions to a new discipline, a new way of thinking and living and being.

There is a saying of Jesus in Matthew 13:52 that illustrates what a learner looks like when she or he “has been discipled,” the text says, mathēteutheìs. That person is like the manager of a household who brings out of their treasure “what is new and what is old.” It’s a fascinating saying. It reveals the literary and theological rationale of the gospel of Matthew; it illuminates the heart of midrash; and it highlights the creation of learners who have sufficient command of a discipline to understand the timely appropriation and application of “what is new and what is old.” The primary verb of your mission is to create learners of the great disciplines and to make them capable of the timely appropriation and application of the knowledge and wisdom those disciplines offer. That’s the darash of the main verb, the one and only imperative in the text: “make learners.”

A third particularity and peculiarity of the Great Commission is that two more verb forms follow the main verb, and both of them are participles, just as the first verb in the Great Commission was a participle. In their relation to the main verb they are clearly—even if rarely translated as—instrumental participles. An instrumental participle reveals “the means by which the action of the main verb is accomplished” (H.E. Dana and J. R. Mantey, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament [Toronto: Macmillan, 1955], p. 228). Create learners “by baptizing them” and "by teaching them.”

The pashat of baptism is obvious in its commendation of the entry ritual of the Christian community. And the darash for teaching and learning is no less obvious, I think. Learners are best created by immersion. Don’t just spritz or sprinkle them. Your task is to immerse them in the languages and literatures, the images, the formulas and notations, the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and tactile experiences of living and breathing in the various environments of your respective disciplines. It’s a cerebral cortex sort of thing that we human beings learn best when we are immersed. But one word to the wise from an experienced practitioner of immersion: the point is not to hold them under until they stop moving. That rather defeats the purpose. Create learners by immersing them, baptízontes autoùs.

And by “teaching them,” didáskontes autoùs. Most New Testament scholars agree that the widely promoted proposal that the writer of the gospel of Matthew intended to present Jesus as the new Moses who delivered five discourses that correspond to the five books of Moses has been overplayed (B. W. Bacon, Studies in Matthew [New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1930]). Perhaps it has. But the closing scene with Jesus standing on a mountain commending to his followers “all that I have commanded you” is so obvious an allusion to Moses as to border on the pashat, the plain sense, of the text. But something else is happening there as well in the literary context of Matthew's gospel, as the great New Testament form critic Norman Perrin has pointed out: "Only at the end of the gospel are the disciples instructed to teach. Up until then, only Jesus teaches" (N. Perrin and C. Dulling, The New Testament: An Introduction, 2nd ed. [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974], p. 269). Even in the pashat, the plain sense of the text, your mission of teaching in this place call you to stand in the long line of teachers par excellence, Moses and Jesus and Aristotle and Gandhi and King and Goodman and Partain and countless others who have gone before you.

Here is the darash. Earlier in Matthew’s gospel, in 23:3, Jesus instructs his followers to do what the Pharisees say but not to do what they do. If you read the NRSV, the verse goes like this: “Do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.” NRSV’s rendering of Matthew 23:3 is one of the most egregious mistranslations I have ever seen. I cannot understand how an entire committee of superb scholars could be so tone-deaf as to miss the particularity and peculiarity of expression in that verse. The verb “teach,” didáskō is nowhere to be found in Matthew 23:3. The Pharisees do not “teach” in the Greek text. They “speak” (eípōsin) and they “say” (légousin), but they do not practice what they say. And that’s not teaching. Teaching requires that we not only profess but that we practice also. It’s a very simple equation: professing plus practicing equals teaching. Anything less is merely chatter, babble, the proverbial “tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing” (William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, scene 5). Do not be professors only; be practitioners also, living out with your students what you have learned in order to create learners in order to fulfill your mission of teaching and learning.

A final particularity and peculiarity of the Great Commission is that it closes with a promise of presence: “I am with you always.” Literarily speaking, this expression is an inclusio, a frame, a bookend. The one who in chapter 1 is named “Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us’” (1:23) promises in chapter 28 to be with them always. That pashat is clear enough.

One final darash. This one who will be present always is spoken of in Colossians 1 as the one in whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17). Now, we have learned from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and from the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe what we have also learned from systems theory and from our own experience with our houses and our bodies: “things fall apart.” That may be the ultimate darash of that so-called “fall narrative” in Genesis 3: left to their own devices and to ours, even the very best systems collapse. But the Great Commission concludes with an assertion of the constant presence of the one in whom all things hold together. So while the way of the world is indeed entropy—the decline and dissolution of energy and order, there is just as surely the potential for negentropy, renewal, renovation, reenergizing and reordering. That potential comes from the constant presence of the one in whom all things hold together. But that potential is only realized by those who have learned the timely appropriation and application of “what is new and what is old.” And that’s your mission, your reason for being in a university. It's God's echo that I hope you can hear from the foot of the unnamed mountain in the Galilee.

As you go together, ya'll, create learners by immersing them and teaching them so that they will develop the capacity to renew and renovate, to reenergize and reorder themselves and the world by the timely appropriation and application of “what is new and what is old.” And as you go, may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, now and forever. Go together with God’s blessing, and go together with God’s peace. Amen.

Out-takes on Midrash (cut on account of constraints of time and structure):

Now, I acknowledge that some cynics among us might contend that "midrash" is what preacher with a Ph.D. in biblical studies calls a sermon that has no basis in the critical biblical methods ofhis or her doctoral training. To which I would respond, "You say 'tomayto'; I say 'tomahto.'" And that would be good enough for me, except for the fact that it was precisely during my doctoral work that the Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod introduced me to the wonders of Rashi, the eleventh-century interpreter of Scripture who to this day has not been surpassed in the grace and clarity of his handling of midrash.

The result of such attention to the text is amazingly creative, imaginative, and occasionally fanciful interpretations of Scripture. Midrash has been called "a scholarly, holy game" played with Scripture (Gary Porton, "Midrash," Anchor Bible Dictionary IV.818). Lest you think, however, that characterization means it is somehow less than a serious endeavor, our colleagues in Psychology and Sociology and Education and Athletics can remind us that for us human beings with the large and highly wrinkled cerebral cortex, play is a very serious exercise that is indisipensible for learning and growing and developing cognitive and physical and social capacities.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.