However,
Jesus not only demonstrates intellectual knowledge but also earthy, tangible
service, though always to serve the greater purpose of his ministry. His sermons were not designed for academic
audiences but popular ones. His
audiences were primarily farmers and fishermen.
His parables frequently use blue-collar metaphors familiar to them. One of the most explicit stories of Jesus’s
concern for the practical comes in his healing of the paralytic. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us that a
crippled man is brought to Jesus. He is
lowered through the roof of the house in which Jesus is teaching. When the man is lowered to him, he announces
that the man’s sins are forgiven. The
Pharisees balk, murmuring to themselves that this is blasphemy. Jesus knows their hearts and announces that
he will prove his authority to forgive sin by healing the man. We see in this that Jesus’s tangible ministry
is spurred by a spiritual imperative.
Time would fail me to explore other examples like the feeding of the
multitudes, his social discourse in the Sermon on the Mount, his affirmation of
paying taxes to Caesar, even raising the dead.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Jesus believes that a bodily life must be
grounded in a spiritual foundation.
Most
striking for our purposes, however, is how Jesus is passionately concerned with
the hearts of his hearers over the particularities of how they make a
living. We read in Matthew, Mark, and
Luke that a rich young ruler came to Jesus and asked how he may inherit eternal
life. He appeared to have all the
correct practices, was obviously wealthy, had a promising political career
ahead, and showed a real desire to follow Jesus. To use Berry College language, his “head” and
his “hands” appeared to be in order.
Then Jesus, loving him, drops a dramatic challenge upon the young
man. “Go, sell what you possess and give
to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Rather than follow, this pious, intelligent,
practical young man goes away sad. In
saying this, Jesus was not saying that all who follow him must be poor and
destitute. We see numerous people in the
Bible who are wealthy Christians. Yet
Jesus knows something about this man; Mammon is his god and he will never be
truly fulfilled until he casts his idol into the dust. He must drop everything and follow this
itinerant preacher for as long as he has left on Earth. This man must leave his doubtlessly promising
political career, all the financial gain he has achieved through his job, and
follow the Master, an unwise career move in any century. In saying this, Jesus illustrates what he
taught in the Sermon on the Mount: “No one can serve two masters, for either he
will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and
despise the other. You cannot serve God
and money.” For Jesus, the heart of what
we do cannot be devoted to profit. It
must be devoted to God.
The
greatest challenge to the mechanical/employability view of education is the
very core of Jesus’s life and teaching.
Bill Gates told the National Governors Association in February 2011 that
“everybody should have a sense of which of the colleges—both community and
four-year institutions—are doing very well.
You can even break that down by the departments. […] The amount of
subsidation is not that well-correlated to the areas that actually create jobs
in the state—that create income in the state.”
And surely this is common sense, right?
Pour taxpayer resources into departments which create jobs, take the
humanities off of life support, and you will maximize state investment in
education. Let the English majors be
baristas and let the hard sciences do the real work in the economy. Isn’t that what China and Japan do? But the very premise of the Gospel Jesus
preaches, the very premise of the entire Bible, is that truth must be revealed
from the outside. It is not enough that
students graduate, make money, create jobs, and figure out who they are on
their own. The Bible says that truth
must be revealed from without, not from within.
Jesus tells us that he came that we might have life and have it more
abundantly. He tells us that the
Scriptures have been fulfilled within our hearing. He tells us that we are in far more trouble
than we ever realized in the Sermon on the Mount. Most importantly of all, he tells us that
greater love than we can possibly imagine has come in the body of the modest
carpenter calling us home.
This is
why Christianity cannot affirm a libertarian view of education. Education cannot consist solely in acquiring
skills for a marketplace. Christians
throughout the centuries have followed Christ in affirming that education must
be holistic. We cannot be only concerned
with right belief, lest we become like the teachers of the law who believed
many of the right things yet were “whitewashed tombs”, clean on the outside yet
full of death. Nor may we be concerned
only with the pragmatics and measurable outcomes (or incomes) of education lest
we become like the rich young ruler who was successful and affluent, yet in the
end worshiped money and comfort.
Christian education must be fully embodied, recognizing that Jesus
Christ, the Truth, is concerned with the whole person. Jesus’s final charge to the newly-formed
Church is to “Go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything
I have commanded you. And surely I am
with you always, even until the end of the age.” Disciples cannot make themselves no matter
how much money or job fulfillment they find.
They must be taught,
head, heart, and hands.
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