Is 50:4-6 & Jn 15:15-17
27 August 2006
“Not Servants, But Friends”
A couple of days after I arrived in Philadelphia to go to seminary, I decided to take a walk. (This was September ’91, before Banu had arrived on the scene!) I wanted to go exploring. So I started off, heading west down US Route 30, Lancaster Avenue. That’s in the direction of what’s called in the Philadelphia area, the Main Line, a string of suburbs stretching out from the city. I walked several miles that day.
At a gas station, I came upon some people having a car wash. It was a church group, and they were raising money for mission work. I obviously didn’t have a car, but I went over to talk with them and see what was going on. There was one guy, a little younger than me, who spent the most time talking with me. I’ll call him “Jay,” though that wasn’t his real name.
He told me they were with the Greater Philadelphia Church of Christ. That’s different from the UCC, the United Church of Christ, and from the Churches of Christ, such as the one next to Blockbuster Video on Fairmount Avenue. He invited me to worship with them on Sunday; he said that they were meeting in a theater at Haverford College, several more miles down the road. After I explained that I left my car in Tennessee, he offered to pick me up Sunday morning. So I agreed and walked back to school.
The congregation was a bit unusual. I would guess that there were about three or four hundred in attendance—and about ninety percent were in my age range. That is, almost everyone was either in their late teens or their twenties. (I was 26 at the time.) The service was energetic, though they didn’t believe in playing music during worship. But I went there for the first two or three Sundays I was in Philly.
Jay and the others were very friendly. They invited me to play volleyball at the house of one of the pastors. So I did that, and they also invited me to a Bible study. That’s when things started to get…weird.
It was soon quite clear that this wasn’t a normal Bible study, in which everyone shares freely. It became apparent that I was the only one who was expected to answer. Posed to me was stuff like, “Do you believe that all Christians are disciples?”, or “Is there a difference between Christians and disciples?” Actually, those aren’t bad questions! My thinking was, “Well, let’s look into it, and see what we come up with.”
I noticed that Jay seemed to keep deferring to another guy, whose name now escapes me. (I’ll call him “Joe.”) It seemed rather strange. In any event, they weren’t interested in a really honest, open discussion. It felt like an interrogation. Actually, I found it somewhat amusing. I said to them, “Am I giving the right answers?”
When I went home that night, I figured I’d had enough of that, and I started going to the church across the street from school—to Overbrook Presbyterian. I joined the church in December, and I officially became a Presbyterian. (The rest, as they say, is history!)
However, the Greater Philly Church of Christ wasn’t through with me! A couple of weeks later, at about 11pm, there’s a knock on the door of my room. In walks Joe and some other guy I’ve never seen before; he never utters a sound during the whole visit. Joe begins by politely asking me where I’ve been. I tell him I’ve been going to the Presbyterian Church across the street.
Joe tries to convince me to return to their church. When he senses that he’s failing in that task, I begin to detect hostility in his voice. “You know,” he says, as he looks around my dorm room, “just because you’re in seminary, it doesn’t make you a disciple.” And my response is this: “You know, I think you guys are a cult.” So off they go, never to be seen again.
About a year or so later, I did happen to see Jay in the supermarket. I went over to talk with him, but he pretended like he didn’t see me and took off in the other direction.
I’ve told you this story as an example of what discipling is not. I don’t know if the Greater Philadelphia Church of Christ is exactly a cult, but they do have cult-like ways—or at least, they did. I can’t speak about their present day behavior. I’m actually thankful for the experience I had with them. I can better understand how people get sucked into cults, especially those who are unsure of themselves. (Not that I’m claiming to be the Rock of Gibraltar myself!)
Discipling is the last in my current sermon series on spiritual disciplines. Our friend Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, in her Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, says that discipling meets the desire “to be in a relationship where I am encouraged, or where I encourage another, to become an apprentice of Jesus.”[1]
To become an “apprentice” of Jesus—that has a less “churchy” feel to it. For those who are fans of Donald Trump and his TV show, “The Apprentice,” it is definitely not churchy. (“You’re fired!”)
Fortunately, we can turn to other sources to discover what discipling is all about. One of them is our first reading, from Isaiah 50. This is the third of the so-called “Servant Songs.” The others are in chapters 42 and 49, and the last one begins in chapter 52 and runs through 53. That’s the song of the “Suffering Servant.”
Some say the songs are about the prophet himself, others say they’re about the nation of Israel, and others see them as looking ahead to the Messiah. I would say that there’s probably truth in all of those viewpoints.
But what can we learn here about discipling? There’s a great deal of overlap between discipling and teachability, the discipline I preached on two weeks ago. We can see that reflected right here in the text of Isaiah 50. There’s an interesting word in verse 4: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens—wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.”
There’s a single Hebrew word translated as both “teacher” and as “those who are taught.” It is dMuli (limmud). If you read this in different versions of the Bible, you’ll see a variety of translations. Besides “teacher” and “those who are taught,” it’s also translated as “learned” and “learner,” “expert” and “disciple.” I think you get the idea: one word that means both “teacher” and “student.”
As I said two weeks ago, “The best teachers always practice the art of teachability.” They don’t pretend to know it all; they remain open to discovery. And thinking of our Lord as a teacher, I said, “In Jesus, the one who teaches, and the one who is taught, are in perfect harmony.”
In verse 5, we continue down this road of a “discipler” willing to be “discipled.” “The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward.” How often do we really want to hear from God? How often are we willing to set aside all the junk in our lives and really listen? I fear that we’re rebellious, that we turn backward, more often than we know.
But this guy seems to be really committed! Verse 6: “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.”
In his book, Deutero-Isaiah, George Knight says, “The vast majority of peoples at all ages of the world have known only one answer to the problem of commanding obedience—strike your [servants] and compel [them] to obey. However, this Servant had learned from Yahweh neither to run away nor to rebel, nor even to hit back, but instead to offer his back to the bullies, the average [people].”[2]
This verse brings us into the “real world,” where people rely on force and control to get things done. It’s nice to talk about Jesus and turning the other cheek, but do we practice what we preach? Do we pursue a policy of vengeance, of retaliation? Do we say (or at least, think), “I’m gonna get you—just wait and see!”
Jesus turns the “real world’s” way of doing things upside down. Look at the gospel reading in John 15. Jesus lets his disciples know that, to him, they’re not servants, but friends. He treats them as equals. He dispenses with the bullying tactics that we’re so familiar with. He doesn’t play games, like being passive aggressive.
Because Jesus thinks of them not as servants, but friends, he lets the disciples know, “I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (v. 15). Last week, I said that the better we learn the art of secrecy, the more transparent we become. Jesus is the best example of this. He doesn’t keep his disciples, his friends, in the dark. He’s completely open with them—probably more open than they, and we, at times would like!
Still, his openness doesn’t mean that Jesus has no agenda! He has an agenda, all right—and you better believe it’s a nefarious one! John unveils the intentions of Jesus in verse 17: “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” Imagine such a thing!
It might seem that if love is the motivation for Jesus’ discipling of others, he’d be willing to do whatever it takes to make sure no one rejects him. In John 6, when “many of his disciples [turn] back and no longer [go] about with him,” Jesus simply asks “the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’” (vv. 66-67).
He doesn’t go running after the ones who left; he doesn’t try to convince them to stay. Jesus respects them and their free will enough to not try to manipulate them. He doesn’t violate those boundaries.
Okay, so far we’ve looked at the practice of discipling as being “in a relationship where I am encouraged, or where I encourage another, to become an apprentice of Jesus.” I’ve told a story as an example of how not to disciple, and I’ve given some examples from the Bible as how to disciple.
Here’s a quick review. Isaiah 50 shows us how teachers and students are two sides of the same coin. It also dramatically underlines the need for humility. In the ancient Middle East, yanking out the hairs of a man’s beard was a very serious, not to mention painful, insult!
In John 15, we see that the best teachers learn to be friends with their students, with their apprentices. That doesn’t mean that they violate the boundaries that are present. If love is guiding them, they will do what they can to teach them, to mentor them. But ultimately, it’s a two way street. Respect for self-determination must be maintained.
Those are some of the “how to’s.” For the “how not to’s,” look at the flip side. Instead of being teachable and humble, be overbearing and have a know-it-all attitude. Instead of learning to be a friend, be hostile—or at least, be distant. Instead of respecting the other’s free will, use tactics of control.
I want to return to what the people in my story asked of me. I may have disagreed with their methods, but that doesn’t negate the validity of their questions. “Do you believe that all Christians are disciples?” I would say that, if we’re thinking of the truest meaning of those words, the answer has to be “yes.” But if we consider the way most people take those words, the answer is clearly “no.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the word “disciple” seem to suggest something more intense, more dedicated, than the word “Christian”? In my opinion, it shouldn’t, but there it is. I think we more readily embrace being “Christian” than being a “disciple.” We like to delude ourselves into believing that being Christian doesn’t take as much commitment as being a disciple.
Here’s another way of looking at it: we may not feel like we’re good enough, or know enough, to be a disciple. As if we could ever be good enough or know enough! That’s kind of the whole point to being a disciple!
In his essay for this Sunday, “Hearts on Pilgrimage,” Daniel Clendenin considers Jesus’ question to the twelve in John 6, “Do you also wish to go away?” “Authentic spirituality [and authentic discipling] includes rather than excludes whatever is bothering you most,” he says. “We need not solve every problem or answer every question to stay the faith. We can let the ‘hard sayings’ of Jesus [the things we have trouble with] stand without softening them, or perhaps even understanding them.”[3]
As Calhoun says in her book, a key part of discipling is “keeping company with Jesus as you fulfill his command to go and make disciples.”[4] Keeping company with someone means that it doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a journey. And it’s a journey that we have to take together.