“See one, do one, teach one,” is an old adage that has been passed down through generations of medical professionals. I believe it originally referred to surgery, but it applies to manufacturing, construction, machining and all sorts of physical tasks. You watch someone do it, perhaps for a while. Then you try it on your own, and hopefully become proficient. Eventually you teach others, and the pattern repeats.
It is always fascinating to me that
the best way to truly know something is to have to teach it. There’s something about planning what you are
going to present, and thinking through what you are teaching as you are doing
it, that instills things deeply in our brains.
There have been many things I thought I knew, but found that I really
didn’t know until I had to teach it.
Only then did real mastery of a task or subject start to happen.
We hope that those
who are teachers do truly have mastery of what they are doing. They should be proficient at their field before
they try to teach others. Sadly, there
is another old adage, “Those who can’t, teach.”
I don’t like that one at all. And
yet, when I consider the various teachers I have in schooling throughout life,
it’s been a mix. It is incredible to be
taught by someone who is a master of the craft and leader in the field! You can also tell when a person has become a
teacher because they’ve failed at something in the real world, and only because
they can’t do anything else, do they teach.
They’re usually terrible teachers.
Last Sunday I
brought up an interesting thing in Matthew’s gospel about teaching. I mentioned that Jesus had sent his disciples
on missionary journeys and equipped them to do many things. They were sent out to proclaim that the
Kingdom of God had come near; and they could cure the sick, raise the dead, and
cleanse leprosy. It is an astonishing
list of things to do. Whether the
disciple were actually capable of all that isn’t known. It seems historically doubtful to me. Regardless, what is not on that list is
teaching. Jesus does not commission his
disciples to go out and teach at that point.
Proclaiming that the Kingdom of God has come near is not the same as
teaching.
Then today, we
read in the very last two verses of Matthew’s gospel that Jesus sends them out
to all nations to baptize and, “teaching them to obey everything that I have
commanded you.”
It seems that only
after they have seen Jesus’ ministry, and his death, and his resurrected body
are they now equipped enough to be given the role of teaching.
It is not an
accidental irony that last week Matthew’s gospel told us that the guards who
were assigned to Jesus’ tomb, when they saw what happened, went to the
religious leaders and reported it. The
religious leaders conspire, pay off the guards, and send them out to teach
lies. So ultimately we have the
religious leaders scheming to teach lies and Jesus’ disciples commissioned to
go out and teach the truth.
We’ll turn to what
the disciples are supposed to teach in just a moment. But before that, we need to recognize
something about the competence of these disciples to teach. Was it the competence of, “See one, do one,
teach one”? Or was it more along the
lines of, “Those who can’t, teach”? You
see, there’s a little detail that I skipped over. Our English translators add one small word
when they translated from Greek to English.
We read, “When [the disciples] saw [Jesus] they worshipped him; but some
doubted.” The added word is “some”. A stricter translation would be, “When they
saw him they worshipped him; but doubted.”
In other words, it wasn’t that some of them doubted. They all had some measure of doubt.
How could these
disciples have the resurrected Jesus standing right in front of them but still
have doubts?!? What level of proof for
the resurrection could they possibly want?
If I’m using old quotes I want to bring up, “Seeing is believing.”
There’s something
else going on here. If I’m honest, no
one knows exactly what Matthew means by this as he tells us. But it is suggested, and it seems to me to be
a good suggestion, is for Matthew, doubt and worship can work together. For Matthew faith and doubt are not
opposites. They often get mixed
together. For Matthew, the opposite of
faith is not doubt. It is fear.
Remember, what
happened to the guards at the tomb when the angel descended? …these guards who are later paid off to go
and teach lies about Jesus? They have no
faith in Jesus. Mattew told us, “For
fear of [the angel] the guards shook and became like dead men.
Doubt is not the
opposite of faith. Again, true faith and
true worship often incorporate doubts.
But fear is the opposite of faith.
The angel said to the women, who were people of faith, “Do not be
afraid.”
So let’s put
teaching, faith, and doubts all together as we consider this commission from
Jesus to go out into all nations to baptize, and to teach everything that he
has commanded.
How are we to
teach if we have doubts about what we are teaching? Shouldn’t we know the stories of Jesus down
cold and be absolutely certain of the truth of our faith before we go out and
teach?
It would certainly
be nice! But consider this, the
situation of the disciples of Jesus that day was no different than our
own. They had their doubts. They were imperfect; in fact they had just
recently all just abandoned Jesus and fled!
Here’s something
interesting. Matthew tells us that the
disciples all deserted Jesus and fled when he was arrested. Peter denies Jesus three times and then goes
out and weeps bitterly. But Matthew
never tells us they were afraid. Surely
they were! But only the guards are
actually described by Matthew as being paralyzed by fear.
We may feel
woefully unequipped to spread the gospel.
We may have our questions and our doubts. But that doesn’t seem to matter to God. Perhaps we are all the more effective in our
evangelism because of our questions and doubts.
That’s counter-intuitive, but I think it is correct. If God wanted the disciples to be perfect in
their faith, and if God wanted us to be perfect in our faith before we go out
and teach, God would have made us so.
But God has not. We have from God
what God wants us to have. The thing we
should not be is afraid. It is fear, not
doubt, that paralyzes faith.
We do not live in
a land that legally punishes us for being Christians or for proclaiming the
faith. But we are apt to be afraid. We fear that others will think us to be nut
cases, or that we are religious fanatics.
We do not want to annoy people the way door-to-door evangelists do. We have convinced ourselves that faith is a
private thing and that we are being respectful by not sharing it. But is that not actually a position that is being
driven by fear?
Okay, we need to
be honest with ourselves. Maybe we are so
much afraid that we should question the depth of our faith. Do we really believe that God is salvation
for the world? If yes, then why are we
afraid of it?
Perhaps as
Matthew’s gospel ends it even meets us in the fears that we wish we didn’t have
– fears, mixed with doubts, mixed with limitations, mixed with tiredness, mixed
with failures, mixed with a whole host of conditions that come from our human
brokenness.
Jesus gives his
disciples a profound task: Make
disciples. Baptize them under the name
and the authority of the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We should get a sense of grandeur here. We should realize the enormity of the honor
Jesus has bestowed upon us. The
disciples, and us too, are to be the vehicles for the salvation of the world.
No honor is
greater than God telling you, “I choose you to bear my name to the world.”
And finally, when
our fears do threaten to get the best of us, we remember Jesus very final words
in Matthew’s gospel, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The resurrected Jesus, who proved to be more
powerful than death, is with us as we go about teaching and making disciples,
and taking on the honor of bearing God’s name.
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