have a rabbi say, “You can be like me”?
Of course you would drop your net. The rabbi believes you can do what he does. He thinks you can be like him.
Jesus then comes upon James and John, who are fishing with their father, Zebedee. They are apprentices, learning the family business, which in this case happens to be fishing.
If they are still with their father, then how old are they? Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? Twenty?
Jesus took some boys who didn’t make the cut and changed the course of human history.
Now being a disciple was terrifying and exhilarating and demanding—they never knew what the rabbi would do next. One account in the book of Matthew says that Jesus was talking to his disciples at Caesarea Philippi. This is one of those details that is easy to skip, but it is significant. Caesarea Philippi was the world center of the goat god, Pan. People came from all over the world to worship this god. There is a cliff with a giant crack in it that the followers of Pan believed was the place where the spirits from hell would come and go from the earth. The crack was called the Gates of Hell. They built a temple for Pan there and then a court next to it where people would engage in sexual acts with goats during the Pan worship festivals.8
And Jesus is there with his disciples. As good Jewish boys, they never would have gone to this place before. It is twenty-six miles from Galilee, where Jesus and his disciples are from. What was that walk like? Did Jesus even tell his disciples where they were going? Can you imagine them talking to each other behind his back? “When our parents find out about this, we are so busted!” The whole experience would have been riveting. Where are we going? What are we doing? What is our rabbi going to do next?
He tells them at Caesarea Philippi that upon this rock he is going to build his new witnessing community, and the Gates of Hell won’t be able to stop it. He is essentially saying that those kinds of people—the ones with the goats—are going to join the Jesus movement and it will be unstoppable. How would you as a disciple even begin to process this statement?
Rabbis were passionate and funny and quirky and unpredictable. They told stories and laughed and went to a lot of parties and never stopped asking questions and pushing their students and keeping them guessing. Rabbis devoted their energies to their students to help them learn to do what they did, and they used every opportunity they had to prepare their students.
“I Chose You”
At one point, Jesus’s disciples are riding in a boat and Jesus comes walking by on the water. And one of the disciples says, “If it’s you, let me come to you on the water.”
It’s a weird story, isn’t it?
And it gets even weirder when the disciple Peter jumps out of the boat because he wants to walk on water like Jesus.
But it makes sense—maybe not the water part, but the disciple part.
If you are a disciple, you have committed your entire life to being like your rabbi. If you see your rabbi walk on water, what do you immediately want to do? Walk on water.
So this disciple gets out on the water and he starts to sink, so he yells, “Jesus save me!”
And Jesus says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
Who does Peter lose faith in?
Not Jesus; Jesus is doing fine.
Peter loses faith in himself.
Peter loses faith that he can do what his rabbi is doing.
If the rabbi calls you to be his disciple, then he believes you can actually be like him. As we read the stories of Jesus’s life with his talmidim, his disciples, what do we find frustrates him to no end? When his disciples lose faith in themselves.
He even says to them at one point, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”9
The entire rabbinical system was based on the rabbi having faith in his disciples.
Let’s spend some time here, because the implications of this truth are astounding. A rabbi would only pick a disciple who he thought could actually do what he was doing. Notice how many places in the accounts of Jesus’s life he gets frustrated with his disciples.10 Because they are incapable? No, because of how capable they are. He sees what they could be and could do, and when they fall short, it provokes him to no end. It isn’t their failure that’s the problem; it’s their greatness. They don’t realize what they are capable of.
So at the end of his time with his disciples, Jesus has some final words for them. He tells them to go to the ends of the earth and make more disciples.11 And then he leaves. He promises to send his Spirit to guide them and give them power, but Jesus himself leaves the future of the movement in their hands. And he doesn’t stick around to make sure they don’t screw it up. He’s gone. He trusts that they can actually do it.
God has an incredibly high view of people. God believes that people are capable of amazing things.
I have been told that I need to believe in Jesus. Which is a good thing. But what I am learning is that Jesus believes in me.
I have been told that I need to have faith in God. Which is a good thing. But what I am learning is that God has faith in me.
The rabbi thinks we can be like him.
I was having lunch with a guy who was telling me about a struggle he had been having for a while. He said he knew he was a sinner and that he was fallen and that he would keep committing this one sin, and he knew he was going to keep committing this one sin because he was a sinner and his nature was evil and there was nothing he could do about it because of what a sinner he was . . .
Do I have to go on?
I was so depressed I wanted to bang my head on the table. His question was basically, why do I struggle like this?
And all that was running through my head during his questions was that his system was perfectly designed to achieve the results he was getting.
He’s convinced he is a sinner, he’s convinced he is going to sin, he has no hope against sin, he believes his basic nature is sin, and then he wonders why he keeps sinning.
And what was so startling to me is that he said he had just become a Christian.
It seemed to me that becoming a Christian had given him all sorts of new things to feel guilty about. I wondered if becoming a Christian had made his life not better but actually worse.
And then a little while later I had a similar experience. I was listening to a pastor speak, and his point was that people weren’t reading their Bibles enough and weren’t praying enough and weren’t being spiritual enough. If people would just do more—read their Bibles more and pray more and be more spiritual—basically just more “mores,” then God would be happy with them.
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