Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

A second difference: It was repeatedly emphasized to rabbinic students that they were to “serve” their teacher. The rabbinic tradition lists forty-eight things through which knowledge of Torah is to be acquired. Besides study, careful listening, intelligence, fear of God, joy, and purity of heart, the list also includes “serving the wise.” This “serving” means that the student performs for the teacher all the services that would otherwise be done by a servant or a slave. Thus he washes the rabbi’s feet, serves at and clears the table, cleans the house and the courtyard, goes to the market and purchases necessities. Serving the teacher is an essential part of studying Torah. But with Jesus things were different, in a way that was unheard of in his time. The evangelist Mark repeats these words of his: “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). In its Lukan variant the saying is: “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).

Texts such as these distill what Jesus constantly inculcated in his disciples: a new way of being together. He does not allow himself to be served; instead, he is the servant at his disciples’ table. Hence the washing of feet before the last meal, which the evangelist John regards as so crucial that he tells of it instead of the universally familiar words of institution (John 13:1-20).

How different from the rabbinic tradition! And yet one must not be unjust to them, for when they say again and again that a disciple must serve his rabbi their intention was not to have dummies around them to make their lives easier. Their idea, rather, was that those who serve their teacher are constantly in the teacher’s presence, and that gives them the opportunity to learn the correct observance of the Law in practice. For as students accompany their rabbi through the whole day they see without interruption how their master observes the Torah, and so they themselves learn Torah. That is the background of the “serving of the wise,” and it is a very beautiful and moving background.

But we also see here the profound difference: in the Talmudic relationship of teacher and student everything revolves around the Torah. It is to become their way of life. The text of the Torah must be learned by heart. Its interpretation by great scholars must be studied. The practice of living the Torah every day must be rehearsed and memorized down to the smallest detail.

Jesus also taught his disciples and had them practice and internalize the right way of life, and the Torah was by no means absent, as we can see from the Sermon on the Mount. There we find a collection of rules for interpretation, for a right understanding of Torah, and also any number of tangible examples of how Torah is to be grasped and lived now, at the time of its eschatological fulfillment.

And yet for Jesus the Torah has a different position: it is transformed by the message of the arrival of the reign of God.⁵

Therefore Jesus does not first of all encourage the disciples he gathers around him to study the Torah; he begins instead by creating a new way of being together with them. Under the sign of the now-inbreaking reign of God, human community must also be renewed—finally to become what the Torah had always intended it to be.

And just here we find a third difference between Jesus’ disciples and those of the scribes and rabbis: for them what was crucial was the continuous communication of the traditional teaching and an ongoing close and ever-more-accurate interpretation of Torah. That demanded not only an orderly educational system but also a stabilitas loci

, a stability of place in an established house of study—and both the house of study and the educational system required a secure means of support. Most rabbis were craftsmen.

Jesus, on the other hand, did not conduct an established educational operation in rabbinic style; instead, being his disciple meant following him into always-changing situations. But within this constant change, accompanied by its eschatological pressure, there took place a daily exercise, a daily inculcation of the new community of discipleship—involving, for example, the rule that disciples had to forgive one another seventy-seven times a day, that is, constantly (Matt 18:21-22). They could not and must not live together any other way in the reign of God.

There was no stabilitas loci with Jesus. He traveled throughout Israel with his disciples in an unstable, itinerant fashion, totally surrendered to whatever the situation of the approaching reign of God demanded at any particular time. Jesus had no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58).

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