When Leaders Keep Learning, Part 2

Scripture — Matthew 5:1 (NRSV)

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying. . .

Devotion

In Matthew 5:1 we find the introduction to Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount, one of the deepest, richest, and most challenging teachings in scripture. The setting is similar to the feeding of the 5000 recounted later in Matthew 14:13-21 or the feeding of the 4000 described in Matthew 15:29-39. All three events occur in remote places, with the first and third explicitly mentioned as being on a mountain. And all three involve large crowds.

It is the crowds that I often think about. For a long time, I imagined these scenes similar to the Billy Graham crusades I heard and read about in my childhood (though I never actually attended one).  I pictured a speaker with a microphone and a big sound system as at an outdoor music festival. Because how else is somebody going to address several thousand people and be heard?

Except when you read the passage closely, you realize this image doesn’t actually match the Biblical description of the scene at all. It isn’t just the lack of microphones and speaker systems in Jesus’ day. Although Jesus certainly could have miraculously made his voice heard by several thousand people without a sound system, he didn’t seem to be addressing the crowds at all when he preached his famous sermon. The crowds are there, to be sure. People have come to be healed and maybe also to be fed, and perhaps in some cases just to see the spectacle. There are also indications that many of the people of Israel have experienced some deep spiritual hunger. Perhaps they have sensed a stirring of the Holy Spirit. But though Jesus does heal, and in the latter two events he also physically feeds the masses, his teaching is not a megaphone-style evangelistic crusade, but rather is directed to a small group of his disciples who follow him up the mountainside. These disciples are the “them” of Matthew 5:1 that Jesus speaks to and teaches.

In yesterday’s devotion, I wrote about the believers in Troas who are given an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the Christian faith; they are willing to invest time to learn from the teaching of Paul, staying up late into the night despite the fact that at least some of them are tired and Paul seems to be rather long-winded. That passage in Acts 20 was personally challenging to me to be willing to invest my own time and energy in order to learn from wise teachers and to deepen my faith and Biblical understanding.

In light of that thought, three more relevant observations come to mind from today’s passage. The first is that the disciples followed Jesus up the mountain. It’s a simple statement, but a very important one. They went to Jesus. They put themselves in a place to be with him and to hear his teaching. I’m sure the disciples could have come up with all sorts of reasons to skip out—because, in fact, I come up with reasons like that of my own. Tired legs. Tired minds. They need to do crowd control. Maybe they would rather have just relaxed. But because they made the effort to follow Jesus up the mountain and sit with him, they heard the profound, challenging, encouraging, wise, insightful words of the Sermon on the Mount.  And because of their effort, those words were passed on to disciples through the ages in the various gospel accounts.

The second observation is that most of the gathered crowds did _not _hear this sermon from Jesus. It was a small group of leaders committed to being with Jesus, and learning from Jesus, and listening to challenging and enriching teaching—so that Jesus’ words would spread through Jerusalem, Judea, and to the ends of the world in the days, months, and years that followed.

The leaders—in this case, Jesus’ small group of disciples—were committed to being learners. If there is any teaching in Scripture that constitutes spiritual meat and not just milk for infants (1 Corinthians 3:1-4;  Hebrews 5:12), it would include the Sermon on the Mount. These disciples of Jesus ate that spiritual meat. They sought out the teaching, listened to it, and in doing so became the ones who spread that word.

A third observation is that the continued learning of this small group of Jesus’ followers and developing leaders is that their learning took place in the context of ministering. It was as they fed the hungry and walked alongside Jesus in his daily ministry of caring for the sick and poor that they also continued to learn—so that what they learned wasn’t merely an intellectual abstraction or brain exercise, but something they could put into practice in daily life and in the kingdom work of God.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12).