I came across a translation of the New Testament once in which the word disciple is translated as "student." Jesus was the Teacher; the ones who listened to him and then chose to follow him were his students. He came to teach them about the kingdom that had already come and that was to come even still, somehow. They came to him to learn how to recognize it as well as to live in and out of it. If they would listen to his teaching, he would teach them how to live in the way that God had envisioned for them all.
Of all of the names that we have for the Son of God — Christ, Master, Lord, Redeemer, Messiah, Savior — one that often gets the least attention is Teacher. Not, perhaps, because it is the most esoteric, abstract, or difficult to understand, but perhaps precisely because it is the easiest to understand. It is the one that is the closest to us and our experience, the one that is the closest to our status here on earth. We know something about teachers and students, and we have been one or the other or even both in our lives. However, we do not have much experience being Messiahs.
I do not always know exactly how I am to live in relationship to the Messiah. I was not really looking for one when this one found me. But now that I have been found, I might do well to listen to the Teacher. I am in need of someone who can teach me the ways of God, the ways to live so that I might become a reasonable facsimile of the person who I am suppose to become, the ways to become a reasonable and lively version of the saint who I was envisioned to become when God dreamed me into being in the first place.
But most of us seldom think of ourselves as the students of the Teacher. We are Christians: card-carrying members of institutions that have codified his teaching after all these years. In the name of becoming the mature Christians that Saint Paul envisioned, we too often forsake becoming and remaining the hungry students whom Jesus sought out and called his own.
Jim Wallis once wrote that many of us "skip the prophets, go straight to John 3:16, and then on to Saint Paul." We do not miss a great deal, of course, just the teachings of the One Who came among us to teach us how to live with each other. In our haste to clearly define what it means to be "the true Body of Christ," we often miss the continuing call to be "the student Body of Christ." We often behave as though we have nothing more to learn about those things.
We have a Teacher, one who came into our midst to teach us the way to live, but we spend a fair amount of our time, especially our time parsing the scriptures into little bits and pieces, straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
— Robert Benson, The Body Broken