Judas Was on the Team
A devotional for your next professional development day.
Read it to your staff. Read it to yourself first.
Teachers exist to help people learn. That is the whole job. And because that is the job, every teacher gets graded on whether it worked.
You have done the grading yourself. You sat through a graduate seminar, took the notes, kept what was useful, argued with the rest in the margins, and at the end of the term the university handed you a form and asked you to evaluate the man. Nobody found that strange. It is what a teacher is for.
Your teachers live under the same arrangement right now. Walkthroughs, parent conferences, the spring survey, the conversation you overheard in the hallway on Tuesday. Your students are grading them too, and they are not waiting for a form.
Carry that into your next in-service day and ask one simple question: Is Jesus your teacher, or your Lord?
Same table, one word different
Matthew 26. The Last Supper. Jesus tells the twelve that one of them will betray him, and Matthew records what happens next in a detail most people read past.
When it was evening, Jesus sat down at the table with the Twelve. While they were eating, he said, “I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me.”
Greatly distressed, each one asked in turn, “Am I the one, Lord?”
He replied, “One of you who has just eaten from this bowl with me will betray me. For the Son of Man must die, as the Scriptures declared long ago. But how terrible it will be for the one who betrays him. It would be far better for that man if he had never been born!”
Judas, the one who would betray him, also asked, “Rabbi, am I the one?”
And Jesus told him, “You have said it.”
Matthew 26:20 through 25 (NLT)
Same table. Same question. One word different. Eleven men said Lord. One man said Rabbi.
It happens again in the garden a few hours later. “Judas came straight to Jesus. ‘Greetings, Rabbi!’ he exclaimed and gave him the kiss” (Matthew 26:49). In Matthew’s gospel, Judas never once calls Jesus Lord.
Judas was not an atheist. He was a part of the core twelve disciples for three years. He saw the miracles. He heard every sermon. He handled the money. He was on the team. He just filed Jesus under Teacher.
A teacher is someone you grade
What Judas wanted is what most of us want. A good teacher who shows us how to lead better, parent better, run a better school. We take the notes and we keep what works.
That arrangement is comfortable because it leaves the authority where you can reach it. You decide which ideas apply to your situation. You decide which ones were written for a different kind of school, a different kind of board, a different decade. You are still holding the eval form.
The test between the two words is simple: A teacher you obey when you agree with him. A Lord you obey when you don’t.
You can only call a living man Lord
The eleven had the better word, but the word is not what made them right. Three days after that meal, the man they called Lord walked out of a tomb.
You can admire a dead teacher for the rest of your life. You can quote him, build a school on his ideas, hang his sayings in the hallway, and nobody will stop you. We honor plenty of dead teachers. A living Lord is still giving orders, and he expects them carried out.
Put your school in the room
Jesus is on the wall in your building. He is in the mission statement, the chapel schedule, the Bible curriculum, the statement of faith every teacher signed. Nobody doubts he is present. Matthew’s question is what he is present as.
A school can put Jesus at the center of everything it teaches and still run him as Teacher. Strip the living Lord out and what is left is a private school with chapel. Good values, small classes, a strong statement of faith, and a dead teacher whose notes everyone finds helpful. Plenty of schools run exactly that way and never notice, because everything on the wall still says Jesus.
He is not on the wall. He is in the building. Lord of the budget meeting, Lord of the hiring decision, Lord of the conversation at 3:10 and the way your staff treat the parent who is hard to love.
Ask your staff. Ask yourself first.
Most people in your building would say Jesus is Lord if you handed them a form. So would Judas, probably. Forms do not settle it. Your week does.
Two questions for the room, and you answer first, out loud. They are not about the school. They are about you. Faith starts there, and the school follows the people in it.
Where do I take Jesus’ notes but not his orders? Think of all the domains of your life. Your professional life, your planning, your home life, how you talk to students, how you talk to colleagues, how you talk to parents, your money, your calendar, etc.
Where is Jesus still just Teacher to me? The place where you agree with him most and obey him least is usually the answer.
If you want to give this one, I built a version you can hand to a staff meeting: the opening discussion, the Scripture, the teaching in plain words, and the two questions, all printed on the page. Read it for yourself before you hand it to anyone. Download the staff devotional. It takes twelve minutes, and it will change the temperature of the day.
