James Song

But God demonstrates his own love in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8.

If what it takes to be a Christian is to confess that I am a sinner and that Christ, out of his abundant love, died to atone for my sins, and that now I live only to embody with joy that same love, then I can’t call myself a Christian.

But the Bible is compelling as a metaphor that enlightens us and teaches us to live happy lives.

My definition of happiness is simple and derived from the Bible: love, and follow the way of Christ. All the ways that you diverge from this–worrying, hating, suffering from the guilt of perceived or actual wrongdoing, fear of disapproval, living out of duty and not love–are sources of unhappiness and the result of deviating from the Word of God.

I’m not interested in empirical proofs or logically persuading someone of the depth of meaning I see in the Bible. We simply live our lives, and the joy–the “eternal life”–that shines forth is the most compelling proof of the strength of our worldviews.

We simply embody and model, since we absorb and learn effectively when models show us some idea and we imitate. And when we talk about models, we implicitly take it that we are compelled by them and want to copy them.

So who is the ideal human? Are there various forms of the ideal human, merely one of which comes from the Christian context? Is there an ideal at a more fundamental level that unites all the various cases of ideals?

And how is it we can say with confidence that something is an ideal? We know it when we see it, I think, but how can we define it?

Still, I want to say that Christ is an ideal human. At the least, he is admirable and so far ahead of my own moral and spiritual state that I can enjoy the benefits of emulating his character. But how can we be certain?

To be more precise, Christ is a candidate for the ideal human in the moral and spiritual sphere. This delimiting of the domain of concern is maybe the first step to defining the ideal human.

We go to Christ for answers in the realm of how to live. We can examine and imitate Christ in daily living. One striking verse captures the project of Jesus in this regard: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

I understand this verse metaphorically. It has hit home in the last six months, while I’ve been teaching fourth to twelfth graders English.

The great challenge as a teacher has been dealing with the death by a thousand cuts inflicted on me by my students. I, in turn, assign relatively difficult readings and reading responses. But it’s a lopsided battle. One time, a student left my class in the middle of a lesson, because she was hungry. She went off to the cafeteria for an early lunch.

I was slighted, but why shouldn’t a hungry human eat her lunch, when the only reason not to do so is because she is forced to attend an institution because her culture and the state group her with a demographic that cannot be trusted to make its own decision, justly or unjustly?

These unfortunate set of events–the student being forced to do something she doesn’t want to, the teacher being disobeyed and insulted–is in part due to the failure of the system.

We should ask, when does the system of school work ideally, and in what ways does it fail? What are the inefficiencies of the system and how do we get rid of it?

How do you address the inefficiency caused by students’ lack of sleep?

Another time, I explained how to write a reading response in great detail. A student criticized me for being confusing because I gave too much information. Later, I repeated the directions with less detail, simply outlining the main points. The same student pointed out that this time I was not being detailed enough.

It may seem that the student is being unreasonable, but I don’t want to dismiss the matter just like that. It is a symptom of some deeper issue in the student’s life, which a teacher might help heal.1 I admire the principle that it is always incumbent on the teacher to make learning as effective and efficient as possible for the student. The teacher should teach with unconditional generosity.

A few weeks after the clarification incident, my students suggested that they change their schedules–to have P.E. as their first session, followed by the sessions of English literature, instead of the other way around. So the adjustment was made. After a few days of showing up to the morning P.E. sessions, they started to use them to catch up on sleep. Four of my five students came three times or less to the ten sessions we had.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that many a teacher’s blood pressure has gone up because of the incessant requests to repeat directions, even from the smart students. Here, AI would relieve much unnecessary stress.

Occassionally, I ask what Christ would do.

What has Jesus done? While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He suffered death by a betrayal by his close friends, forty lashes of whips with spikes attached, unjust legal proceedings, the judgment by a mob that wanted to see him dead over an actual criminal, humiliation by being stripped naked and crucified in front of his friends and family, the censure of the man who was crucified beside him, and the spiritual abandonment by God.2

If we take for granted that the shedding of innocent blood atones for someone’s sins, then we see that Christ went through all the suffering–in other words, denied himself–in order to save people from their sins and offer them happy lives.

The Bible says we will find our life when we lose it. This is acted out in Christ. He denied himself everything and suffered unjust persecution and death sentence. And in dying, he found life. Resurrection means this: you die in order to live. You deny yourself everything and gain more.

In other words, we accept everything. We suffer all. The Bible is foolish. It says we should not stop the suffering and death coming our way, and that in fact eternal life awaits those who patiently endure.

When we die for others, we find life–peace, joy, and love–for ourselves and others. As Jesus says in John 12:24 says: Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.

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Notes:

  1. So a teacher can serve as a healer. And, as a model human always in touch with people whom he influences, a sort of preacher. So a school teacher is in the business of teaching, preaching, and healing, like Jesus: and Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people (Matt. 4:23). ↩

  2. In math, we can’t reject the right answer. How can it be that the ideal human, the sort of truth that Jesus embodied, was rejected? ↩