“‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher),” reads today’s Gospel.

“Suppose some non-Jewish people read this,” thought John. “They might not know what a Rabbi is, so I’d better translate that and explain it.”

Was Jesus actually a Rabbi? Given the issues that drove his contemporaries to distraction, one would think John might have had that in mind when he concluded that all the world wouldn’t hold all the books that could have been written about Jesus. Was he a part-time carpenter/part-time Rabbi? “The only thing more reliable than our Talmudic exegesis is our Jerusalem four-bedroom Craftsman!” might have made a persuasive slogan.

“Jewish people will read it too,” John thought. “I’m just going to spell it out for everybody that Andrew and I called Jesus ‘Rabbi,’ guessing that he’d discern correctly that we knew He knew that we knew He wasn’t a rabbi, but we esteemed His knowledge highly enough that our best way of addressing Him was to call him ‘Rabbi’ because we knew His authority and knowledge were such that in the minds of any intelligent observer, He had the credibility of a Rabbi. And He did pick up on that, of course, and He had a good humor about it.

“Jews and non-Jews alike, that is how I mean ‘Rabbi,’ and that is how I mean ‘Teacher.”

At my service, I’ll ask that the Scriptures be read from the Bible I’ve had since the ’70s, lest people wonder, “How sad that he was impressed by that clumsy syntax!”

Translations can only do so much. As a Christian, my religious life began with the Bible, as explained to me by teachers and adults, as investigated and questioned by myself and my friends, as we tried to reconcile what we were told with what made sense to us at the time.

Age brought exposure to the world, with its unfamiliar peoples, countries, cultures, and religions. We learned to translate the Bible as a vehicle of history, often in violent disagreement with other scriptures and the religions inspired by them.

Christianity in and of itself can be a self-supporting system founded upon a vast network of mutually confirming explanations. A cosmology is created in which all other religions and cultures are explained in ways that confirm the privileged, primary place of Christianity. But to leap across the divide and read the literature of the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Jews, the Muslims, not from the outside, but within them, one realizes that the world needn’t even include Christianity at all to be explained in religious terms.

The Christian needs to interpret this complexity and find for himself, in his own life, a place for the Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, for Jesus, the Catholic Church, the Buddhists, the Jews, agnostics and atheists, the universe.

“There is but one Teacher, and you are all students,” Jesus said.

And so we are– students, trying to make sense of things.