What do you do for a living?

When we are first introduced to someone, we want to know who they are. We often ask, "What do you do for a living?" By learning something about the person's livelihood, we hope to learn something more about the person. For example, if we learn that the person we have just met is a doctor, that information tells us a great deal about the person's education, social circles, financial standing and even day-to-day routine. It is our natural tendency to define people by their vocations, at least initially.

What if you had the opportunity to step back in time and meet the Yeshua of the gospels and to ask him, "What do you do for a living?" What would he tell you? What kind of higher education does a savior need? What kind of social status does the job of Son of God carry? How much does a messiah make annually? What is the day-to-day routine for a Christ? Although these titles are the theological categories we normally use to define Yeshua, none of them were his actual vocation.

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Our image of a disciple maybe of a bearded man in a robe and sandals. Or it may be simply an image of one of the Twelve that followed Yeshua. We tend to think of discipleship as a New Testament, Gospel phenomenon, perhaps something Yeshua introduced when he chose his 12 disciples. This is wrong.

Long before the days of the Master, discipleship was already a well-established institution within Jewish culture. All the great sages, the rabbis, the sages among the Pharisees and the teachers of the Torah had disciples.

The Hebrew word for disciple is talmid. Talmid means student. The plural is talmidim: students. We translate talmidim as disciples. A talmid was a student of one of the sages. A talmid's job was to learn everything that his Master had to teach.

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