“Any rabbi would have done that sort of thing. You also have stories where Jesus let learners fall into embarrassing situations. I’ve read them many times. Rabbis didn’t mind allowing their students to fail. That storm story where he said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ is an examination moment. When he told them to feed that big crowd of hungry people, he was challenging them to do something special. When he scolded them about the children they’d tried to keep from bothering him, he was rebuking them, correcting them. He was saying, ‘I happen to like kids.’
