We all understand the roles of Obi-Wan and Yoda in training Luke. Right?

Both sought to open his mind to the Force., and to understand the nature of the power locked away in him.

Both sought to nurture him to fight for good, and to abhor evil.

Both wanted to protect him from truths that would harm him, and provide him with the truths that would guide him.

Both wanted him to understand his weaknesses so that he could best overcome them.

Both of them wanted him to find inner peace, to quiet his mind to better listen to the Force.

Both of them wanted him to pass on the Jedi way, so that their lofty purpose could be reborn in the Galaxy.

Both of them wanted to teach Luke that a Jedi is passive, only using the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

Both of them wanted him to avoid anger, fear, aggression, for the Dark Side are they.

Both of them wanted him to do the right thing.

And both of them wanted Luke to kill Darth Vader.

Murder him.
Chop him in half.
Destroy him.


...

err?

With all the time and effort Obi-Wan and Yoda have taken to teach Luke the ways of the Force as well as the Jedi philosophy regarding the defense of peace and justice, even at the expense of their own lives, that last bit (you know, the murder part) seems just a tad bit contradictory. Forget contradictory, it's a betrayal of the Jedi way.

Beyond that, they both must have learned how the Jedi were caught up in a web of deception that led the Jedi into open warfare, and to their demise. And yet here they are, apparently wanting Luke to fight the last battle of the Clone Wars, the last battle to protect the Republic from the Dark Side, using the exact same methods that proved ineffective the last go around.
Or are they? Yes, and no.

The Lessons of Obi-Wan:
Firstly, let's look at Obi-Wan, and what his experiences have taught him. As a padawan, Obi-Wan was the first Jedi to defeat a Sith in combat in an age or more. Obi-Wan's tenacity, and his adherence to the principles of the Jedi had served him well.

And yet the Sith monster had grown a new head in the place of Maul's, and this next one was not so easy to dispatch. Obi-Wan and his padawan Anakin were both stricken down by Dooku. Only by virtue of Yoda's Jedi prowess were either of them saved, and Dooku sent running to the safety of his master. It was not until later, when a wiser Anakin and a still resolute Obi-Wan meet Dooku again, that they defeat him.

Sith are dropping, slowly, all around Obi-Wan. He can see the path to victory over the Sith, because he has seen them defeated, killed, firsthand...

And even then..another head is growing on the beast.

By the time Obi-Wan fights his last battle with the Sith, he knows one thing - if you keep coming, if you don't let them instill fear in you, you can win. But Obi-Wan has always been fighting the apprentice, or at least a Sith underling - regardless, the products of Sith teachings, not the source. He's never fought the Master. For that reason, Obi-Wan's perception on how to defeat evil may be skewed, or at least incomplete.

And so Obi-Wan is charged by Yoda with one of his last campaigns: "Defeat the Sith we must." He moves to battle the last evil head to grow in the place of Maul, in the place of Dooku, in the place of Ventress: His own padawan, friend, brother in life and arms, Anakin.

The outcome, though undoubtedly painful to endure, doesn't do much to change Obi-Wan's perceptions on the matter of Sith, and how to defeat them. Show no fear, show no conflict, show no thought for oneself or those dear to you. There is no one more important to deal with than your quarry. When Obi-Wan left Anakin on the dark slopes of Mustafar, literally ablaze with hatred and malice, Obi-Wan had been proven right again. Good defeated Evil, because Good had to.

And yet...the beast was again growing another head...

The Teachings of Yoda:
Let's look now at Yoda's experience with the Sith. Prior to his direct involvement in the fight, the Galaxy had benefited from a long absence of the Sith. Then, like Obi-Wan, Yoda was forced to endure the pain and disappointment of fighting his own former padawan: Dooku.

Yoda, like Mace, had seen the path to victory much the way Obi-Wan did. In fact, Yoda appears to have even fostered that viewpoint in him and other Jedi on his watch. And like Mace, Yoda marches headlong into battle, but perhaps with a little more reluctance than Mace or Obi-Wan. It's clear to the master that something is amiss, and it troubles him.

He and Dooku fight, and he nearly defeats him by employing the same tactics - show no fear, be resolute in the fight for good over evil. But Dooku, unlike Maul, changes the playing board and makes his old Master make a choice - defeat a Sith, or save two lives (Obi-Wan and Anakin).

Yoda cuts off his withering attack and opts to save his Jedi. And now, already we start to see a change in Yoda's approach. Whereas Obi-Wan is relentless and unafraid, Yoda sees there are some things not worth sacrificing. Yoda listens intently to the Force, and the Force guides him. Oddly, in this case, it guides him away from destroying a Sith.

On Yoda's next battle with the Sith, he faces the Master, Darth Sidious. Again Yoda pushes through the darkness and deceit, through the fear and doubt, to strike at the heart of the Sith Menace. In the process, though, Yoda finds that the harder he fights, and the more Force abilities he calls upon, the more he strikes out in Righteousness to defeat this blight on civilization and peace, the more he loses. As Stover said, the brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

From both of these experiences, Yoda learns a hard lesson, even at his venerable age of 9 centuries: You can not fight the Sith from without. You can not espouse the ideas of peace and justice, and seek to defeat evil with violence and aggression. To strike out with vengeful righteousness, however rooted in good intention, is to feed the powerhouse that is the Sith. They crave anger, the thirst aggression, and they grow fear. They are gathered to these things as if ghosts to the living, coveting them for their own life force. It gives them focus.

At the end of this lesson, with his last clawing effort, Yoda falls, but not without having been changed forever.

Points of View:
Now we see a possibility of diverging thoughts between Obi-Wan and Yoda. They are still complimentary points of view, mind you, but the end results of their counsel may be very different. To fight evil, you do need a steadfast heart, and an tenacious grasp on our task at hand. And yet, to fight evil, you need to recognize when evil is using you against yourself. And above all, to fight evil, you can not become evil.

With Luke now in their care, we see a slightly different focus for each master for their student. Obi-Wan immediately sets about teaching Luke to defend himself. Moreover, he gives him what reasons he deems suitable for Luke to fight for. He tells Luke that Vader is evil, and that he destroyed his father. He gives him his father's lightsaber and nearly in the same breath tells Luke "You must learn the ways of the Force." To Obi-Wan, the task at hand is tied to the weapon. The task, therefore, is to kill Vader.

This is not to say he wants Luke to rush off to be cut down prematurely. No, Luke must be carefully trained in the ways only he knows are effective. Luke must ignore the outside influences, the pesky details that fray truth around the edges. The truth is Vader, and the Emperor, are evil and must be destroyed. In short, he is sending Luke to finish what Yoda had sent him to do so many years ago. Obi-Wan has given his life to defeat the Sith. His training is over. He already knows what he needs to know.

This idea is reinforced when Luke returns to Dagobah to finish his training, having been defeated by Vader, and having learned the truth in the process. Luke confronts the ghost of Obi-Wan with the terrible knowledge, and lays at his feet the seeds of defeat...

"I can't kill my own father."

"Then the Emperor has already won," Obi-Wan laments. "You were our only hope."

A truer thing was never said about Obi-Wan's viewpoint on his life, and his struggle with evil:

"...you're going to find that many of the
truths we cling to depend greatly on our
own point of view."

Because it is Obi-Wan's point of view that victory over the Sith will only come at the end of a lightsaber.

Yoda, however, begins Luke's training not with a lightsaber, nor the practice of martial techniques. Yoda likewise doesn't fill Luke's head with reasons to fight. Rather, Yoda begins Luke's first lesson with none other than the tried and true adage: Patience is a Virtue.

Upon his first meeting with Luke, he tests his patience, gauges its shallow depths and sternly sets him straight about his aspirations.

"Ready, are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years
have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be
trained! A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious
mind."

He looks beyond, to the incorporeal Obi-Wan, still wailing away on the point, seemingly to both Jedi, and regards Luke's track record:

"This one a long time have I watched. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh! Excitement. Heh! A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless!"

After sufficiently humbling Luke, then begins the real training - a training of the heart and mind more than the hand and eye. He imparts to Luke some of the core truths of a Jedi's relationship with the Force:

"A Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger ... fear ... aggression. The dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice."

Luke then asks a central question, one that every padawan must have asked in his or her own way for centuries: "Is the dark side stronger?"

"No...no...no," Yoda answers with conviction. "Quicker, easier, more seductive."

"But how am I to know the good side from the bad?"

"You will know," Yoda says, full of belief. "When you are calm, at peace. Passive. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack."

This is not just the sophic rhetoric of an old master. Yoda learned this, face to face with evil. He felt it's cold breath on his face, smelled its foul stench, battled it to the edge of his might, and lost. And there is no more valuable lesson, no more deeply ingrained shift of anyone's personal paradigm than the things you learn when you lose. Life itself is our own teacher in this - The lessons of defeat are more powerful, and more lasting, and somehow more real, than when you win.

Yoda tests Luke further to see if he's grasped the finer points of this counterintuitive philosophy at the Cave. Much has been said of the Failure of the Cave over the years, but this may be the most central point to the Cave: It is a preamble to Luke's eventual destiny in the Emperor's lair.

Yoda tells Luke he must enter, but warns him of the true nature of this test.

"That place...is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go."

"What's in there?" Luke asks.

"Only what you take with you."

And as Luke dons his weapons, perhaps to Yoda's disappointment, but not surprise, he gives him one last hint:

"Your weapons...you will not need them."

We know the outcome, of course, is that Luke meets the specter of Vader and destroys it, only to find that he has defeated none other than himself.

The lesson, then, is clear. Luke had anger, and fear, and answered them with aggression. Had he left his weapons behind, so he would have left aggression behind, and he would have dealt with fear and anger without fighting. What he took with him were the shadows of the Dark Side, and the Dark Side seeks those footholds out, and leverages upon them. In other words, Luke gave this domain of evil all it needed to defeat him. Sadly, Luke would later fail at Cloud City for similar reasons.

But once again, what we learn in defeat can be more powerful than what we learn in victory. Luke was armed now with many truths. He knew who he was. He knew who Darth Vader was. And more importantly, he knew who he used to be. And most of all, Luke knew, as Yoda knew, that to fight the Dark Side with the same primal forces that comprise its matrix of evil is to succumb to it.

And in Yoda's words, we find the truth of his intentions. Never does Yoda once say "you must kill Vader." He never even says the word "destroy". Luke's first assignment has no such instructions:

"No more training do you require. Already know
you that which you need."

"Then I am a Jedi?"

"Ohhh. Not yet. One thing remains: Vader. You
must confront Vader. Then, only then, a Jedi
will you be. And confront him you will."

Yoda has been grooming him for one task - to confront him. Does Yoda know where this path will lead? This remains a mystery, but one thing is clear - Yoda is guided closely by the Force. Everything in Yoda's training of Luke speaks to inner strength, focus, passivity, calm, and to avoid anger, hatred, fear, aggression. Yoda may not know to what end he is sending Luke, but it's certainly not to kill. Yoda had tried that, and failed. Luke's role had to be different, and therefore his mission. Luke had to succeed where he, Obi-Wan and Mace had failed, and that meant unlearning what they had learned, and teaching a new methodology.

The proof is in the pudding. Faced with the ultimate test, the one that Yoda, and Mace, and Obi-Wan, and many other Jedi had failed, Luke won by throwing his weapons away, and therefore his fear, his anger, and his aggression along with them. This was Luke's trial, perhaps one the hardest trials ever faced by a Jedi: to be caught in between righteousness and hatred, and to be at the head of the path of fear, anger, hatred and suffering, and then to turn away knowing where the path would lead.

He could see it in himself, he could see it in his father, he could see it in Yoda, and even see it Obi-Wan. To fight the Sith from without was a fool's errand. To profess peace and justice while swinging a lightsaber was a heretical contradiction of the Jedi way, born in lies propagated by the Dark Side.

Luke, then, was trained first by a Jedi to defend himself, and to know what it took to fight evil. He completed his training with all he needed to know, which was that you could not seek to defeat the Sith from without, you had to change them from within. Whereas Obi-Wan was apparently grooming a holy assassin, Yoda was building a guardian of the Jedi Order, and a new bastion of its principles. Yoda knew that Luke would make the right choice, and only guided him to his appointment with his destiny knowing in his own heart, making his own decisions, of what really was the right thing to do - to appeal to compassion. If there was any good left, find it, and reclaim it. This would be the only way Anakin could fulfill his prophecy.

Perhaps Obi-Wan had given up on the idea of the prophecy. Perhaps he saw no hope for a Chosen One to restore Balance. Or perhaps he thought that person was never Anakin, but was his son. This coupled with his own experiences shaped his teachings to Luke. The ironic aspect of that would be Obi-Wan's assertion to Yoda and Mace, before Anakin's turn, that the Prophecy could still be real, and that Anakin would defeat the Sith. But in the end, Obi-Wan saw no other alternative but to send Luke to finish his last battle with an old friend.

Yoda, on the other hand, never meant for Luke to kill Vader. He meant for Luke to confront him without aggression, and without those shadows of the Dark Side that had mired everyone else. Luke was meant to resurrect and uphold the peaceful ideals that had once bound the Galaxy together. The same ideals that lay dormant in Vader's dark heart.

Now, this would seem to render Obi-Wan irrelevant, or even dangerously aberrant in their united cause to defeat the Sith. Not so, I believe. I think that, like most everyone is the product of multiple views starting with two parents or more than one guardian or more than one mentor, Luke was an amalgam born of these two masters. Obi-Wan taught Luke steadfastness and courage. Yoda taught him peace and vigilance. In the end, a lesson is not truly learned until you make it your own, drawn from the different viewpoints that make up every luminous being. Luke's decision was an elegant merging of the two, then - to be vigilant against the Dark Side, to be tenacious in pursuit of good, never to fight anger with anger, but to find peace with peace.

Only then could Luke declare, with the certainty that only true understanding can provide:

"I am a Jedi, like my father before me."