Jesus is the answer …. but what was the question?
1 Samuel 28.3-15
Mark 9: 14-29
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 12th August 2007
We’ve been exploring the theme ‘sharing our faith’. We’ve looked at the content of faith, at Resurrection, the meaning of the cross, the call to discipleship and what faith means for lifestyle and ethics, faith and the future. We’ve seen that that faith varies in content - there is no prescribed pattern – but what we share has to be ours .
But HOW are we to communicate, impart, transfer, share faith? We now come to the HOW of sharing faith. To address these questions I want to model our approach on Jesus. Over the enxt three Sundays we will explore the ‘how’ of sharing faith.
I once saw a wonderful T shirt with the message across the front “Jesus is the answer!” As the person wearing it passed by I looked at their back on which was written in the same script “…. but what was the question?” This queries an approach that sees Christian faith as a universal panacea the fix to every problem, the response to every ‘need’. It makes Jesus a kind of Delphic Oracle in which the same answer is adequate to every question. Now in one sense it’s a good affirmation: if we believe that Jesus is God, then one would expect that he can ‘do stuff’, so the assumption that ‘Jesus is the answer’ may be theologically correct in that there is power and adequacy in the person of Jesus.
But is this an adequate expression of the meaning of Jesus? Is ‘faith’ about carefully building up the truth, in a neat package that addresses every need, that is theologically consistent and logically tight? Is it a kind of one-size-fits-all answer to life’s questions and riddles?
When we look to Jesus what do we see? Often we have a mental image of wise and gentle person wandering about dispensing words of wisdom and preaching for conversion. But in Mark’s gospel he asks lots questions: 55 questions in a short 16 chapters!
And they are great questions!
What do you want me to do for you?
Who do you say that I am?
Why are you so afraid?
What is your name?
Can you see anything?
Any one of these questions is a sermon in itself – an invitation for self-reflection and engagement with the deep themes of life!
Is this questioning just a version of “the Socratic method”, a technique for making people think for themselves and grapple with the issues? Is it simply a tactic that Jesus employs? Or does it reflect a deeper dynamic, a truth about human life, and the nature of the gospel and God’s dealings with us? Is faith primarily about having the answers or might it be a matter of finding the questions?
In the world around us we are dominated by ways of knowing and acting that are certain, sure, predictable. The consumer paradigm means that “you pays your money and takes your choice’. Our education and much of our career are driven by competency. Having to live with uncertainty or worse, with ignorance and darkness, are to our friends almost a form of moral failure. Well can we empathise with Saul in 1 Sam 28 when all of his attempts to find an answer to his anxious questions came to naught. He was faced with a tremendous threat. The Philistine army was ranged against him and he was afraid and his heart trembled greatly. What would happen? What did the future hold? The Lord did not answer – not by dreams nor by prophets nor by the sacred lot. To all his anxious questions there was naught but silence! So he looked for a medium, a clairvoyant. In Saul’s day it was hard to find a medium. Today he would simply need to look in the back pages of some popular magazines. It seems strange, doesn’t it, that a rational, scientific, enlightened society like ours should need so many psychics and clairvoyants? So many of us are like Saul – terrified of living with unanswered questions. Will I be loved? Will I be betrayed, played false? What will be the outcome of tomorrow’s battle – whether it be the battle of the board room, or the hospital. We want to know – desperately. We want to know, not just because human beings are curious but because certainty, competence and knowledge are what our culture values. To be unsure, uncertain, living with questions that do not yield ready answers is to be weak and vulnerable and irrelevant.
We are so focused on mastery and efficiency that people spend their lives training and developing their professional skills. Richard Rohr, the American priest and spiritual Director spoke here in Canberra some years ago. He had been at a meeting of neurosurgeons and psychologists and others investigating the mysteries of the brain. A prominent neurologist said that when most Americans are told that we seem to only be using about 10-20% of our brains they seem to be almost morally affronted. That’s so inefficient! So wasteful! Just think what we could achieve if only we could access 30 or 40 or 50% of that untapped potential. But, said the neurologist, perhaps we need that 80 or 90% of the brain to deal with mystery, and paradox, and suffering. Mystery, paradox and suffering: some of the great questions of human existence.
So does the gospel become acculturated in our western world. Jesus is about answers to questions, solutions to problems, a neatly packaged product for a consumer world.
In Mark 9.14 is one of the greatest stories about Jesus healing someone, by ‘casting out a demon’. These days we would recognise the ‘demon’ as probably epilepsy, but let us deal with the story on its own terms. It is a story shot through with questions, questions that have to be articulated and honoured and engaged before the final miracle of healing ( the exorcism) comes to pass. I wish to point to four levels of question that emerge in this story.
The first is the question that opens and closes the story: a deep questioning of the failure of Jesus’ followers to caste out the demon: “I asked you disciples to cast it out but they could not?” How often the question that the people of Jesus have to address first of all is the question of our own impotence and failure. It’s a question implied by the crowds at the story’s beginning (vs 18), and expressly addressed to Jesus by the disciples at the stories end ( vs. 28) At the end of the story this question is addressed to Jesus who points out that prayer is the only way that our powerlessness and failure can be redressed. So much of the ‘Jesus is the answer’ approach to sharing faith refuses to take seriously the triviality of much of the churches activity or the damage that we have done. It speaks blythely to a people who have been deeply disillusioned by the failures of the church. And the church fails, believe me, the church does fail! I don’t need the headlines in the paper or the court reports of the juicy court cases to tell me that the church fails. I just need my own diary: the appointments not made, the poor choices and decisions, the promises not kept and the intentions not met. There is more than enough failure there to remind me that my talk of faithfulness and love and grace and God might sound very, very empty to some ears. If I am to share my faith at all it can only be from a deep questioning of my own adequacy for the task. Jesus may the answer, but the first question the church - that’s us - must ask before we come anywhere near suggesting an answer, is to question ourselves and acknowledge our failures and powerlessness. It’s only from a position of profound humility and honesty that we can dare to speak anything about our faith. As the evangelist and missionary theologian DT Niles once put it:
Christianity is simply one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.
There is then the second question, the question of the general scepticism of the age, a question pointedly formulated by Jesus himself : “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How must longer must I put up with you?” (vs. 19) This is a strong response. It seems to be addressed to the crowd (for it is someone from the crowd who has told Jesus what has happened). It focuses one of the deep questions about faith in our own day. I suspect we have come to accept as normal the secularity and cynicism of our society. Our friends work and think and play. They feel no need of worship with their fellows, or of prayer on their own. We don’t question that very much – it is the norm for western pluralist societies. We want to talk about faith, and invite people to faith, in a faithless age. We do not realise what a huge task that is. We do not grieve over the faithlessness of our generation. We do not question the culture enough. How will people find faith when they’re chasing promotion in the workplace, or the products of the marketplace. How can you be faithful to God when you can’t even be faithful to each other? If we are going to speak of faith, and point to faith, and live faithfully, we need to question the faithlessness of our culture and generation. “Jesus is the answer” theology tends to allow the status quo to define the questions. When faith in Jesus becomes a consumer add-on that addresses whatever questions are raised by living in a modern culture, we have failed in the prophetic tradition that identifies the message of God as itself a deep question that goes right to the heart of the way the people around us live. You cannot believe in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus and live your life, happy with a fine house and a public service pension and nothing more. The gospel is radically counter-cultural.
Then comes the third level of questioning, and I think this is the core of our sensitivity to the question as a way of sharing our faith. If we cannot be alert to the question of the church’s failure [the 1st question], if we cannot attend to the question of the world’s faithlessness [the 2nd question], we must all attend to the third question, the question of human suffering.
Confronted with this boy convulsing and foaming at the mouth, Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been going on?” (v 21) Did it matter? Was Jesus’ action dependent on knowing this? Wasn’t the problem obvious? But Jesus knew that there was a story to be heard, a tale of suffering, a history of injury and sickness and failed healings and years of powerless, of wounded watching that went to the heart of not just the boy’s experience but the pain of that father and that family. Jesus doesn’t proffer the answer until he had plumbed the depth of the question, and suffering is always a question! Suffering probes us and asks most searchingly of our courage and hope and our patience. When the suffering is that of your child and you have no answer to it, then it is the most profound questioning of all. It’s a questioning so deep that it questions the very nature and goodness of God himself. The father’s story ends with the haunting plea and implied rebuke: “… if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.”
Talking about answers is pointless and insulting, until we can hear and hold the anger and desperation and hopelessness that always attends the question of suffering. Do I believe that Jesus can answer this kind of deep existential question? Oh, yes I do! I do because I have known so many people who found that answer in their own experience, born of burning questions of loss, pain and debility. Any attempt to express the answers they may have found, without the most careful respect of their suffering, is pointless, and perhaps (if we believe in the Cross) even blasphemous.
Then there is the fourth and most profound level of question that we have to engage in the sharing of faith, and that is the questioning of faith itself. Jesus questions the father’s faith: “If you are able! – all things can be done for the one who believes.” What follows is the harrowing and the heroic confession of that anguished parent, “I believe, help my unbelief!” So often Christians want to share life’s answers as if faith is our sure possession, something calm and assured and without problem. It’s there in the way we talk. It’s there in our bright smiles and kind friendships. The surface looks so assured, the prayers so smooth and polished, like the shiny cars out in the carpark. But spend much time with the people of this or any church and you find that we are very much like that poor anguished parent. We are struggling not just with our own suffering or that of our children or our parents, but struggling with faith itself. Things we used to believe so easily seem irrelevant now. Questions and doubts have arisen. We do believe, most definitely and assuredly, but there is also unbelief. There are questions within ourselves, and some of these questions run to the heart of our faith.
I was always taught that one should never preach your doubts! That’s a good principle, but you cannot deny your doubts either, and there are some things which perhaps should be doubted. If an atheist says, “I don’t believe in God” my answer is always, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in – I may not believe in him either!” Even as we listen to others’ questions – the question of suffering, intellectual objections, life issues that make it hard to believe, we must honour our own questions and doubts.
But we honour them in a particular way. Henri Nouwen writes in The Wounded Healer the Jewish story of the Messiah in the marketplace. A Man asked a rabbi where he would find the Messiah. The rabbi answered that the Messiah is a crippled, wounded beggar in the marketplace. The man went on his search and quickly returned to say, “The marketplace is full of crippled wounded beggars, how can I tell which one is the Messiah?” The rabbi answered , “The Messiah is the one who unwraps his wounds one at a time” (so that when someone comes you can quickly wrap it up again and serve them). In the same way the evangelist is the one who unwraps her doubts one at a time, so she can deal with and attend to the questions of the searcher.
When these four levels of question have been engaged by Jesus , he casts out the demon and the boy is healed, but not before. The miracle of faith can come, answering our deep questions and re-founding a lives, but not before the questions are acknowledged and engaged.
I want to close by telling the story of two sons who died in the same church over 2 decades apart. The first was a 5 year old who died tragically and quite needlessly over 40 years ago. It was, as is often the case with the young, a pointless death. And it rocked the church: it did fit with the theology of blessing that had explained so much of the 1950’s and early 1960’s in Christian Australia. Many answers were given: Why this happened. What it meant. Why this was necessary in God’s great and good plan. These answers were well-meaning and well intended, usually spoken as lovingly as possible, but trite and inappropriate and ultimately profoundly wounding for the parents.
Twenty five years later the same church struggled with the death of another son, the pastor’s son who had died just as tragically senselessly in an industrial accident. Once or twice over the ensuing months, as he was preaching to his flock, the pastor would drift away from the sermon, would stop and eyes fix on the back wall and his knuckles would turn white as he gripped the pulpit: and then the agonised cry would break over the congregation: “Why? Why?” After a moment he would remember where he was, find his place in the notes, and break open for his people the word of life, even as his heart was breaking. In the former case people clamoured for answers. In the latter case they had simply to live with the painful, unanswerable question.
But what does God think? Which one of these scenarios best reflects how God works in us for faith.?
There are some who know God as one who offers answers about sin and Atonement and the necessity of the Cross, all packaged up in a neat Answer to be confidently unwrapped in the presence of whatever questions might be flying around the room.
And there are some who know God as that most puzzling question of all: the Triune One, the one who is at once Father, Son and Spirit: