The Question
As a society, we love having answers. We have game shows that reward thousands of dollars to people who are able to come up with the right answers to a wide variety of questions. When something breaks, we want to be able to answer the questions of “how do I fix this?” Our jobs and salaries are often dependent on how well we can answer certain questions. We expect our doctors to have the answer to questions like “what is wrong with me” or “how can I get better?” Our accountants should answer the questions of “how can I better manage my money” or “how do I get the best tax return?” Even the internet is built around search engines like Google and Bing, whose purpose is to give us the answers we seek.
When it comes to our Christian faith, we also expect to have answers. We expect to have the answers to defend our faith or understand God (at least a little bit), and when we don’t have those answers we expect our pastors to know them, or at least to be able to find them in the bible.
Having answers isn’t a bad thing. I love when something breaks and I know how to fix it, or when I am able to answer the questions posed on Jeopardy or Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The problem is, faith isn’t defined by how many answers we have, faith is defined by how we trust and believe and follow Jesus without having answers. In the book of Job, Job asks the question that many of us tend to ask when we hit our breaking point—why God? We can basically sum up God’s response to be: “who are you to ask these questions of which you cannot understand?” In his book “A Grief Observed” C. S. Lewis reflects on this same idea:
“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand.”
God expects us to trust and believe and follow God without having the answers, often, I believe, because we wouldn’t be able to understand God’s answers anyway.
Having what we believe are the answers can also create division. In Christianity this is especially true. Many Christians, denominations, and churches are divided over the answers they believe they have to the deepest theological and metaphysical questions concerning God. These divisions, in turn, can often lead to a hatred and demonization of “the other”—of those who don’t believe in our answers. “Our answers” came from prayer and discernment and God, so they must be the right answers! The problem is, their answers also come from prayer and discernment and God, or so they claim. C. S. Lewis also has some words in regard to this:
“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask—half of our theological and metaphysical problems—are like that.”
I often seem to find wisdom in the unlikeliest of places, and as I reflected on our need to have answers, I ended up looking towards Douglas Adams book called “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.” In this book, a race of hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings created a supercomputer called “Deep Thought” in order to determine the answer to the “ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.” The computer then took 7.5 million years to process this answer, and came to the conclusion that the answer is 42. The computer then reveals to the beings that the answer makes no sense to them because they did not know what the “ultimate question” was in the first place. He then suggested creating a far more complex and superior computer to determine what the question actually is.
In our headlong pursuit of answers, we so often forget the importance of asking the right questions. What if C. S. Lewis is right and half of the questions we ask about Christianity make as much sense as asking what the shape of yellow is? What if when God is silent it isn’t because God doesn’t care, or that God refuses to answer—what if instead God sometimes remains silent because the question we asked simply doesn’t have an answer? Or doesn’t have an answer that we could possibly understand?
Often when Jesus taught, he taught using parables. The purpose of the parables wasn’t to give us a clear and definitive answer. If it was, Jesus would have simply given us answers instead of disguising them as stories. Jesus used parables to teach us how to consider and reflect upon questions that point towards God’s truths. Said another way, Jesus was teaching us the importance of asking good questions. I believe that Jesus also understood that while answers so often can cause division, questions unite. People come together around questions, to search for God’s truths together. It’s only when we think we have the answers figured out that division enters in.
Maybe then what Jesus is trying to show us is that faith and love and hope and peace are not so much about having the right answers to things—it’s about starting with the love of God and neighbor. Recognizing that the image of God is present in each and every human being and coming together to consider the great questions. Maybe in asking these questions together, we can learn a little more about ourselves, our neighbors, and God—even if we don’t end up with an answer.