On the Power of Jesus' Questions: Calling us to Transcendence

[[Dear Sister Laurel, I liked your post on Jesus's two questions to Peter and his disciples from Sunday. It was the first time I ever heard anyone speak about one question, "Who do others say that I am?" as representing the world, and the other, "And you, who do YOU say that I am?" representing the Kingdom or being freed from "the world" and moving toward the Kingdom. I think you are right that the world tells us what to think and buy, value and reject, though I never saw it this way before. I have two questions. First, do all questions have this kind of power or did only Jesus' questions?  Second, why does Jesus tell his disciples to say nothing to anyone about who he is?]]

Thanks for your comments and questions! While I believe Jesus' questions might have had a peculiar kind of power, I believe that was because they were motivated by love and sought to bring the best (i.e., the truest) out of every person. Also, I believe that it was because Jesus was absolutely trustworthy (i.e., he challenged people but they were completely safe with him too) that his questions could work as powerfully as they did. He asked questions like, "Do you want to be well?", "What would you have me do?" "Do you love (Agape) me?" "Why are you anxious (or terrified)?" "What did you go out to the desert to see?" "What are you looking for?" and, of course, the two we heard on Sunday and many others besides. Each one of these confronts us with ourselves, each uncovers the deeply held beliefs and biases, and often too, the deeply hidden parts or dimensions of ourselves and asks us to trust Jesus with them. 

When I hear these kinds of questions that were so typical of Jesus in the Gospels, it is clear these are no mere requests for information or a kind of polite "How are you doing?" with no real desire to hear (much less nurture!) the truth. Instead, I hear a call to vulnerability, self-knowledge, and faith (trust) in the face of our deepest needs and desires. This is the way we grow, the way we are called beyond ourselves, first with confrontation (You are sick, you are looking to me for something, you are frightened, you betrayed me and I think there is something deeper and truer within you, etc.) and then, with a call to transcendence and the invitation to place ourselves in Jesus' hands so that that change might be achieved. And even in Jesus' absence these kinds of questions still have great power. They can still confront us with who we are and what we hold as true and sometimes incontrovertible, and they can stir us to imagine something other and even something greater, not only in ourselves but in others and in the whole of God's creation. 

If we can allow ourselves to "live the questions," (Rilke) we will also begin to see where we are really profoundly dissatisfied with the answers we were formerly at least superficially comfortable with, or where potentialities and opportunities lay deeply hidden within us, covered by layers of "What others have told us" or much of "what we have become convinced of."  Questions of the sort Jesus seemed to specialize in are like psychological or existential dynamite. They can explode the hardened worldly accretions of years of hopelessness and futility or complacency and unearth the fires of Life burning at the core of our Being that make us alive, creative, hopeful, and courageous. Of course, the one who asks the questions is also critical in this entire process, but I think there is no doubt that the questions themselves can work in us and produce powerful results.

Why did Jesus tell his disciples not to tell anyone about him (or about who he was)? I think there are several reasons. 

• First, when Peter gave his answer, "You are the Messiah" Jesus had already become persona non grata to the Jewish and Roman leaders. They were out to get him and Jesus needed to maintain a low profile, not have his disciples touting him as the Jewish Messiah! 
• Secondly, while Jesus did not eschew the title Messiah, he knew it needed to be redefined in terms of suffering if God's love and mercy were to be fully and exhaustively revealed. A God who chose to become God-With-Us to the extent Jesus' Abba did this was literally inconceivable as was a crucified Messiah. One needed to meet this God face to face and, in Christ, allow him to confront, change, and grow one's heart. Second or third-hand reports would not do it! This was true of the disciples as well as those whom they might meet.
• Thirdly, those who met Jesus needed to see (discern) and say (claim) for themselves who it was they were meeting. This was imperative for those who would truly follow Jesus, particularly since they would be following him to his crucifixion --- and potentially to their own passion and death as well. Only those who answered from their own hearts what they truly knew in that profoundly biblical sense of "knowing," would be able to muster the courage one's discipleship to this man would necessitate. 

As you imply in your comments, an encounter with Jesus and his questions led his hearers to a new kind of freedom. It is this freedom we see in the book of Acts when Peter and the other disciples start proclaiming the crucified and risen Christ to their fellow Jews --- those responsible for Jesus' trial and crucifixion --- the kind of freedom associated with what the New Testament calls parrhesia, a remarkable boldness of speech (and associated living) that is wholly transparent to others. One says what is on one's mind and does so completely, without fear or rhetorical tricks or veiling. One is made free to be oneself and to say precisely what one believes so that others might also be brought to the same kind of freedom in Christ.

Living and Responding to Jesus' Questions: the Key to Becoming the Persons we are Called to Be

 In reflecting on today's  Gospel what struck me was the relation between the two questions Jesus asked his followers. Remember he first asks, "Who do others say that I am?" and then, "And you, who do you say that I am?" Why does Jesus begin with what others are saying about him? A couple of thoughts come to mind. Maybe Jesus knows it is easier to speak of what others are saying than to speak of what is on our own minds and in our own hearts. Or maybe Jesus is leading his disciples slowly to the answer he wants them to give; maybe he wants them to think about what others are saying since the others are those with and to whom the disciples will be called to minister.  Given the disciples' uneven track record in getting things right, maybe Jesus is trying to give them a head start on the real answer! There are any number of possible answers. But today, I thought I saw Jesus moving his students away from the basis for much of who we think we are (not to mention who we think Jesus is!) and what we do in our lives, namely, what others think and value, and then giving these disciples a chance to discover and claim what they really think and feel themselves.

And why isn't it enough to answer with these others? After all, they are answering in terms of their Tradition, and the Tradition of Jesus and his disciples as well!   But what Jesus knows is that in him God is doing something new, something unprecedented, something that will tear that Tradition apart. In some ways, Jesus', "And you, who do you say that I am?" is a warning to his disciples. Jesus asks them to get in touch with all of the ways his life moves them, all the ways he resonates with their Tradition, all the ways he is what they expected and hoped for. At the same time, Jesus asks his disciples to bring to the front of their minds and hearts all the ways he surprises or disappoints them, all the ways he doesn't fit the Traditional categories and orthodoxy, all the times the others (and perhaps the disciples themselves) have called him a drunkard, or crazy, or a blasphemer. Only from this point can they really speak about the One God has sent to do something so insanely, inconceivably new. Only from this point can Jesus begin to teach them about what God's plan really has in store for him and for them.

And so, Jesus takes Peter's confession of Jesus as the Messiah and begins to reshape it out of all recognizability, all Jewish acceptability, and frankly out of any known religious shape at all! And for Peter, it is simply a bridge too far! Nothing in his Religious Tradition or in any other in the Roman world he inhabits has prepared him for a suffering Messiah or (and Peter has not even glimpsed this yet) an executed criminal who allows an utterly transcendent God to take death into himself and not be destroyed by it. Nothing in Peter's experience prepares him for a God who wills so strongly to be Emmanuel (God-with-us), that he will take sin and death into himself and eventually create a new heaven and new earth where sin and death have been destroyed through the faithfulness and work of a condemned and crucified Messiah.

But for all this to happen, Jesus must move us from the place of canned answers (no matter how correct they are) and "fitting in", to the place of an open mind and heart rooted in personal truth, and then to a faithful mind and heart that are courageous enough to travel with God to the unexpected and even the unacceptable place so that that God may do something insanely new in and with our world.  And in today's Gospel pericope, that is what Jesus is doing with his disciples, not because he does not value orthodoxy, and not because he promotes individualism and heresy, but because the God he serves so well wills to do something absolutely explosively, counterculturally new. 

For us, the first step in this journey of faith means breaking away from what others tell us to think and feel. This is part of reclaiming our own minds and hearts for God, the first step in dying to self so that we might live for and from God. It is a step we must make over and over again in a world that so glibly tells us what to think and eat and wear, and what medicines to ask our doctors about or cars to drive. Or what people we should regard --- and those we should not! The hardest part of this journey is coming to know who we really are while letting go of what is false, what is the result of our enmeshment in what monastic and eremitic life calls "the world" --- and this, of course, is what Jesus' second question to his disciples is all about, not ripping them away from the truth of their Tradition, but freeing them from inauthentic enmeshment so that God may do something new with that truth as it truly lives in them.

Jesus captures all of this with his reminder to Peter, [[You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.]] and then to everyone, [[Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.]] When I hear Jesus' questions in today's Gospel, I recognize they do what all Jesus's questions do; they call us beyond being the people the world says we are and must be, and open the way to be who we are truly called to be. For a hermit committed to living a stricter separation from the world, I also recognize that today's Gospel can call the hermit from unhealthy enmeshment in "the world", and empower the kind of freedom that allows God to do something unimaginably new!! The key to stricter separation from the world for hermits or for anyone else, the key to what today's readings call, "walking before the Lord in the land of the living", is in honestly living and answering Jesus' two questions every day of our lives: "Who do others say that I am?" and you, "Who do YOU say that I am?"

Who Do You Say that I Am? On the importance of Jesus' Questions

Tomorrow's readings focus on the promise of God's coming attached to his covenant with us and how it is that the fruit of that covenant so completely overshadows anything we expect or could have expected. When God reveals himself it is a surprise to us. In fact, God's self-revelation is a surprise that shakes us to the very foundations of our being. And yet, the coming of our God can be subtle, simple, exteriorly unimposing --- even a bit disappointing when we see it with something other than the eyes of faith.

In the first reading from Haggai, the new Temple, the place where heaven and earth literally meet, though still under construction, is disappointing for those who remember the old Temple and its glory. This new Temple, despite being unfinished, "seems like nothing in their eyes." And yet, Haggai tells the people in the name of the Lord, "take courage. . .for I am with you. . .my spirit continues in your midst. . . in a [little while] I will shake the heavens and the earth. . . all the nations (will be shaken). . . and I will fill this house with Glory. . . and give you peace." In that day the new Temple will be even more imposing than that of Solomon. We are not surprised that the language of this coming in fullness is the traditional language of cosmic upheaval, nor are we surprised at the fact that the Lord must counsel his people to patience. It is hard to believe in the fruit when all we hold in our hands is the seed, for instance.

In the Gospel Jesus has been praying in solitude, and he comes out to ask his disciples, "Who do the crowds say that I am?" The response is familiar, "John the Baptist;. . . Elijah,. . . one of the ancient Prophets arisen." And so it goes. Then Jesus asks the really pivotal question, "And you, who do you say that I am?" Peter replies, "You are the Christ of God." Jesus cautions the disciples not to tell anyone and then clarifies, the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the religious leaders of the day, be crucified and raised. Then others really will have to grapple with this question finding that old answers are inadequate and terms they thought they understood have been redefined. Only then will the real meaning of "the Christ of God" be revealed. Only then will the fullness of God's faithfulness and mercy be seen. Only then he will have been revealed on and in his own terms --- surprising, disappointing, and even as offensive as that may be to many.

At some point then, for this revelation to come to fullness, every one of us must answer the question Jesus posed to his disciples. It is certainly true that an important part of coming to faith is trusting in what the tradition tells us, trusting what those we love tells us, listening attentively to the stories they share which move us to faith, listening to the Scriptures as they challenge and inspire us similarly. It is critical that we reflect on the Scriptures which are God's Word in a special way for us. In other words, we must answer Jesus' first question as well: "Who do people say that I am?" However, mature faith is not built on mere information; it is not a matter of merely acting as though what these people have said is true --- though it usually begins here, and can be assisted by doing so in times of difficulty. Mature faith means allowing ourselves to be addressed, challenged, and changed by what we hear because we trust the one addressing us. One of the most powerful, though unpretentious, ways we are addressed by the Word of God is through Jesus' questions.

But what do we ordinarily do with Jesus' questions? For Jesus' questions, deceptively simple and unpretentious though they are, are those little seeds that can eventually bear great fruit, the tiny levers that can shift the very axis of our world, the trigger for the minor tremor that can grow and, in time, shake the foundations of everything built up in our lives and allow God to build something new and more glorious than the original Temple of Solomon. They are dynamite in small, plainly-wrapped packages. But before we can answer the question in tomorrow's gospel passage, we have to entertain it, and in my experience, Jesus's questions are the things we mainly ignore --- partly because we think they are addressed to someone else, partly because we remember the story instead, partly because we look for information (Jesus is the Christ, Peter answered the question this way, etc), and partly because on some level we are afraid of what would happen if we were pressed to let the question work in us and eventually be made to answer ourselves. In our own way, we tend to do as the Jews did with the new and unfinished Temple; we treat them as nothing --- insignificant and as things lacking in power or potential.

For instance, if I were to ask you how many questions Jesus asked, what would you answer? If I asked how many are recorded in the gospels what would you say? If I pressed harder and asked how many you could repeat, how would you do? And if I asked how many you had prayed with, journaled on, spoken to friends about, or been transformed by, what would your answers be? In the past several years I have only written about two of Jesus' questions --- two which I had prayed with, journaled about, etc. These two alone had changed my life: "Who do you say that I am?" and "Do you want to be well?" I could think of several others: "What did you go out into the desert to see?" "Could you not watch with me for one brief hour?" "Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do as I command?" but I had never prayed with these, never treated them as addressed directly to me. Imagine my surprise when I found websites listing over 40 questions posed directly to those who would be his followers (not counting duplicates in other gospel accounts)!

As Rainer Marie Rilke once counseled a young poet, it is more important, in some ways, to "live the questions," than to simply be given and have the answer. Doing this uncovers unexamined assumptions and unexplored conclusions, shifts our perspective, triggers in our brains an explosion of creative and imaginative potential and power, breaks us out of psychological and cognitive ruts, reframes the way we see and feel about reality, allows us to get in touch with our deepest and truest selves and all we are and need, and can foster our capacity for empathy and attentiveness. Imagine then what Jesus' own questions can do when they are the vehicle for the Holy Spirit and the coming reign of God!! What comes from living with them is wholly incommensurate with their apparent simplicity and humbleness.

My prayer today is that we all might take a little more care with Jesus' questions and especially that we not dismiss them as the post-exilic Jews did with the new Temple beginnings. For us, these questions are precisely the place where heaven and earth meet, where judgment (harvest!) is accomplished, and where God is given a chance to work in and through us so that he might, if only we are patient, be fully revealed and his creation brought to completion.

Notes From Stillsong Hermitage: On the Importance of Jesus' Questions