“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually—without even noticing it—live your way into the answer.”
Probably you recognize that quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” which I first encountered when I was a student at Cal. A friend gave me the book at a time when I was feeling rather overwhelmed by unanswerable questions, mostly focused on the state of my love life. It happened that I was crushing on this cute guy who was in several of my classes. We had spent a lot of happy time together outside of class, but I couldn’t tell if my feelings were reciprocated. I confided my doubts to my friend Terri, who told me to “love the questions themselves,” and loaned me Rilke’s book. So—as only a twenty-something can do—I prepared to throw myself into a drama of long-term romantic perplexity. Which is exactly when John called me and said—shyly—“I think I have a crush on you.”
So much for living the questions. John is my husband of 28 years, by the way. The friend he had confided in evidently did not counsel him to live the questions.
Jesus, on the other hand, seems to do his best work with questions. Depending on how you count them, Jesus asks between two and three hundred questions in the Gospels. Admittedly, many of these are repeat occurrences, recorded by four different authors. But even so, the sheer number times that we read about Jesus asking questions is impressive. Something like 50 times more often than he answered them.
Inquiry was and still is the primary methodology of Jewish religious education, so as a rabbi, Jesus would certainly have been expected to ask questions. Famously, questions like “what are you looking for?” (John 1:38), and “why are you looking for me?” (Luke 2:49) or “what do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:36, 51) These questions have been profoundly formative in my own faith life, disrupting my prejudices and assumptions and calling me to live into answers that continue to reveal themselves— gradually, yes— but daily.
Today’s gospel presents us with a whole other whole series of questions, in this case posed by “the crowd” who were chasing after Jesus who had had fed the multitudes with five loaves and two fishes. Given what had just occurred, its understandable that they would have wanted to know things like “when did you come here?” or “what must we do?” or “what sign will you give us?” or “what work are you performing?”
While these are perfectly reasonable questions under the circumstances, they are qualitatively different from questions of rabbinic inquiry. In contrast to the kinds of questions Jesus typically asked—which have to with identity and desire and fidelity—the crowd was asking questions about means and ends. They wanted answers about performance, like “what are you doing, and, what are we supposed to do?” And also about the outcome, like “what’s going to be the result of all this?” And predictably, Jesus doesn’t answer these questions at all.
He does respond to the crowd—answering questions that weren’t asked—and I’ll return to that in a moment. But as disciples of Jesus ourselves, I think this interchange offers an important witness for us. When the conversation we find ourselves in turns to questions of means and ends, it might be time to take a pause and listen to Jesus. Because we may be narrowing the field of inquiry just when God want to teach us something profoundly true about our identity as children of God. Which never has to do with performance or productivity.
Consider the letter to the Ephesians, which was our first lesson. Far too often, I’ve heard churches engage the question of spiritual gifts— whether we call them prophecy, evangelism or serving on the altar guild or finance committee—as if they were the performance standards. If you’re good at something, that must be your gift, right? That’s probably an occupational hazard of living in a consumer culture. But God evidently doesn’t see it that way, if we take the Biblical record seriously. God has demonstrable preference for calling the person least qualified. So perhaps our commitment to each other needs to be more about discerning the call than identifying the capability.
Of course what brings this to mind today is not only our lessons, but also the baptism of Charlotte Eleanor. Whose life and presence in our Christian community is celebrated irrespective of how or what she does or becomes. As part of the baptismal rite, we will ask plenty of questions of her family and of ourselves, but they are questions on the order of what a rabbi might ask. They cannot be answered by pointing to outcomes.
This may all sound very churchy, as if this were some rarified space in which we talk about questions of identity and calling, while in the real world we have to talk about productivity. But in an era when the resources of the earth are being depleted, climate is disrupted globally, and children in the most privileged parts of the world are committing self-harm at alarming rates, it might be time for those of us who follow Jesus to change the conversation. To raise some new questions—which are actually very old ones—about what’s ultimately important.
So, taking a play from the rabbi’s playbook, lets return to the gospel and look again at what Jesus actually did in conversation with that crowd. When people asked him about what they must do, he told them to believe. When they asked him what miracle he was going to perform so that they might believe, he told them stories of God’s faithfulness. And when they asked him to just give them the product they wanted—in this case more of the bread which everyone now knew he had to give in abundance—he said “I am the bread of life.”
He was not answering the questions they asked—questions about means and outcomes—but responding to another order of questions altogether. Questions about fidelity, memory, desire and fulfillment. Which are the questions we all need to be asking if we want Charlotte Eleanor and all of our children to grow up knowing that they are unconditionally loved in a world where everyone has a chance to be fed.
Perhaps this is where the author of the letter to the Ephesians meets Rilke. If we’re willing to love the questions themselves—the ones without easy answers—and live in their uncomfortable ambiguity, we might just become people who can speak God’s own truth in love. And in this way, grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
