Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and 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.
Maybe 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 romantic 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 37 years, by the way. The friend he had confided in evidently did not counsel him to continue living 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 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 fed the multitudes with five loaves and two fishes. Given what had just occurred, it’s 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 means, like “what are you doing, and, what are we supposed to do?” And also about the ends, 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—what we might also call performance and productivity—it might be time to take a pause and listen to Jesus. Because we may be narrowing the field of our inquiry just when God wants to teach us something deeper and more true. God may be wanting to teach us 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 always seems to call 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 our missional work through Vital and Thriving initiative. Over the past year, we have asked ourselves and each other many questions about what we value and what we think God is doing here. But the questions we’ve been asking are like what a rabbi like Jesus might ask: they tell us more about who we are than what we’re supposed to do. This year under the leadership of our Missional Innovation Team, we will start experimenting with new ministries. We’ll use gifts we didn’t know we had, and take some risks that won’t succeed. And that’s perfectly alright, because Jesus came not that we might know success, but that we might know the love of God.
This may 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 a era when the resources of the earth are being depleted, climate is disrupted globally, and people are exchanging love of neighbor for partisan extremism, 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 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 ends—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 are to manifest the unconditional love of God in a world where everyone has a chance to be fed.
Which might be just 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, we 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.
