In today’s story from the Gospel of Matthew,
we see the religious leaders of Jesus’ day playing a game of “Who Can Stump the
Messiah?” It is played when each contestant takes turns asking Jesus clever,
even challenging questions, but instead of vying for prize, they are really
designed to trap Jesus into saying things that will get him into trouble.
Another name for the game is “Gotcha!”
And sometimes, I like to play along with Jesus, too!
Today, it’s the Pharisees’ turn to ask
the question. On previous turns, you’ll remember, the Pharisees quizzed Jesus about
whether or not people should pay taxes to Caesar. It was a question designed to
make Jesus lose no matter what he said or how fast he hit the buzzer. If he
said, “No, do not pay Caesar – rather, save your money for the real king” he
would immediately get arrested for advocating revolution against the Roman
Empire. If he said, “Yes, pay the taxes,” then he’d lose the respect of the
Jewish people. Jesus reframes the question.
Jesus stumped them instead by asking
them to fish out a coin with Caesar’s face on it, and he told them to give to
Caeser what was his, and to God what was due God. Ding! Jesus won that round!
But not all the questions that we have,
especially the ones that we might want to ask Jesus, can be handled with a
simple buzzer, and rather than a glitzy prize, we may simply be seeing peace,
solace, or to make sense of whatever is happening in our lives.
And many of the questions we have are
not asked because we want to stump Jesus, but because we ourselves are truly
stumped and flummoxed by what going on in our lives and in the world we live
in.
There are certainly people who love to
ask unanswerable questions just to sound clever or to make God, the Bible, or
the church, or even ordinary faithful folk seem silly. I remember that very old
George Carlin routine where he talked about thinking up outrageous question to
stump the nuns in his Catholic school like “Can God make a rock so big that he
himself can’t lift it?”
Generally, those kinds of questions
aren’t designed to enlighten or even to promote dialogue. They are meant to
make the questioner feel smug and superior by belittling the other person. They
are usually hiding a deeper pain, or are meant to distract us from the real
questions that are often left unsaid.
But other questions come deep from
within us and speak to something inside longing for peace, for connection, for
hope, for purpose. These are the real questions we want to ask Jesus.
I remember a story told by the late
Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the book When Bad Things Happen to Good
People.” It is about a mother who sent her son to the store to buy a loaf
of bread at the corner store for lunch. He didn’t come back for hours and
hours, and when he finally came home well after lunch, his frantic mother asked
the boy where he was. He said “I was helping my friend fix his bike.” But you
don’t know how to fix bikes, she replied. I know, said the boy, but I was
helping cry about it!
Sometimes the answer to the question is
not an answer but simply a loving presence, a listening ear, and a caring
heart, given in the moment without strings or expectation of return. And this
comes to us from God, often in the form of a caring friend or companion, or in
the silence of prayer as we open ourselves up to God even in our most
vulnerable moments.
You may be thinking that some of your
questions might stump Jesus and still you want to challenge his authority like
those of old. Jesus understands your curiosity and is fully prepared to take on
all of the earthly challenges that can be thrown at him. Remember that this
loving Jesus is ever-present. Jesus hears your questions as well as your cries,
your temptations as well as your triumphs and disappointments. There is nothing
too challenging for God. God also challenges us.
This is the pattern that Jesus sets for
us in the Gospels. He teaches, yes, and he is ready to interact, even go a few
rounds with the skeptics he meets on the way. But the main thing that Jesus
does is to meet people, exactly at the point of their greatest need. That is
why Jesus can hear our questions not as challenges but as the inquiries of
search souls looking for guidance, solace, and connection.
It is tempting to think of the Pharisees
and the Sadducees in the Gospels as people with a superficial faith who were
only trying to preserve their position and status. And there was certainly
enough of that going around, but what if they, like the disciples and the
others who followed Jesus, they were simply endeavoring to live as faithfully
as they knew how and were trying to figure out how Jesus fit into what God was
doing? What if they were like so many people whom we meet today… people who
want to believe deeply, and yet can’t get past the nagging questions that won’t
go away, including, among so many others: How does faith work when we have
science and technology? Why is there so much poverty and violence in a world
with so much to offer? Does faith matter? Whom does Jesus truly love? Am I
worthy of God’s love? And on and on and on.
Jesus was faced with all kind of
questions: some heartfelt, some pesky. But at the heart of all Jesus’
interactions, and the heart of all his answers to all those inquiries was the
answer we heard today.
Interestingly, Jesus’ answer to question
“what is the greatest commandment” was not an answer new to Jesus. He didn't invent it, but every
kid who ever learned Torah at their parent’s knee, or who ever went to
Synagogue, would have known the answer by heart: the greatest commandment to love God with
all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and the second is like it, love your
neighbor as yourself. As even our Prayer Book says (in Rite 1), there is no other
commandment greater than these.
And that is why God is ready to hear our
questions no matter how basic or superficial sounding like whether or not you
should pay your taxes or whether or not you can be married to your brother’s
widow in the afterlife. Especially from us, Christ’s followers. Because as
baptized people, we are not expected to be “Mr. or Ms. Know It All” but we are
called to be followers, everyday disciples. We are, as baptized people, Jesus’
friends, students, and apprentices.
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