THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION
David Robb
August 18, 2002
I invite you to explore with me this morning, and for the following two Sundays a specific story from the New Testament. You will find this story in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. As stories go, it is a fairly familiar one, even to those who were not raised in the church. It is a story that Jesus told to illustrate a point--a parable, the one we know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I would like to believe that I chose this text for your consideration. But that would not be quite accurate. The truth is I believe this text chose me for our consideration and mutual edification.
Those of you who have sat in on any of the seminars I occasionally offer on Biblical themes are probably already aware that I am intrigued by Jesus’ style as a teacher of wisdom. This is in part because I also am a teacher, if not of wisdom, at least of the various ways in which wisdom may be conveyed. One of the most characteristic ways Jesus chose to reveal his message was the technique of the story or parable. And in the next weeks I will have a few things to say about this particular method. But for the time being I am not going to comment this morning directly on the parable itself. That I will begin to address next week. This morning I want to focus our attention on the context in which the Evangelist sets this famous story:
A lawyer approached Jesus, and, seeking to put him to the test, asked,
"Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"If we ever think about this story at all we tend to pass over this introductory scene. That is in large part, I suspect, because the question does not really speak to us. To whom among us has it ever occurred to ask, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" In the first place it just seems a bit stiff, a little artificial. But the question does after all bear closer examination. I think there is more here than meets the eye.
I suspect that Jesus too sees the question as somewhat brittle, a little too glib, a little too legalistic. But he also must sense there is something important hidden within the question, because he does not dismiss it out of hand. He is willing to pursue it further to see if he can provoke a deeper engagement. It is as if he senses there is a question beneath the question–some longing or desire–but that it lies buried beneath a more prosaic concern.
Our first reaction, perhaps, is that the language of this question is off-putting. Our concerns throughout daily life are mostly on the here and now. This question seems to focus on the future, even a very remote future–apparently upon heaven and upon eternal rewards. If we look even closer there appears to be a fundamental incongruity. It is in the verbs: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" The verbs "do" and "inherit" do not quite seem to go together. Our normal understanding suggests that if you stand to inherit something, it is not because you have to do anything at all. You do not have to achieve something in order to earn an inheritance. You just have to be something–in our usual sense of things, to be someone else’s son or daughter.
Notice that the lawyer in our story certainly does not seem to be focused on the question of what he has to be. He is interested in what he must do. This, of course, is a common misunderstanding about the nature of the religious question, one that we have all made at one time or another. Most of us think that religion is primarily about doing something or about getting something right in the eyes of the Almighty. That is why we tend to hear so many denials about religion from otherwise religious folk: "I am not really a religious person myself, preacher, but I am a spiritual person." When I hear that kind of denial I suspect the person usually means that he or she is more attuned to being something or becoming something than with doing something, especially doing some-thing that some religious authority or other has already decided is for our own good.
But let us return to the lawyer. What is the substance of his question? I doubt very much if Jesus is much interested in the question as he states it. But, as I suggested earlier, I believe he is very interested in the question that lies just below the surface of the question as he states it. But in order to get there, we have to start where he starts. How do we really understand his question? Or better still, how do you and I ask this question? If we think that the essence of his question is, "How can I be sure that I am going to heaven when I die?" we are not likely to pay much attention.
But what if we were to reframe the question in terms that felt more real, more like our concerns? What if we put it like this: "What must I do to feel comfortable with myself?" Or, "What does it mean to be at home in a world that we know is not always hospitable or friendly, a world where innocent people are suddenly targeted for violent death for no better reason than that they happened to show up for work on time?" Those are some of the ways in which we might actually ask that question. Sometimes the question gets a little more pointed for us. Not "What does the future hold and what can I do to assure I will be secure?" but rather "What after all is the point of my life?" This is the way this question begins to take shape for us more realistically. This is the way we tend to ask it especially when we sense that we have failed in a substantial way, or that we are lost, or the wheels seem to have just come off: "What is the meaning of my life?" "What difference do I make to anything or anyone?" And let us be honest about it, there have been times when the question has even taken a darker form: "Is there any reason for me to go on?"
I believe that Jesus knows that this lawyer is not yet asking his question in an existential way, that he is not quite there yet. His question has the feel about it of intellectual volleyball: "Here, rabbi, let’s bat this around for awhile." He is really only asking, "How can I be sure that I will be right? That I will always be regarded as a decent person?" Bill Coffin, for many years the Chaplain of Yale University, was fond of pointing out: "What the world is in desperate need of just now are good men; what we at Yale tend to turn out are nice guys." (That, by the way, was during the era in which Yale was still an all-male college; it was not really as sexist as it may now sound to us).
What becomes more obvious, in the light of Coffin’s quip, is that this lawyer is a quintessential nice guy; he is not yet a good man. Whatever you may imagine to be the difference between a "nice guy" and a "good man," one key mark may have to do with the distance between a concern for doing as opposed to a concern for being.
The lawyer in this story is mostly looking for the safety of a set of rules and religious regulations he can adhere to and not have to think about too much. He’s asking for someone to point the way to "eternal life" through a program of selective virtue. But in typical rabbinical fashion Jesus turns the issue back to him. "What is written in the law?" he asks. "What does it say?" Of course the lawyer already knows the answer to this by rote, and he does not skip a beat:
You shall love the Lord your God with all you heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And
you shall love your neighbor as yourself.And Jesus responds simply: "So what is the problem? Do this and you will live."
And notice that Jesus is not talking about living some time in the near or distant future. He is speaking about the here and now, about being fully alive in the present moment.
When Gertrude Stein lay dying in her beloved Paris, her companion Alice B. Toklas approached her, gently took her hand, and whispered, "Gertrude, did you find the answer?" Stein’s reply was a splendid one. In her dying breath she is reported to have said simply, "What was the question?" The lawyer in our story certainly knows the right answer. What he does not yet know is the right question. And it would seem that Jesus’ method is not to lead him to the answer but to an awareness of what he does not yet know.
None of is moved to ask the religious question when we are honing our skills in intellectual debate or sharpening the proofs for or against the existence of God. None of is moved to ask the religious question when we are so filled with opinions that there is no room left for honest doubt. We ask the religious question when we have exhausted our resources, when we have tried and failed to preserve something in which have deeply believed. We rarely ask the religious question in moments of triumph and success; we tend to ask the religious question when we are deeply aware that we have reached a limit, when we are perplexed, overwhelmed, and not sure whether our efforts have any meaning whatsoever.
In a world where children strap on book bags full of explosives and shrapnel and blow themselves to smithereens in order blow other children to smithereens in a misguided conviction that this is a path to freedom, to security, and to peace. In a world where armies retaliate by bulldozing homes and whole neighborhoods, where planes drop bombs upon communities of civilians and kill indiscriminately by way of state-sponsored terrorism, in a misguided conviction that this is a path to freedom, to security, and to peace. In a world where such things happen every day in the name of devotion to religious convictions, it is time that we turn our focus away from religious answers and learn to pay more and more deep attention to our authentic religious questions.
Whatever else he may have accomplished, Jesus certainly understood this problem that lies at heart of every religion. What he challenged the lawyer in this story with, what he challenges each of us with, is not a quest for the right religious answer, but a quest for the right religious question. At least one mark of that quest is this: the kinds of questions that will lead us to the most profound answers will usually have one thing in common. They will focus our attention not so much on what we are to do. Rather they will focus our attention on what we are to be, on who it is that we are becoming by the choices we make in each day. Let us pray that we may discover discernment that will require us to struggle profoundly with each and every conviction until we learn to count the cost.