Questions and Answers

We’ve all heard the expression, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question, just stupid answers.” Whether the phrase is literally true or not, we know what it is intended to convey – that asking a question is never dumb because it’s better to be honest than pretend you know something you don’t. But how you answer a question? That can be something else entirely.

In the Gospel today (Mt 16:13-20), Jesus asks two questions that, if not stupid, at least seem silly. He asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and then “Who do you say that I am?” On the one hand, there’s an obvious answer to the question: he’s Jesus from Nazareth, the one whom everyone was going to hear preach and perform miracles. Jesus, of course, isn’t asking them if they know his name. But the questions still seem kind of dumb: “Who do people – who do you – say that I am?” Is he asking them what kind of impression he’s making? Is he concerned about his public image?

Jesus, of course, isn’t asking anything nearly so superficial. His questions are not intended to boost his ego or satisfy his own interest – instead they are intended to make the disciples ponder what they have seen and heard. At this time, they have been with Jesus for a while. They had heard him preach like no one they have had ever heard; they had him do things no one had ever seen. The question then that Jesus asks is clearly one that they had already been asking themselves, one that they had been pondering silently – Just who is this Jesus from Nazareth?

Questions, and their answers, in many ways dominate our day to day. They range from the mundane – “What shall I have for breakfast this morning?”, “What will I watch on TV tonight?” – to the more serious – “How am I going to make the next payment?”, “How can I make this relationship work?” They can even be life-changing, “Will she say yes?” or “How long do I have, Doc?” The way we ask those questions, and the way we answer them, shape in large part the course of our lives.

As hugely significant as many of the questions we face are, none of them are as crucial as that simple question that Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Because far beyond just looking for the response of his name, or for an evaluation of what kind of impression he’s making, Jesus is asking them to form a judgment – a decision, an answer – about him, about who he really is, based upon all that they have seen and heard and understood. While the people – the crowd, the ones who witness him from a distance – think that he is a great preacher, a prophet in the mode of John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah, Jesus implicitly encourages his disciples to answer more boldly.

Ariel Amegian, The Face of Christ (1935), based upon a negative of the Shroud of Turin

The questions of who Jesus is – not who was he historically, but what does all that he did and said mean ultimately about him – has been argued and debated ever since his own time. Many people today are content with answering that question by saying that Jesus was a holy man, a man of God, a preacher or a prophet ahead of his time, who wasn’t afraid to upend social convention. He taught things like “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Judge not lest you be judged,” – ideas that all of us can take to heart more deeply and that our society should learn from.

But to answer the question of who Jesus is in that way is not sufficient. Numerous holy men and prophets – even from other religions – have given us bits of wisdom and insight into the human condition and have taught moral axioms that can help us. If that’s all Jesus is, then he’s not much different from John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah – or from Confucius, or the Buddha, or Muhammad. But lest we be satisfied by that answer, Jesus asks again, to his disciples, to us, “Who do you say that I am?”

For the past two years, I’ve had the privilege of being the pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas parish in Fayetteville, the church that ministers to the community of the University of Arkansas. In that role, I’m often involved in a lot of the activities of our college students on the university campus. This past week, I was helping man our Catholic Campus Ministry booth at Razorbash, the annual student fair held outside the Union for all of the campus clubs and organizations. As our group was passing out flyers to new Catholic students, answering questions and handing out rosaries, a group of Muslim young women came up and asked us about the Catholic faith. Specifically, they asked us about Jesus – about what we believed about him. As we talked, it became clear that their particular branch of Islam holds Jesus in very high regard. They believe, for example, he is a prophet of Allah, that he has (in some way) ascended to heaven, and that he will return to earth prior to the Final Judgment. For these young women, Jesus was not just a holy man or a moral teacher – he was a figure of deep reverence.

And yet, for us as Christians, even that is not enough. For we make a claim that even those women, who clearly respect Jesus deeply, would not dare to make. We say – as we hear Peter say in the Gospel – that he is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” That claim – that answer to the question of who Jesus is – distinguishes Christians, not only from those Muslim women, but from the more acceptable answer from our society and our culture to reduce Jesus to mere moral platitudes. To say that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, is to say that our lives are not merely informed by what he taught, they have been re-formed around him – he is the focus, he is the one by which we orient ourselves. Amid every other question that we are asked or must ask ourselves, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus means for us that we have an underlying answer – an answer given by that mysterious reality, at once beyond reason but nonetheless consistent with reason, which we call faith – viz., that Jesus is God himself.

We don’t answer such a tremendous question in such a tremendous way alone. Rather, we do so as part of the community of disciples, as part of the Church which is founded upon the Rock of Peter and which speaks with the faith of Peter. To have faith in Jesus, as Peter did, does not mean that we will always get it right, that we will never again fall short of what God wants or that we’ll wonder why exactly he is asking us to endure some particular trial or challenge. We need only look to the life of Peter himself – who denied three times this friend whom he called the Christ – as proof of that. But what faith does mean – what believing as the Church believes does do for us – is that we always know where to turn back to, where to find again the Answer to our questioning. It means reminding ourselves, despite our failings and our questionings, that we have a Savior, a Christ, a God with us.

In hindsight, I’m not sure that I answered those Muslim women a few days ago in as full a way as I would have liked. Nonetheless, what I said to them I continue to remind myself of each day – Jesus is my Savior, my Redeemer, my God. Like Peter first long ago, we are always relearning how to approach each day and each challenge with faith – to respond to life’s questions not with stupid answers but with faith in the One who is the Answer to every question. Each day, Jesus asks us, “Who do you say that I am?”, and each day, he asks us to answer anew.