Jesus is the Answer! What’s the Question?

I think I took that title from a bumpersticker, and while flippant, it raises a real issue about faith and its purpose.  What do we get for being a Christian?

For many people, Christianity, and therefore Jesus, provides answers.  Thinking of answers, many Christians tend to emphasize the intellectual content of the faith, read the Bible for directions, not just inspiration.  You will hear the Bible described as a rule book, or Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.  Whole theological systems and catechisms are built up around answers to particular questions and the implications.

We can’t just dismiss that.  Theology matters.  Scripture says that we should “love God with all our heart and mind and soul,” how can we love God with our minds if we aren’t asking questions and looking for answers.  In the Gospel stories, we do find Jesus answering questions–not that we always agree on what those answers mean!  But–an interesting fact–Jesus never said that he was the answer, or even an answer, to anything.

Assuming that Jesus is the answer requires us to ask the right questions.  You can see this struggle right now in popular evangelical thinking as the questions that their theology answers–how can I please God, how can I be forgiven, how can I get to heaven–don’t seem to be the ones people are asking right now.  We’re just not on the same page.  Forgiveness isn’t a central issue unless sin is first acknowledged.  Getting into heaven becomes an issue only when we assume that there is a next world, and that reaching it is not guaranteed.  Pleasing God only matters if God exists.  All these matters are up for grabs in a culture where religious belief is widely recognized as irrelevant.  Evangelical theology must first persuade its viewers of the relevancy of its world-view, and then provide the answers that are Jesus.

Another disappointment with the Christian faith is how many questions are not answered, starting with that universal lament, “Why me?”  While the Bible offers many stories of suffering, justified and not, no one answer explains the ups and downs of life.  Christians struggle too with the why’s, only providing definitive, one-size-fits-all answers at the cost of integrity and compassion.  Answers aren’t all we imagine them to be.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Jesus did say that, according to the Gospel of John.  We could emphasize “truth” here, continuing to highlight these answers that don’t always satisfy.  But what if we lift up the other two words, the action words of “way” and “life.” Now we see that Jesus offers not just answers, a way of understanding the world, but a way  of living in the world, of coping, acting, prioritizing, that all have us following Jesus.  Belief trumps understanding.  We act first as followers of Jesus, learning to understand what that means along the way.  Theology describes what we have learned and where we are going instead of serving as the entry point to Jesus.  Theology matters because of the implications of its answers, not just the metaphysics of explanations.

The question for us to answer then always has to do with what we are doing because of Jesus.  How are we following him?  The next question would be about how are we experiencing his presence as we follow.  Then we can begin to describe the answers Jesus provides.

What we know is that we don’t know everything, and that’s not going to change even in following Christ.  But we will know where we belong and to whom.  Those are the questions faith answers.