Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Ask and You Shall Receive”
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (James 3:13-4:3, 7-8/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Mark 9:30-37/NRSVUE)
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author and dissident whose writings shined a light upon political repression in the former Soviet Union and the prison system that enforced it — both of which Solzhenitsyn experienced first hand. For his lifetime of work, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for literature. I didn’t actually know who he was until I got to college, but once I’d learned I was pretty sure I’d never forget, and the reason for this, I hope, will become clear in a moment.
I don’t what it is about our readings for the past couple of weeks that’s inspired me to share traumatic moments from my education with you. I had a lot of really great experiences with teachers during my many years in school, and hopefully I’ll find a way to share a story or two about them as well but, in the meantime, I’ve got another not so great one for you.
In the second semester of my freshman year I somehow ended up in a political science class I probably didn’t belong in — one in which a guy from my dorm and I happened to be the only underclassmen. This was around the time that the Cold War ended so, unsurprisingly, one day’s material had something to with Soviet-era totalitarianism.
In the context of that discussion, the professor dropped the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and then, for some reason, asked us to raise our hands if we knew who he was; I didn’t because I didn’t. The problem, though, was that I was the only person in the class who didn’t.
When the professor saw this, he smiled a devious smile and made his way over to my seat like a hunting lion moving in for the kill. He looked at me and asked with no small measure of judgment in his voice: “Do you really not know who Alexander Solzhenitsyn is?” — as if either his question or my answer somehow weren’t clear the first time around. I replied, “I don’t. Who is he?”
The professor turned away from me and made his way back to the front of the room, shaking his head in disapproval as he walked. In that few seconds — which seemed more like forty-five minutes — the guy from my dorm, who just so happened to be sitting next to me, mimicked the professor’s shaking head as he uttered scornfully under his breath, “Wow, that’s embarrassing. And, indeed, it was embarrassing — though I really didn’t need him to point that out for me.
Okay, so I didn’t know who Solzhenitsyn was — which, admittedly, made me ignorant. But the only other choice I had in those circumstances was to go along with everyone else and raise my hand. But if the professor had then decided to test our knowledge by calling on someone — and that someone had been me — then it soon would have become clear to everyone that I was not only ignorant, but also dishonest, which, in fairness, would have been worse than just being ignorant.
When we use the term “ignorance,” more often than not we’re levying it as an insult but, since ignorance is defined simply as a “lack of knowledge or understanding about something,” this seems kind of unfair. I mean, should we really look down on someone just for not knowing or not understanding something? Since not a one of us is omniscient, since none of us knows everything about everything, we’re all ignorant, really; it’s just part of what it means to be human.
And yet, we tend to go to great lengths to hide our ignorance, as if it’s something to be ashamed of. In retrospect, I realize that I probably wasn’t the only person in that class who didn’t have a clue about who Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was; I was just the only one who owned up to it. But why are we so afraid to admit that we don’t know what we don’t know?
As Jesus and his disciples are making their way through Galilee in today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel, Jesus decides to let his friends in on a little secret; he tells them that, “The Son of Man [meaning Jesus himself] is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again,” which makes perfect sense, right? Wait, no it doesn’t; in fact, it makes no sense whatsoever.
Just a short time ago, Jesus asks these very same disciples one of the Bible’s most memorable questions: “Who do you say that I am?” After some of them offer a few wrong answers, Peter steps up and rightly declares, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus then explains to his disciples that he, the “Messiah,” “must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again,” which is pretty much the same thing that he says to them today. The first time, Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes him for saying what he says because it simply couldn’t be true (and then Jesus rebukes Peter for rebuking him).
But it’s easy to see why Peter reacts to Jesus the that way he does. After all, he’d always be told that the Messiah, God’s Anointed One, would be the king from the line of David who would show up and deliver the people from the misery they’d endured for centuries at the hands of various imperial powers; Peter (and everyone else) figured that, in order to pull that one off, the Messiah would have to be a warrior without peer, the strongest of leader all, more violent than the oppressors, a one-man wrecking crew. Jesus, by contrast, says that he is the Messiah, but then goes on to state that he will suffer, that he will be rejected, that he will even be killed. And Peter’s response is essentially, “Wait a minute, that’s not what’s supposed to happen.”
It’s not a question for Jesus — the person Peter has just rightly identified as the Messiah — but, rather, a defiant statement to Jesus; not “Why is this true?” but, rather, “This is not true.” And this is a big difference. The first proceeds from humble curiosity, the other from insecurity hiding behind arrogance — an unwillingness to admit that one might not understand fully, that one might be wrong, that one might actually need to change one’s mind.
Then, in today’s reading, Jesus repeats to his disciples what he’s declared about himself previously but, as Mark tells us, “They did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.”
They were afraid to ask him? Look, I won’t speak for you but I’d like to think that if I were standing there listening to Jesus say all of this crazy stuff, I’d have a few questions for him. Then again, it’s easy for me to say this two thousand years later since I know how the rest of the story goes and I wasn’t, in fact, standing there listening to Jesus say all of this crazy stuff. I wonder, though, what kind of answers the disciples would have received from Jesus if, instead of remaining silent, they’d actually bothered to ask some questions.
But why were they afraid to ask him? The next part of today’s story provides us with a clue. As the travelers roll up on the city of Capernaum, Jesus asks his disciples a question (one to which he already knows the answer): “What were you arguing about on the way?” The answer — one they do not actually provide — is that they were fighting about which one of them was the greatest; once again, insecurity hiding behind arrogance rears its ugly head.
At first glance, you might think this is a strange combination — insecurity and arrogance — but it’s really not. In this world we live, one in which knowledge and power and greatness seem to go hand and hand, to admit that one has more questions than answers, to concede one’s vulnerability amidst a reality we do not and cannot fully comprehend, is seen as an admission of weakness — and no one wants to be seen as weak; so we strive instead to convince ourselves (and others) that we are the greatest (or at least to not betray the fact that we’re not), and that we have all the answers (even though we don’t). But is that way of being really working out all that well for us?
According to what Jesus tells his disciples, “Whoever wants to be the first must be last and servant of all.” In other words, for God, it’s not (and has never been) about being the greatest. Then Jesus takes a little child, places it among them, takes it in his arms and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” In his typical, roundabout way Jesus is saying that a child is a model for how we ought to live our lives and, as anyone who has spent even two minutes around a child can tell you, there is one word that emanates from a child’s mouth more than any other: “Why?” Apparently, an honest curiosity about all that we don’t know is a virtue in God’s way of seeing things.
Way back in the eleventh century Saint Anselm took a stab at defining the enterprise of theology, the study of God, and this is what he came up with: fides quarens intellectum (in English, “faith seeking understanding”). And this statement has some important implications.
If we’re seeking to understand our faith, then we don’t actually have a complete understanding of it now, and we seek to understand it by doing what we do when we seek to understand anything: we question.
The point is that, when it comes to God and our relationship to God, we should have questions. The things that Jesus tells his disciples about who he is — and the stories of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection that the gospel writers tell us — make no rational sense; by the standards of this world, it’s all simply off the charts. If you don’t actually have doubts and questions after reading all of this, then either you’re not being honest (with yourself, with others, and with God), or you haven’t read it very carefully.
Perhaps God’s hope for us is that we’ll come to terms with the fact that we don’t have all the answers and that we’ll be humble enough and curious enough — that we’ll trust in God enough — to ask questions.
And so maybe faith doesn’t mean deluding ourselves (and others) into believing that we have certainty; maybe faith doesn’t even mean believing in spite of our uncertainty; maybe faith simply means being willing to lean into the uncertainty, and to revel in the incredible, unfathomable, irrational mystery that is God.