Jesus talks about this “in and out” a lot in his teachings. He keeps insisting that the people who assume they are in may not be in and the ones who everybody thinks are out for whatever reason may in fact be in. In one parable, he has the Judge of Everything telling some religious people, “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”12 Stunning. And in another parable, a man has a feast and none of his invited guests come, so he sends word to all the marginalized, disgusting, unclean people who are “out” that they are invited to come “in” and celebrate with him.13 Again, stunning.
Jesus invites everybody to jump.
And saying yes to the invitation doesn’t mean we have to have it all figured out. This is an important thing to remember: I can jump and still have questions and doubts. I often meet people who are waiting to follow God until they have all their questions answered. They will be waiting for a long time, because if we knew everything, we’d be . . . God. So the invitation to jump is an invitation to follow Jesus with all of our doubts and questions right there with us.
Questions
A Christian doesn’t avoid the questions; a Christian embraces them. In fact, to truly pursue the living God, we have to see the need for questions.
Questions are not scary.
What is scary is when people don’t have any.
What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.
We sponsored a Doubt Night at our church awhile back. People were encouraged to write down whatever questions or doubts they had about God and Jesus and the Bible and faith and church. We had to get a large box to hold all of the scraps of paper. The first question was from a woman who had been raped and didn’t press charges because she was told that doing so wasn’t “the Christian thing to do.” The man then raped several other girls, and this woman wanted to know if God would still forgive her even if she hadn’t forgiven the man who raped her.
Did I mention that this was the first question? Here are a few more asked that night:
“Why does God let people die . . . so young?”
“Why does it seem that mean people get the most money?”
“Why does the killer go free and the honest man die of cancer?”
“Sometimes I doubt God’s presence in starving Africa.”
“If we can ask God for forgiveness at our last breath, why strive for a godly life in the present?”
“Either God is in control of everything and so all the crap we see today is part of his plan (which I don’t want to accept), or it’s all out of control (which sucks too). What’s up?”
This is just a random sampling. I have page after page of questions on my desk. Heaven and hell and suicide and the devil and God and love and rape—some very personal, some angry, some desperate, some very deep and philosophical.
Most of my responses were about how we need others to carry our burdens and how our real needs in life are not for more information but for loving community with other people on the journey. But what was so powerful for those I spoke with was that they were free to voice what was deepest in their hearts and minds. Questions, doubts, struggles. It wasn’t the information that helped them—it was simply being in an environment in which they were free to voice what was inside.
And this is why questions are so central to faith. A question by its very nature acknowledges that the person asking the question does not have all of the answers. And because the person does not have all of the answers, they are looking outside of themselves for guidance.
Questions, no matter how shocking or blasphemous or arrogant or ignorant or raw, are rooted in humility. A humility that understands that I am not God. And there is more to know.
Questions bring freedom. Freedom that I don’t have to be God and I don’t have to pretend that I have it all figured out. I can let God be God.14
In the book of Genesis, God tells Abraham what he is going to do with Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham fires back, “Will not the Ruler of the earth do right?”
Abraham thinks God is in the wrong and the proposed action is not in line with who God is, and Abraham questions him about it. Actually, they get into a sort of bargaining discussion in which Abraham doesn’t let up. He keeps questioning God. And God not only doesn’t get angry, but he seems to engage with Abraham all the more.15
Maybe that is who God is looking for—people who don’t just sit there and mindlessly accept whatever comes their way.
Moses tries for two chapters to convince God that he has picked the wrong man, and God seems all the more convinced with each question that he has picked the right man.16
David says this to God in Psalm 13: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer.”
What’s the first thing Mary says to the angel who brings her the news that she’s going to be the mother of the Messiah?
“But how can this be? I’m a virgin!”
Questions. Questions. Questions.
What are some of Jesus’s final words? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus. On the cross. Questioning God.
Central to the Christian experience is the art of questioning God. Not belligerent, arrogant questions that have no respect for our maker, but naked, honest, vulnerable, raw questions, arising out of the awe that comes from engaging the living God.
This type of questioning frees us. Frees us from having to have it all figured out. Frees us from having answers to everything. Frees us from always having to be right. It allows us to have moments when we come to the end of our ability to comprehend. Moments when the silence is enough.
The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder.”17
The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can’t be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.
Most of us are conditioned to think of mystery in terms of a television show or a novel or a film in which the mystery is solved at the end.18 Often right before the credits we find out who did it, or who is actually the long-lost son of whom, or that she is actually a he. Or that Bruce Willis was dead for most of the movie and we just now figured it out.19
Mystery is created when key facts are hidden from the viewer. What the writer/director/creator does at the end
