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Uncommon Questions
from an
Extraordinary Savior
Christopher Bozung
Energion Publications
P. O. Box 841
Gonzalez, FL 32560
energionpubs.com
Copyright © 2012, Christopher Bozung
Unless otherwise marked, scripture quotations are from the New International Version Bible. Copyright © Zondervan Corporation. 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011. Used by Permission.
Scripture quotations marked NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U. S. A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover Design: Christopher Bozung
Author Photo: Christian Bozung
EPub Edition
Print ISBNs:
ISBN10: 1-938434-06-4
ISBN13: 978-1-938434-06-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012949736
To my children,
Christian, Arriana, Cashmira, and Chase
who taught me no question is beyond asking
Foreword
Have you ever questioned what Jesus questioned? Have you ever thought about what Jesus was thinking? Have you ever wondered what Jesus wondered about? If only we could know his questions. But we can! Jesus was the master questioner of history.
Jesus asked questions on approximately 115 different occasions. And yet, as Chris Bozung asserts, the Savior’s questions are truly unique. That’s the premise of his book, Uncommon Questions from an Extraordinary Savior.
A decade ago while visiting Regent University in Virginia Beach, Chris asked me to sign a copy of my own book, Soul Tsunami. While I was autographing the inside cover, he said, “I’m working on a book that asserts that Jesus never asked a question because he needed to know the answer.”
It was an intriguing thought, a thought that I couldn’t shake off when a few months later I picked up for the first time Letters to a Young Poet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934). These ten letters were written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) to a young man named Franz Xaver Kappus (age 19) about to enter the German military. Kappus sought advice from the senior Rilke (age 27) on what it means to be an artist and a human being. My favorite letter is this one dated 16 July 1903:
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. LIVE the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer (33-34).
Chris got me thinking about what it might mean to live the questions of Jesus. What can be learned from examining the questions of Jesus? What is true about any single question of Jesus, yet true about all the questions of Jesus at the same time? Stated simply, what do His questions have in common?
Chris’ book overflows with astute perceptions on Jesus’ mode of questioning. His starting point is bold yet simple: Jesus asked questions in a way no one before or since has ever done. He contends that with Jesus, we never have to wonder whether the correct question was being asked. Chris asserts Jesus did not ask questions simply to gather information or secure facts. He writes from the perspective that Jesus’ use of questions emphasized inward change in those Jesus’ was questioning.
I came away from this book realizing that Jesus didn’t ask questions to get an answer so much as to provoke a re-start. Sometimes certain areas of our lives need restarts more than answers. I did not know how much I needed this book until after I read it.
Chris’ concept is fresh, different, solid, and interesting. His book includes provocative interactions to get small groups to ask great questions. As you read Uncommon Questions I hope you’ll agree that Jesus never asked a question because he needed to know the answer.
Leonard Sweet
Madison, New Jersey
“Oh my soul … be prepared to meet him who knows how to ask questions.”
T.S. Eliot, The Rock
Introduction
In Chicago, March 1992, an 8-year-old boy was questioned by police after he shot a girl classmate in the spine with a semiautomatic handgun. “Is this going to take long?” he asked the detectives, “I’ve got someplace to go tonight.”1
Questions define our thoughts. They are used to attract the attention of the listener and prejudice responses. They help us to build our understanding of a subject or idea. Yet not all questions challenge us in the same way. Open-ended questions require much thought. Closed-ended questions require a simple “yes” or “no.” Rhetorical questions have self-evident answers. Hypothetical questions ask us to begin the process of thinking and answering.
Have you ever noticed how many questions you ask in a day – or perhaps someone asks you?
In just one hour’s time, my son Christian asked me, “Why are your lips red? Where does your tongue go when you close your mouth? How do they make potato chips? Why do we only have ten fingers?” My daughter Arriana – who tends to be more pragmatic – asked me, “Do old people take a shower?”
Since I first began studying the questions of Jesus, I have collected questions people ask. Here are some of my favorites:
Why do they lock gas station rest rooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them?
Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?
Why isn’t there mouse-flavored cat food?
What was the best thing before sliced bread?
Two of the best questions, though, come from the presidential election of 1948 in which Governor Thomas Dewey lost to Harry S Truman. Paul Boller writes in Presidential Anecdotes, “Stunned by his defeat, Dewey later said he felt like the man who woke up to find himself inside a coffin with a lily in his hand and thought to himself: ‘If I’m alive, what am I doing here? And if I’m dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?’”2
The pages of the New Testament contain some 340 individual questions Jesus asked. Such questions as:
“Why were you searching for me?” “Didn’t you know that I had to be in my Father’s house?” “Who are my mother and my brothers?”
