Twenty-Fifth
Sunday of Ordinary Time
September
24, 2006
Were
you a student who was afraid to ask questions when you didn’t understand
something?
I was an inquisitive child. Asking
questions when I didn’t know. Pestering my brothers. Watching the repairmen
when they came to work on the house. I was always trying to figure out how things
worked, and when I couldn’t, I’d ask people. It was a great way to
come to the truth about stuff – keep asking the questions. Were you the
kind of kid who asked questions or who kept silent when you didn’t know?
When I got to that line in the gospel where the disciples did not understand,
“but were afraid to question him”, I was a bit surprised. If you really
wanted to know, you just ask. How come they didn’t just ask Jesus? It would
be an easy thing to do.
But you know, it is easy to pick on the disciples, sometimes. The gospels themselves
make less than stunning comments about the 12. Mark is particularly harsh in regard
to their understanding of Jesus’ passion predictions. Three times in Mark’s
gospel Jesus says: I am the messiah, and I must suffer. Three times the disciples
don’t get it and either rebuke Jesus like last week or remain silent like
this week or misunderstand it. The disciples didn’t understand how being
a messiah and suffering could go together. But they were afraid to ask. They were
afraid to ask.
Yet, when I thought it about it, there are times when I am afraid to ask the questions
that need to be asked as well. I am about to go to St. Ann from the Newman Center
for my other full time job and I run into a student whose face seems to be not
their usual smiling self, and in that moment, I can choose either to ask and be
late or not ask. It is easier (or more time efficient) not to ask. Or near the
middle of last year, as a member of the priest council, I volunteered for a task
force looking into the marriage policy of the Archdiocese. The person spearheading
it did a lot of the work by e-mail. But not much has happened in a while and I
am afraid to ask where the project stood – because it would most likely
mean more work for me…
I wonder if it was that kind of ‘afraid to ask’ that was going on
in the lives of the disciples. They were afraid to ask because there would be
consequences for them, and if they ask, they’ll have to face that truth.
Kind of like what happens between roommates, after you’ve had several discussions
about cleanliness and dishes and the like. Then you come home, and there are clothes
and towels lying on the bathroom floor and a sink full of dirty dishes that aren’t
yours. And you have a choice – to get INTO it again, or to not ask the question.
It sometimes seems easier not to ask the question.
Or, when you are making a moral decision, and there is this little nagging going
on, trying to warn you, trying to tell you, maybe this is not a great choice,
or even a good choice. But instead of pursuing that feeling, finding out what
it is trying to teach us, we are afraid to ask that question…
Fortunately for us, we have a savior who gently knows how to confront even
this way of evading the truth in our lives. When the disciples refused to ask
the questions they needed to about their lord’s suffering and what that
meant for their discipleship, He sat a child down in front of them, one with
no status, no authority, no power. And in a way that they could hear and see,
in that child, he showed them the life of discipleship, the life of being a
servant that was before them all.
As we come to this altar, the same Lord greets our questions and our fears and
our doubts. He kneels in our midst and invites us to speak our questions and
our fears. And when we are afraid to do just that, he will send a word during
the week, perhaps through a classmate’s off comment, or a line in a class
reading that will be like standing a child in front of US. And we will know
again the deepest truth. That, even though he will suffer and die, he will be
our messiah, - meeting us in our questions and fears and teaching us there is
nothing that can keep us from that saving love…