The Questions Jesus Asks Us: A Sermon

Lauren Wright Pittman, “Come and See” (2021).

There are only two questions, it seems to me, that matter most fundamentally in our brief lives: the questions that we ask of God and the questions that God asks of us.

If we’re perfectly honest with ourselves, however, we rarely ask God all of our questions for fear that he will go silent on us or shell out something that we never wanted in the first place. After a few rounds of such impossible silence, we give up altogether because the pain is too great.

Or faced yet again with the inscrutable will of God, we find ourselves settling for a more polite but self-protective relationship with God.

It’s easier that way—never looking him in the face. In public we rehearse the requisite theological truths because we know that it’s the right thing to do, but in private they’ve become platitudes, utterly ineffectual because we don't believe them, not really.

Or we avoid asking God the questions of our hearts because we’re embarrassed by them. What kind of God is interested in our silly little wishes—for better skin, for a happy house, for getting noticed for one’s talents, for a spouse who might speak a word of kindness more often.

Or we ask God our questions as if he were a civil servant at the DMV, there to do his job in perfunctory fashion but ultimately un-interested in us as a person, as a human being. We get the business of prayer done efficiently but nobody ever looks the other in the face. It's too intimate that way, too uncomfortable.

“It’s all God, not me, anyway,” we think to ourselves, and we make ourselves small before the Divine Presence because it’s what we think we should be doing. But in practice we’re simply finding a way to hide from God.

Yet there's also the other side of the question. There are the questions that God asks of us. “Where are you?” “Where are you going?” “What is your name?” “Can these bones live?”

This past Sunday I got to explore the questions that Jesus asks us in the Gospel of John. More specifically, I explored the question that Jesus asks the Twelve in John 6:67, “Do you wish also to leave?”

I suggested to folks Church of the Cross that we couldn’t make full sense of that question apart from the first and last questions that Jesus asks in the Fourth Gospel: “What do you want?” and “Do you love me?”

You can listen to my whole sermon here which starts around minute 24. I share it with you here in the hopes that it might give you courage to ask God your most honest questions and, even better, by God's grace to share your honest questions with trusted friends.

(I also heartily recommend Lore Wilburt’s book, A Curious Faith: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and We Wish Someone Would Ask Us. It’s a brave and gentle book that makes it far more possible than we had perhaps originally imagined to bring to God all of our honest questions.)

Here is an excerpt from the latter part of the sermon: