My talk today is all about questions. There’s no doubt that questions play a big part in the way we talk and write, even in the way we think. Imagine if we couldn’t ask questions! In Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Just So Story’ about the elephant’s child, comes the little verse:- I have six honest serving men (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. and if you know the story, you’ll remember that the elephant’s child asked so many questions, because of his ‘satiable curiosity, that all the grown-ups got totally fed up with him, and so he went off on his own to find the answers to his own questions – the result of which was that a crocodile got hold of his little nose, and hung onto it while the elephant’s child pulled and pulled, and the poor little elephant’s nose got longer and longer, until it became a trunk.
Well, true or not, it’s a great story, and it contains a great truth: we do ask an awful lot of questions; children do especially, have you noticed?!. And Kipling’s not so far off the mark when he says that those question-words “taught him all he knew”.
But questions can be used in all sorts of ways, not just for finding out things. Have you ever played that game where two of you have a conversation in which everything you say has to be a question? If you give an answer which isn’t a question you lose that round. It’s great fun, because you have to do some really quick thinking. Have a go afterwards!
Then there’s ‘real questions’ and ‘teacher’s questions’. If you asked me, for example, how to get to Stoke St. Michael from here, and I said “Go out on the main road, take the left turn at Cranmore Piers and keep straight on.” Then if you said, “Yes. Well done!” I’d know you were a teacher, because a real person would have said “Oh, thank you very much.” But, of course, sometimes we do have to find out what people know.
Some questions, of course, are too big for us to answer. Our own children’s favourite was always, “Well, who made God then?!?” And as soon as you come close to God, you do come up against some very big questions, and different people answer them in different ways, and some people try to avoid answering them altogether, or even facing them, don’t they?
Talking of children, I picked up off the floor the other day, a clothes tag. and the words on it could be the answer to one of these very big questions. Here it is. It says on it, “Born to be alive”. Now just go backwards from that to the question that could be the answer to, “Why were you born? – or what were you born for?” and you can see it’s quite a tough question to answer. What answer would you give to the question ‘why were you born?’ (Does anyone want to come up with a suggestion?) Whatever you have come up with, ‘born to be alive’ is actually quite a neat answer, isn’t it? Although it does beg further questions, such as “What were you born to be alive for?” and “What does ‘being alive’ mean?” And they’re quite good questions, aren’t they? They go right to the heart of ‘the meaning of life’, and somehow it feels right to be thinking about them, even if we can’t ever answer them once and for all.
It seems specially right today, as we welcome you all here to participate in young Charlie Hill’s baptism. Let’s see if he knows the answer to the question: “Why were you born, Charlie?” Oh, you were born to be alive, were you? OK, I’ll go along with that. As you all know, within the baptism service, there is a whole series of questions, and they are big questions, that are put to parents, godparents, and the whole congregation. And we all offer God our answers together, in faith.
The chapter from St. Matthew’s gospel, from which today’s reading was taken, is dominated by questions. You may have heard last Sunday the reading about whether Jesus believed it was right to pay taxes to Caesar or not. Matthew makes the reason for asking absolutely clear: “The Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words.” This wasn’t a ‘real’ question: it was a trap. Then the Sadducees, who didn’t believe in the resurrection, came to him with a question designed to ridicule the idea of life after death. And in today’s reading, we have these words, “Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Again, you see, the idea is not to learn something, it’s to trap Jesus into a position of disrespect for the sacred commandments brought to their forefathers so long ago by Moses.
And we’ve heard Jesus’s answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.” Well, there are several sermons in that wonderful reply, so I’m not even going to dip my toes into it now. There’s certainly enough in it to keep me fully occupied in my spiritual life, in my social life and in my personal life, both here and hereafter.
But then Jesus takes his turn to ask the Pharisees a question. “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” It seems a much fairer and more genuine question: to ask what they think, even if his motive is to teach them something. That’s what he’s been doing all along. It doesn’t matter whether the questions are put to him, or he’s the one doing the asking. At first glance, the question seems an odd one: ‘Whose son is the Christ?’ When the Pharisees say that the Christ is the son of David, Jesus then quotes a psalm of David and asks how David can refer to his own son as Lord. In Jewish society, you might call your father ‘Lord’, never your son. What sense do they make of it? It sounds like a contradiction.
And without Jesus saying it in so many words, they, and the crowd, and we, realise that the only way it can be true is if the holy one of God, the Christ, the Messiah, is a son of David, in fact a human being, just like you or me. Well, if not totally like you or me, then certainly a member of the same family of mankind as we are.
And that, in itself, is such incredibly good news! Because what it does is it makes us part of the family of God. All we have to do is believe that this son of David, this son of Adam, is the beloved son of God. And indeed, when Jesus was asked “What must we do to do the works God requires?” he answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
Now if I ask you again, “What were you born for?” and I show you one of the sunflowers from my garden, you can see that a very convincing answer would be, “I was born to die.” Convincing, yes, but rather lacking in hope. We know that the man, Jesus, also died. He was born to die, too, and if that was the end of the matter, all his friends and followers would also be a completely hopeless bunch.
But if it really is true that he rose again and is forever with his father in heaven, well that changes everything, doesn’t it, because what better thing could he wish to do than to gather his family round him, so that they could all be part of his everlasting life.
So, Charlie, I believe that you really were ‘born to be alive’ and I pray that you will always know yourself to be in God’s family. But as you grow up, remember the elephant’s child, and be sure to annoy everybody by asking lots and lots of questions.