I find myself lately identifying with the people in the Gospels who ask Jesus questions and raise objections to him.
"We only have five loaves and two fishes."
"He's been dead for three days."
"We don't know where you are going. How can we know the way?"
I think that what is funny about these exchanges -- and probably why I relate to the people who ask them -- is that the questions are always perfectly reasonable, completely logical objections to what Jesus says.
They are exactly the objections we raise, exactly the kinds of things we might ask when we worry if there is enough, when we wonder if there is hope, when we do not know which way to go.
Yet somehow Jesus always exposes these questions as completely incorrect.
"You are thinking not as God thinks."
Is it any wonder that we don't always have the right answer? In each of his responses, time after time, Christ reveals that we don't even have the right questions.
The good news is that we don't have to have all the answers -- we have a person. A person who has experienced all of our reasonable questions. All of our wondering where to go and how to go and whether or not we'll get there. All of our fears that we are going to mess up and be proven inadequate.
To all of our wondering and our questions and our perfectly logical objections, Christ answers that He is the way. And so we find ourselves in Lent, a time to draw closer to him, to follow this Wisdom that is not our own to a conclusion that we would never have expected. We don't have to have all of the right answers to the questions that life will throw our way -- all we need is Christ.
