Sunday, August 11, 2013: Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

One of the few reliable maxims in theology is that the simpler the question, the tougher the answer. Volumes of scholarly articles examining centuries of intellectual struggle emerge from questions that are strikingly stark: Who is Jesus? Why does evil happen? What is salvation? What is the point of the church? The less these questions are adorned, the more pressing they become.

This is not because the simpler questions are somehow ineffable or because the Christian tradition lacks adequate responses. The simplest questions can be hardest to answer because the tradition has bequeathed to us a glorious excess of images and narratives through which we can address the deepest issues of life. Christians are often reduced to a kind of blessed stuttering, not because they lack things to say but because they struggle to know which of the many available answers is the right one for a given situation.

In my childhood the adults who surrounded me often emphasized the importance of “having faith.” “Have faith in Jesus” was the deceptively clear advice—it was meant to reassure me and discourage me from too much fretting over hard problems. But the advice was actually an impetus to my efforts to try to find out more about what it meant to have faith in what cannot be seen. Teresa of Ávila wrote that “Christ has no body but yours,” but the truth is that I became more and more confused. I was being asked to have faith in a person whose presence was far from obvious, and that created more problems than it solved. The simpler the answers, the more the questions kept nagging me.