Many Journalists are very skilled at asking loaded questions that will trip up the unwary. A few months ago one unfortunate government minister was asked something, I can’t remember exactly what now, and he didn’t realise that the answer he gave was the complete opposite to something the Prime Minister had said only a day or two earlier. Oops! So we are rather used to questions that appear to be straight forward on the surface having a deeper agenda that can lead to something quite different.

Today’s gospel reading (John 10:22-30) seems a little strange at first. It looks like the questioners are being a bit thick and Jesus’ reply doesn’t offer them much respite. They want him to give a straight yes or no answer to their question: is he the Messiah, the promised anointed one they were longing for, or not. Jesus answers them by asking that they draw their own conclusions from the signs and works that they can see. He has pretty much spelt it out already. So this is not that far from a straight yes, but still requires them to do a bit of work to get there themselves.

On one level, we could excuse them for not quite believing their eyes. ‘Is this really the one?’ ‘After waiting so long have we really found what we have been looking for?’ Perhaps they can hardly believe it and just need that kind of reassurance we all need when we can’t believe our eyes and suspect we may be day dreaming - though it has to be said Jesus doesn’t give them that benefit of the doubt!

From Jesus’ angle we can realise, like any good teacher, that a lesson is best learnt when the students work it out for themselves and come to the conclusion themselves. This means that it goes so much deeper than just being told, which never really carries the same authority. There is a saying about if you tell me something I will forget, if you show me I will remember and if I am involved myself then I will understand and am more likely to be changed as a result. So Jesus saying ‘put the pieces together: what I have said and done’ is the answer of a good teacher and of course he is calling on them to be involved. Jesus has done his educational psychology!

But none of this touches the depths of this story. We are told that this took place at the festival of the Dedication and Jesus is walking in the temple. This takes us straight to the added levels that spell trouble. To understand it we need to wind back the date clock to the year 167 BC. The Roman baddy is Antiochus Epiphanes and the Jewish good guy is Judas Maccabaeus. Antiochus Epiphanes had led his army into Jerusalem and defiled the temple by worshipping pagan gods there. He offered sacrifices to them in the place where Yahweh, the God of Abraham and Sarah, who called Moses to lead them out of slavery into the promised land, was actually believed to dwell in the Holy of Holies! This defiled the soul of the Hebrew religion and was the ultimate humiliation for a nationalist’s identity.

Judas Maccabaeus led a revolt that liberated the city. The temple was purified and to remember this they had a special festival each year called Hanukkah, the festival of Dedication, and it took place in winter, at precisely the time Jesus wanders into the temple, in the portico of Solomon, the very king who built the holy site in the first place. The setting for this question could not be more poignant. To ask ‘are you the one’ at this time, in this place, under a period of occupation, is to plug into a whole seething pot of potential trouble and revolutionary zeal. And as we know Jesus had a different agenda to the mere military leader notion of what it meant to be the Messiah. He hints at this with his combative language about them not belonging to his sheep.

This gives us a further reason for him not saying a direct ‘yes’ as such. To answer a straight ‘yes’ would have risked giving the wrong answer to the questions underlying the surface one. Yes he is the promised Messiah, just look at the signs around you and listen to what he has been saying about being the Good Shepherd. But he is not in the way they were expecting.

This all takes place in the temple. The temple was not actually built on the firm foundations that the later cult would have liked. When we read the story in the Old Testament (2 Samuel 7) about David deciding to build a temple, a place for God to dwell, the reply comes back from God, ‘excuse me, who made the world and you for that matter, so do you really think I need your house! Rather I will build you a house, a dynasty and you will rule according to my plan.’ It was a divine put down. Some years later, though, under David’s son, Solomon, when things were more settled and they were not plagued by constant warfare, the temple was built any way (1 Kings 5ff)!

Having built this thing, and effectively set themselves up for focussing on it, they are then held to account by how they remain faithful to it; by the standard they have chosen. So when they turn away from it, as they periodically do, they are condemned by their own choice - they can’t really win. Having put all their eggs in one basket, they have set themselves off on a flawed understanding of God. So deeper in the condemnations is buried a notion that God cannot be identified with any one place or practice. God is always bigger than our ways of doing things, however precious they become, and is always bigger than our pictures and definitions. How could we possibly delude ourselves that God will be confined to a house we build?

So a simple yes to the question ‘are you the one’ would also fail to challenge the whole religious basis of their question, that God dwelt in the temple. By moving the parameters of the question, Jesus opens up the possibility of their understanding of God changing, in time. And the ‘in time’ is what happened after the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost.

So as with all really good teachers, Jesus manages to answer not only the question they asked in words as well as the one they asked through the sub-agenda of time, place and setting, but he also answered the question they didn’t know they had asked! They are taken to the ambivalence on which the temple was built, to the God who is far bigger than any of the conceptual containers we try to squash him into, and who fulfils expectations in ways that change the very desire we long for.

There is a lot there to inspire us all in our growth in faith and to challenge just what it is we desire above all things. We can put our trust in God because he answers not only our prayers - the ones we put into words as well as the sub-agenda of time, place and setting - but he also answers the prayers we didn’t know we had prayed and this is life giving beyond measure.

© Ian Black 2004

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