Listen now Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

One of the little angels at my home church in Bury came up with these questions for her Sunday School teacher recently: “Who made God? Why did God not have a wife? What would have happened if the whale didn’t want to swallow Jonah? What if Mary said she didn’t want a baby?”

Well, thank goodness I’m up the front preaching and not taking a Sunday School class! Though it makes me wonder whether we give all the training to the wrong people sometimes…

Why?

Jesus liked to ask questions too. In Luke’s gospel, the first recorded conversation with his parents has Jesus asking Mary and Joseph: “Why were you searching for me?” From the cross he asks: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Having risen from the dead, he says to Mary Magdalene: “Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?”

Some of his questions were rhetorical but some were meant to be answered. To his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” To the woman: “Where are your accusers?”

It’s easy just to switch off when someone is talking without interruption for any period of time, like I am now. But if you thought that I was going to ask you a question and that I expected to get an answer, then you would probably pay more attention! Jesus asking questions was a way of breaking through to peoples’ hearts and minds. A challenge to vocalise what was going on inside. To voice the confusion, the prejudice, the bias. To work through the complexities.

God is a comma

Pope Francis said: “…if you still don’t understand, God works through questions. He really does. In fact, I think he prefers questions to answers. Because while answers are closed, in a sense, questions are open. A poet once wrote: ‘God is a comma and not a full stop.’ The comma points to something else, advances the discussion, leaves the way open for further discussion. A full stop brings discussion to an end, it closes the dialogue. Yes, God is a comma, a lover of questions.”

Questions can be loving, unsettling and provocative all at the same time. In the first dialogue with God recorded in the Bible, God asks Adam and Eve: “Where are you?”. God knew where they were, and the couple weren’t lost. Instead, God was giving them the freedom to step out and to answer.

Of Cain, the Lord God asks: “Where is your brother?” Much later, in Jesus last conversation with this disciple, he asks Simon, son of John: “Do you love me more than these?”

Ask ourselves

Those are timeless questions. Questions that we should ask of ourselves. Where are we in our life of faith? How much do we look out for our brothers and sisters, both those in this room and those that we see only on the news? Where is God in our list of priorities? What does Jesus really mean to me? How can God be more a part of my daily life?

Perhaps this morning we ask why a man in a Sydney shopping mall indiscriminately stabs and kills. Or why one nation sends missiles and drones against another with little to gain and much to lose.

And in our Gospel passage we have another question of Jesus and another question that we perhaps need to answer ourselves: “Why are you frightened and why do doubts arise in your heart?”

His mission

Just to remind ourselves, we’re in the Third Sunday of Easter but in our Gospel readings this year we’ve only got as far as the evening of the first day. Last week we had John’s version of Jesus appearing to the disciples and the week before, Easter Day, we had the women going to the empty tomb.

Last week and this week are very similar. Jesus appears to the disciples who are afraid and unbelieving. He convinces them that it really is him and that he is raised from the dead. And that they are to continue his work, his mission to the world.

In Luke, our version today, this is the third of three appearances that Jesus has made that day. He’s walked with two of the disciples on their return to Emmaus and he’s appeared privately to Simon Peter, of which we annoyingly get no details.

Opens their minds

The earlier Emmaus story follows much the same pattern as our Gospel today. The disciples initially fail to recognize Jesus, he opens their minds to scripture, there’s food, and finally they truly understand who he is.

In the Emmaus story, the two disciples initially think that the women’s report of a tomb, that was empty of Jesus but containing angels instead, was just an idle tale. Jesus tells the two that they’ve been slow of heart and connects the dots for them between what is going on and what the scriptures had said. We’re told that their eyes are opened whilst he breaks bread in their home and he immediately exits, stage right – or left.

The two disciples leg it back to Jerusalem to excitedly share what had happened, only to find that Jesus had somehow got back first and with enough time to speak to Simon.

Scarpered

And here we are. The disciples seem to recognize Jesus but think he’s a ghost. We’re told they are startled and terrified, despite at least three of them having already met him. And is it any wonder? The person they’d devoted the last three or so years to, the one who meant the world to them, the one they believed to be the Messiah, had been captured, tortured and killed. The one who not only they believed in but who believed in them too, was gone, killed on a cross. Most of them had scarpered and probably felt ashamed. Most hadn’t seen the death themselves but there was enough there who had to testify to what had happened. And now, somehow, he was back and in the room. What manner of man is this?

He shows them his hands and feet and eats some fish to show that, yes, it really is him, not some spirit or apparition. He opens up scripture again, just like he did on the way to Emmaus, though Luke doesn’t say here whether they were all convinced and whether their hearts all burned in the same way that it had for the two earlier.

What happens next

Once done, Jesus leaves this room too. Our Lectionary reading misses it off but in Luke he doesn’t vanish off on his own this time but leads his followers out to Bethany, where he blesses them and then ascends into heaven. And that’s where the Gospel of Luke stops, and we have to go to Acts to see what happens next.

But our reading today finishes with the commissioning of the disciples. They’re told that “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem.” The Book of Acts paints the picture of what that looked like for the disciples as they fulfil their call to be witnesses.

Not asking the right questions

And that’s where we come in. We can each have our doubts and fears too. Our confusions and misunderstandings. If we don’t, then we’re probably not asking the right questions. Or we mistakenly think that we already know all the answers and so have stopped asking.

Pierre Claverie, a bishop in Algeria who was killed in 1996, would often say this: “I believe. I believe in one God. But I never pretend to possess God, not through Jesus, who reveals him to me, or even through the dogmas of my faith. One does not possess God. Whoever thinks that he possesses the truth, in fact does nothing of the kind.”

Because we’re human

Jesus asks us: “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” We doubt because we’re human and we can’t possess all truth. If we were braver, we would probably ask the same sorts of questions that the Sunday School child did. We long to search, to know more, to ask questions of ourselves and others. Because God is a comma and not a full stop.

Just like the disciples, we meet together, and we encounter the risen Christ. In scripture and in hymns and in preaching we are offered an explanation, an opening of God’s word. And we eat together, breaking the bread (or perhaps it really should be the fish) in the Eucharist.

The Holy Spirit brought power from on high to the disciples – and brings us enlightenment, opening our eyes and, God willing, setting our hearts on fire too.

But this time it should be us, you and me, who make our exit – because Jesus Christ commissions us, sends us out to the world, to be witnesses to his wonderful, amazing news. Let’s pray to God that we respond to that call. Amen

‘God is a comma’ was given by Ian Banks at St James, Heywood on 14^th April 2024. It was based on Luke 24:36b-48.

References:

• Evans, C.F. (1990). Saint Luke. SCM Press.
• Pope Francis. (2023). The Tablet. The God Who Loves Questions. Volume 227. No. 9533. The Tablet Publishing Company Limited.
• Radcliffe, T. & Popko, L. (2023). Questioning God. Bloomsbury.
• https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-easter-2/commentary-on-luke-2436-48