Reframing Hope Means Asking Better Questions

One way to reframe our thinking about hope (and everything else we’re not sure we believe in anymore) is to focus more on asking better questions and less on finding the “right” answers. While questions themselves offer less security and control than answers, questions are also more powerful than answers, and more compelling.

In the gospels, Jesus is asked 183 questions. In all but four cases, he replies either with another question, a story, or an “answer” that’s a paradox. Not only that, but Jesus himself asks 307 questions throughout the gospels. So he is far more often found with the questions than found answering them. Why might this be? I can think of a few possible reasons…

1. “Answers” are incomplete, and too easily satisfy.

Of course, questions are incomplete too, otherwise why would we ask them? But the trouble with a direct answer is that it too often tries to conceal its incompleteness. It tries to fully satisfy a question, and allows us to pretend that somehow we have “arrived” or really figured something out.

It is too easy to settle for an “answer” in place of a living, breathing encounter with Truth herself, and with our True Humanity in God. With an “answer,” we can be tempted to stop looking, stop seeking, and think that we are now in control. We can be “too easily satisfied” as C.S. Lewis says—so enamored by a mud pie that we have little interest in a holiday at the sea.

But a really good question acknowledges an incompleteness, and issues an invitation to go “further up and further in” to what is Real, and to our true selves. With Jesus, even when he does answer, it always draws his listeners into more, not to a stopping point. He always invites people to a deeper connection, not just with “truth” in the abstract, but with the goodness and beauty which makes Truth complete.

2. Questions and answers are always about power and relationships.

And they can also be about wonder, joy, love, and transformation. This is why they are so important. Too often, our desperation for an answer has to do with failures in relationship, with a need to protect ourselves from true relationship, or even from the truth about ourselves. Too often, answers are a way of feeling in control and exercising power over others too.

We can see this in the desperation for answers, but we can also see it–less commonly maybe–in the refusal to be answered. We’ve all seen people who will just not listen to what anyone says, no matter how reasonable or how good the arguments are. There is a fear of not having an answer, and there is also a fear of having one. Both of these postures actually serve to show why we must strive for better questions, because….

3. Questions set the terms for answers.

For those who refuse to be answered, and for those desperate to find a conclusive answer, the root problem is often a need for better questions, to find out what it is that really troubles them.

When Jesus replies to a question with another question, he is not handing us an answer we can write down, codify, categorize, carve into stone, and possess as an object–he is inviting us into a different way of thinking, being, and living in the Way, Truth, and Life.

Rather than telling us what to decide, he asks us to consider how we make our judgments, and why we have made the decisions we do. Perhaps more than any of this, he is asking us to consider who we are. Through his questions, parables, and paradoxes, he invites us not to close our hearts and minds around an answer, but to open them to love our Creator with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

This is because Truth is only made manifest in Love. Love is Truth in action–Love is the Truth of our being and purpose.

Jesus does not ask us to build our sense of self around what we know, like so many of the scribes who question him–rather, he asks us to build it around who we love, and to whom we belong. Over and over again, the scribes ask Jesus to make a judgment on something, and Jesus calls them back to questions of the heart, loyalty, and affection.

Jesus is interested in loyalty, hope, and love. Where do our loyalties lie? In what do we place our hope? And who do we love?

Of course, what we believe and what we do matter immensely. But they mean absolutely nothing if we have not love. And we cannot truly love a fact or an opinion–we can only truly love something which is in some way living. Our facts and opinions mean nothing if they actually shut our hearts off from love, because we are resting in them rather than risking the vulnerability and trust we need to have what we truly long for–which is not an “answer” but a meeting, an encounter with the Love at the center of the universe.

The truest questions we long to ask are all about knowing, and being known in love.

“Love never fails…but if there is knowledge, it will be done away with…for now, we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known.

“But now, these three remain: loyalty, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

1 Cor. 13:8, 12-13

This blog originally posted at: https://substack.com/home/post/p-191892376

Kristin is Peace Catalyst Program Manager in Phoenix, Arizona. She brings scholarship to the streets through interfaith community organizing and peace building with Arizona Church Advocates for the Middle East, and through community chaplaincy. Learn more about Kristin here.