Jesus the Question, Pt 1: Whose head is this, and whose title?
The events of Easter compelled the disciples to reconsider who Jesus was. This question about who Jesus is has endured down the centuries, and remains important even to those who accept the creeds and formularies that the Church has laboured over. In the next two essays, Fr Simon Cuff helps us to meditate on this question. This essay is adapted from a series of addresses Fr Simon gave in Berkeley.
One of my great theological heroes is the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. One of the recurring themes of his theology is the challenge that Jesus makes to all of the ways we might think religiously.
The best example of this is an essay called ‘The Finality of the Christ’ in his magisterial On Christian Theology (Wiley, 2000). In this essay, which is written with the typical complexity of prose that Bishop Rowan can sometimes muster, he tries to weave a path through the various options to the conundrum posed by the existence of other religions.
The essay is as skilful as it is complex. Rather than take one of the standard options within inter-religious dialogue of exclusivism (“only our tribe gets in”); inclusivism (“only our tribe get in but hey guess what you’re in it”); pluralism (“loads of tribes and we all get in”). Instead, Williams suggests that Jesus isn’t an answer to this conundrum, but God’s fundamental question to human ways of being. Jesus isn’t so much picking a tribe, extending a tribe, or hallowing all tribes, but God’s eternal question to us: “hey guys, what’s with all the tribes?”.
“This does seem to break through”, writes Williams, “to some extent, the options of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. Jesus is not dehistoricized or absoltuized as an icon of significance, but neither is he depicted as the teacher of one among several possible ways of salvation. He is presented as the revelation of God: as God’s question, no more, no less. Being a Christian is being held to that question in such a way that the world of religious discourse in general may hear it”.
Rowan Williams draws again on the theme of Jesus as ‘question’ in a Christmas message to readers of a British television guide in 2011. For Williams, it’s not so much WWJD—What Would Jesus Do?—but WIJA, What Is Jesus Asking?. “The idea that ‘what would Jesus do?’ somehow provides a nice short cut to the truth”, Williams writes, “needs a bit of challenging… Christians don’t believe that Jesus is there just to give us a good example in every possible situation. The Jesus we meet in the Bible is somebody who constantly asks awkward questions.”
The Jesus we meet in Scripture is somebody who is constantly asking questions, often awkward always penetrating. Far from giving clear and simple answers, more often than not Jesus asks difficult questions. He teaches with questions, answers questions with questions. If Williams is right, he is himself God’s question to us, no more, no less.
One of my favourite things to do with groups of students at the beginning of a class on this or that biblical episode is to ask them to them write down from memory what happens in that episode. What happens, who’s there, who said what—that sort of thing—before they’re allowed to open their Bibles, or head to Google or Wikipedia. Inevitably, however you’ve written down the event, there will be details in the text of Scripture which you’ve forgotten, or misremembered, or didn’t seem to be there the last time you read that passage.
Christ Among the Doctors (1506), Albrecht Dürer.
Most of us, if we were asked to describe the story of Mary and Joseph losing their son and finding the twelve-year-old in the temple would recall Jesus being found in the temple teaching the religious elders of his day.
But if we look at Luke's Gospel (2.46):
After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.
Sure enough, Luke goes on (2.47):
and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and answers.
Even at this age, Jesus is asking them questions. In this episode, Jesus even responds to his mother’s question with a question. “Child, why have you treated us like this?”, asks his mother. Jesus’s response:
Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?
From the outset, Jesus asks questions of those around him. He continues to asks those questions of us today.
We can see how Jesus uses questions by looking at some examples of the questions he asks, especially the most famous instance of Jesus’s answering a question with a question (Mark 12.13-17 + parallels).
This episode shows us just how far Jesus’s question reaches, the depths to which God’s challenge to us in Christ extends. This episode raises a perennial relevant question, and demonstrates the universality of Christ’s questioning of us.
The religious authorities have sent a delegation of Pharisees and Herodians, the religious and political elite to entrap him. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?. They’re not quite asking him to publish his tax returns… but it is a wonderfully tricksy question. Say yes, pay tax to the emperor and he can be accused of acknowledging a power other than God. Say no, and he can be reported to the Imperial authorities for encouraging tax evasion. What does Jesus do? Or rather… what does Jesus ask?
Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it. Whose head is this, and whose title? Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.
In a stroke, he explodes their trap.
Williams glosses this passage:
In other words: don’t just imitate me – think. What’s the exact point at which paying taxes to the Empire gets in the way of serving God? What’s the exact point at which involvement in the “empire” of capitalist economy compromises you fatally?
Jesus’s words are deeply ironic, because if we think about it long enough we realise that God’s claim on things trumps even that of any imperial power. Even that which appears to belong to the mighty power, even the head of state, in fact belongs to, originates from God. To give back to God that which is his, is to give each and everything all of us have been given back to him.
Jesus’s answer reminds us of this truth, even as it raises difficult questions for us about how far we participate in and contribute to a system which seems anything but like it belongs to God. Jesus’s question doesn’t just prompt us to think about how we give back what we’ve been given to God, it doesn’t just raise questions for how much we are implicated in a system contrary to his will, it raises questions which strike at the heart of our identity, of who we are before God. Should Jews pay tax to a gentile empire? What does it mean to be Jewish? What does it mean to pay tax? Whose tribe are you in? What does it mean to be in our tribe and how does God break us out of it? What does it mean to give all that is God’s back to him in the mix of the complex and competing mesh of identities and tribes we inhabit.
“Whose head is this, and whose title?”. Jesus takes a coin, points to the image, and asks awkward questions.
We know from elsewhere in Scripture in whose image we are made. “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them” (Gen 1.27).
“Whose head is this, and whose title?”
Whose image are you showing to the world? In whose likeness are you forming your life?
Rowan Williams’s little article on the limitations of "what would Jesus do” ends by applying Jesus’s pervasive questioning to the celebration of Christmas. Williams reflects on what God has done for us by becoming one of us in the Christ-child, and what this means for our call to live according to God’s image and likeness, how it teaches us to change the world around us in order to bring about the kind of changes God wills for us in Christ.
He writes that:
what changes things isn’t a formula for getting the right answer, but a willingness to stop and let yourself be challenged right to the roots of your being… we can find the courage to let this happen because we are let into the secret that we are in the hands of love – committed, unshakeable love.
“Whose head is this and whose title?”
God’s question to us challenges us to our very core. There is nothing we do or are which isn’t subject to God’s awkward questioning, held in God’s unshakeable love.
The most surprising set of questions that Jesus asks further demonstrates just how far this questioning goes. These are the questions that Jesus addresses God the Father. As he approaches his Passion, in John’s Gospel, he asks: “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—’Father, save me from this hour’?” (John 12.27). Jesus doesn’t skip happily to the Cross, the weight of his impending suffering looms large. His sense of regret that it’s come to this.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, likewise he asks: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22.42). There is no other way by which God can save us than enter into the very depths of our alienation and despair. There is no glee here. No trivialising of all the very many ways human beings suffer and cause each other suffering.
This suffering reaches its apex on the Cross. Here Christ asks the most chilling question of all, the bitter cry: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. This is a citation from Psalm 22, but it is a cry which enters into the very depths of all our pain, all our suffering, all our longings. It is the question asked in bitter sighs by those in the very midst of despair.
In Christ, God asks that question of all of us. God takes on the question that it is on the lips of all those who suffer and makes it his own. He enters into solidarity with them. And we put him there. Our rejection of love is what puts Christ there. Not just in that first sin, not just when we put love to death, but in all the ways we reject the love which God wishes us to enjoy, and all the ways we inflict our rejection of that love on to others.
Christ’s cry on the cross, his question of desolation, is the cry of all suffering humanity. His cry is the cry of all those who feel abandonment and despair, of all those who suffer, of those whose suffering means that they feel the utter absence even of God. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”.
And yet, even in the very moment of despair, in the moment of suffering, the moment at which God feels most absent. We look again at the Cross and see that it is God himself crying out. In Christ, God has made this question his own. So that in those moments of despair, in those moments of suffering, those moments God feels most absent, Christ’s desolate question reminds us that God is there. God is there sharing our pain, crying out with us. God is there entering into our suffering and redeeming it from the inside. God is there as he enters our humanity, becoming one of us, and transforming that humanist from the inside. God is there as he enters us, and transforms us from the inside.
Whatever weight we’re carrying today. Whatever pain and suffering. Whatever in life is making us cry out, “why have you forsaken me?”. Christ’s question, his cry of desolation, his question of despair, reminds us that Christ is even there, even in that darkest place, calling us to himself, challenging us, questioning us, and dying to bring us rest.
