In attempting to understand the salvation they received, Christians set about exploring who Jesus was. And that has proved a question the depths of which we still have not fully explored.
Yet speaking of Jesus as an “answer” is not sufficient, for it does not encapsulate the satisfaction we experience when we encounter Him. There are some questions for which a name, a sentence, or even a cluster of ideas would be wholly unsatisfactory if set forth as an “answer.”
Why should I get up in the morning and go off to work? We might lay down a pro/con list to solve it. But a list of benefits and drawbacks stacked up against each other is a reductionistic approach. It might be that one of the goods outweighs any potential drawback—and that what in a given moment seem to be drawbacks are actually precisely those things that God wishes to “use for good” in our lives.
Seeing the point of our work requires discerning its place in the whole of our lives, stretching our minds backward toward our birth and forward toward and beyond death to make sense of the particular moment. It is the psalmist’s imaginative awareness of the brevity of his life in Psalm 90 that prompts him to turn toward God to see the work of his hands established and confirmed.
The answer to the question of the meaning of our work goes well beyond a sentence: It can only be found in the life we share with the Triune God.
Yet we need to be prepared to learn that our questions need to be replaced altogether.
The famous parable of the Good Samaritan is perhaps the best example. A lawyer asks Jesus, “And what must I do to be saved?” Jesus responds by questioning what the lawyer finds in the Torah. The lawyer answers well, summarizing the law with the double command to love God and our neighbor. Yet he is not quite satisfied. He puts a further question to Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus’s response is the parable, which replaces the man’s question with a more appropriate one: “Which of these three … proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”
The lawyer’s original inquiry about his salvation was the right one. But as Jesus’ story reveals, the appropriate question is not who around us counts as deserving of our love; the appropriate question is whether we will be ready to dispense mercy to any who need it.
Jesus is “the answer” to our fundamental questions. However, His gift to us is more than a story; it is life itself and life abundantly. We enfold the gospel story into our lives, which lends that life its distinctive character and shape. As we hear and retell the good news, it becomes for us a story that we also live. The story of Jesus is a truthful answer. But it is a truth that is understood from within, as we walk in the footsteps of the one who also declares Himself the way.
