Answers are important, but questions matter more — our questions for God, like “Do you not care that we are perishing?” and God’s questions for us, like “Why are you still afraid?”

Vicar Lauren Mildahl 
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 12 B 
Texts: Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41 

God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The gospel reading today reminds me of an improv game that I remember watching on “Whose Line is it, Anyway?”.

The game is called “Questions Only,” and in it, the players must act out a scene off the top of their heads, but they are only allowed to speak in questions.  So, it might go something like this:

Imagine a scene is set in a restaurant, one player might ask: “Are you ready to order?”

The other player can’t say yes or no, but they might respond with a question like: “What are the specials?” 

“Can’t you read the board?”

“Would I like the BLT?”

“Do you like Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato?”

“Who doesn’t?”

And it can go on and on like that until someone can’t think of another question or accidentally answers. 

It’s harder than you might think and the joy of it, I think, is when a player messes up. Not only because the mistakes tend to be pretty silly, but also because the format of question after question after question builds its own kind of tension, which can’t be resolved until one of the players finally makes a mistake and offers some kind of resolution. 

And, at least in Mark’s telling, it almost feels like Jesus and the disciples on the boat are playing their own mini game of “Questions Only.”  

When the storm blows up, the disciples ask Jesus: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  Jesus doesn’t answer them directly, but after he calms the storm, asks: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And, like good improv players, the disciples don’t answer this question, but respond with a question of their own which they ask to one another: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Question after question after question – but the answers are left unwritten. The sea is calmed, but the tension isn’t resolved. 

And it reminded me of a quote from Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, who wrote that when it comes to studying scripture: “Answers are important, but questions matter more.”¹

Faithfully seeking God is not about knowing the answers, it’s about the questions. 

And nowhere is that more poignantly demonstrated than in the book of Job.

The entire plot of the book of Job hangs on one of the most difficult questions of human life: if God is good then why is there suffering?  And famously, “the answer” that God gives at the end, isn’t an answer at all. Just more questions hurled at Job from the whirlwind: 

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

“Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together?”

“Who shut in the sea when it burst out from the womb?”

And we only heard the first part, it goes on and on with more and more questions like this for three more chapters! The questions are meant to enlarge Job’s perspective. To help him glimpse a God who is too big for storms and whirlwinds, and much too big for simple, declarative answers! God is beyond the declarative – beyond static description. The mystery of God’s being and reality can only be glimpsed in questions, in shifting images and dynamic metaphors–in a tension that can’t be resolved.  It’s the same idea that Augustine observed, when it comes to God, he wrote: “If you understand, then it isn’t God.”  

Which, to be honest, can be frustrating.  

It can even hurt to be reminded of our smallness, of our helplessness in the face of a chaotic universe and a God we can’t begin to comprehend.  And it sure doesn’t stop us from asking different versions of the same question from Job. 

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  That question the disciples ask in the boat sends a shiver down my spine. 

Because it’s the same question I’ve wanted to ask, during the storms I’ve weathered in my life, whenever I’ve watched whirlwinds swirl around my loved ones.

“God, don’t you care that we are dying?” 

“Don’t you care that we are being gunned down in grocery stores and in Gaza?”

“Don’t you care that we are drinking polluted water and choking on toxic air?”

“Don’t you care that we are so lonely, so hurt, so hopeless that we are killing ourselves?”

“Don’t you care that we are dying?”

These are the hard questions that I think. I wrestle with them. I rage over them. But I don’t often speak them. 

We’ve been taught not to speak these kinds of questions, especially not from the pulpit.  Not to betray any kind of lack of faith, any doubt in God’s goodness. We’re taught to say “Oh sure, I know that God cares,” we’re taught to pray on the assumption that God cares enough to listen, we’re taught to give the good Sunday School answers and never to flat out ask the question. “God, don’t you care?”

Maybe because we are afraid to.  What if we ask and God answers no?  What if God says: “Your mind cannot even contain me. I am the question that cannot be answered. I am the storm and the stillness, I am the thunder and the tempest and the whirlwind and the fire, I AM THAT I AM. How could I care for a speck like you?”

That’s what our deepest, darkest fears whisper to us. So, it feels safer to shove the question down in our hearts and fake an easy faith that we wish we felt. 

But the disciples didn’t do that. 

They were terrified and they asked the question out loud: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

And Jesus doesn’t answer directly.  He doesn’t say, “Of course I care, how could you even ask that?”

Instead he calms the storm. 

We can ask.  We can ask the hard questions. 

Because God speaks from the whirlwind.  Because God’s love is as big as God’s power and as big as God’s self.  Because answers are important but questions matter more. 

The questions we ask God. And the questions God asks us. 

That’s what those four chapters of questions that God asks Job show us.  They show us how much God cares.  How much God cares for the Earth, right down to its foundations. How much God cares for the sea, who God calms and swaddles with clouds. And if we kept reading in these chapters we’d see more questions that show in beautifully strange detail how much God cares for all creation.

“Where is the way to the dwelling of light?” God asks.

“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?”

“Do you know when mountain goats give birth?”

God cares. God cares so deeply.  God cares for every photon and snowflake and baby goat.  And cares for you.  Cares enough to invite you into wonder.  Into mystery.  Into tension that cannot be resolved. 

God cares enough to ask the hard questions of you. 

“Why are you still afraid?” Jesus asks.

So often, we read this as a rebuke of the disciples, but if you go back and look again, it’s the wind and the sea that Jesus’ rebukes and commands, not the disciples. He doesn’t say “Don’t be afraid.”  He asks them: “Why are you still afraid?”

I bet Jesus knew the answer.  I mean, it seems pretty obvious. But it wasn’t about the answer.  Answers are important but questions matter more. 

Because the question is connection. Relationship. It’s a chance for the disciples, and for us, to search our hearts for where fear is coming from. It’s an invitation to swap that fear for faith. Faith in the God who cares enough for us to ask. 

Why are we still afraid? Engaging with that question is scary in itself. And we’re probably never going to be able to answer it fully.  Never going to be able to resolve the tension. But faith isn’t about knowing the answer.  It’s about opening wide our hearts, and asking more questions. 

In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

^{1. https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/answers-are-important-questions-matter-more}