Like many Generation Xers, I have spent a great deal of my life asking questions. In retrospect, it seems that more than a few of my plaguing inquires were the wrong inquiries. In fact, more than a few of my questions were probably even unanswerable. But it took me a while to be able to admit there existed such distinctions. When you are a child and inquiry is your way of gaining a handle on the world around you, you come to believe that every question is right, and every inquiry deserves an answer that satisfies. And there is some truth to that comforting thought: questions are valid and answers should satisfy. Later, when social pressure begins to stress conformity and asking questions carries the risk of embarrassment, we learn to repress our inquisitiveness, even as those who still see the value in inquiring minds offer the ready assurance, “There are no wrong questions!” And this may be true as well, particularly in a classroom. But it does not mean that one cannot ask an unanswerable question or inquire in such a way that simply fails to cohere with reality. Is your idea blue or purple? How much time is in the sky? I imagine a great number of the questions we ask along the way are in fact quite similar.

When it comes to faith, we are actually instructed in the Christian religion to carry into it some of the qualities we held as children. I suspect a child’s passion for inquiry is one of the traits Jesus intended in his directive: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” But the childlike expectation that every inquiry is capable of being answered to our satisfaction, that every question is capable of being answered now (or even answered at all) is likely not the quality he was encouraging us to keep.

Regardless, Jesus readily received the questions of those around him, whether they were asked with ulterior motive or childlike abandon; no inquiry was turned away. Of course, this is not to say that he always answered, or that he always satisfied the questioner. Actually, more often than not, he replied with a question of his own. “Who gave you the authority to do what you are doing?” the scribes asked. Jesus replied, “I will ask you one question; answer me and I will answer you. Did the baptism of John come from heaven or human origin?” Knowing they were stuck between conceding to Jesus’s authority and risking the wrath of the crowd, they refused to answer. So Jesus refused as well.

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