(Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58)
Audio | Text:
I’m an engineer by training, which means I’m fascinated by how things work. HOW can be a big question, a noble question. HOW can set us at fascinating tasks, send us on great quests.
It can also really mess up a pleasant afternoon. If you’ve ever walked into a room in horror to find that your child, significant other, or coworker has taken something intricate apart—something you probably needed—you may have had an encounter with the implacable pull of HOW.
We are fascinated, many of us, with interconnections, mechanisms, lines of reasoning. The world is held together by these pieces and processes, and our God-given curiosity tells us there’s an underlying structure to it all and that to know that reason is, perhaps, in a small way, to know the mind of its Creator and Sustainer.
**
Of course, HOW can be a dangerous question. I’m a fan of science fiction and fantasy, and in these genres HOW is a tightrope. On the one hand, many of us are drawn to these stories because we want to know how these worlds work. The HBO series Game of Thrones and especially the books on which it’s based keep many of us riveted because they let us examine how the webs of influence in Westeros respond when one link in the political machine is strained, or cut, or removed altogether.
On the other hand, HOW can also be a distraction, or even a travesty. If you’re looking forward to the next round of Star Wars movies, you’re probably hoping for a little less HOW than in the much-maligned prequel of the early 2000s. I’m thinking in particular of the film’s relationship with “the Force,” the mystical energy that binds the Star Wars universe together and gives the Skywalkers their power.
I won’t bore you with the details if you don’t know them already, but the prequels reduced the power to control “the Force” to a simple blood test. The boy who would become Luke’s father had a count of little Force bacteria that was off the chart, apparently. And so to be selected as a Jedi Knight became not a matter of mystical discernment but basically a box that might be checked by the technician at the interstellar Lab Corps.
The point is, Star Wars fans’ questions about the Force are not HOW questions. They’re WHY questions: Why did Luke’s father turn from good to evil? Why does the Force seem to desire a kind of balance between light and darkness, good and evil? And, perhaps, why does the Force exist at all?
**
Jesus is a master of turning us toward the WHY. Many of the moments when he brings his opponents up short—or brings us up short—come from his keen insight about the WHY of a given situation. He knows that the person asking HOW is usually trying to justify himself, or trap Jesus in an intenable position, or turn a complex issue simple, or a simple one complex.
We see a typical example of this phenomenon when Jesus encounters the learned religious leaders in today’s passage. He’s claiming to be “the living bread that came down from heaven,” and they understandably want to know: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
After all, it’s an audacious claim: eternal life bestowed, and the indwelling of one spirit in another. It’s also a truly strange one. It doesn’t add up for these anxious onlookers. They don’t see how it would work, or why they’d want it to, this eating of Jesus’ body. Which is fair enough, but also not the point.
Rather than even engage with their HOW-oriented thinking, Jesus keeps right on going with his teaching about WHY: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” It’s like he’s saying “don’t ask how, just *think* of it, for a moment, what I’m offering.
As we’ve been exploring in the gospel readings these past few weeks, Jesus’ discourses on the Bread of Life are about who he is, who God is, how we depend on God, what God wants for us. They’re about the gift of grace, and the means of human flourishing. They’re not a HOW-to manual. They’re parables of WHY.
Why eat? Why follow? Why serve? Why love? These are the questions that animate our lives, and Jesus knows what we seldom admit to ourselves: that we get so bogged down in *how* to do these things that we lose touch with the reasons why we even embarked on the journey.
Or maybe we use our anxiety about how as an excuse not to ask why in the first place. Perhaps in a work meeting, or even a vestry meeting, you’ve seen a skeptical colleague shoot down an important idea with this often toxic question: “But how would that actually work?”
The worst is when it’s not even a question. The phrase “I don’t see how that would work” has an air of finality, especially when it comes from someone in power. Which is why it’s all the more remarkable that Jesus stood up so often and so successfully to the HOWs of the authorities.
**
Now, they’d revoke my engineer’s card if I stood up here and told you HOW wasn’t important. And I hope also my priest card as well.
Practicalities, matter. Jesus was a man of action as much as of reflection. God wants us not only to think big thoughts and dream big dreams but, as we prayed today in our collect, “to follow daily in the blessed steps of [Christ’s] most holy life.” We have to walk the walk, and that means knowing and taking the steps we need.
All this has led me to believe that WHY and HOW are inextricably linked in the life of the Spirit. Perhaps Jesus is always asking us WHY because it’s easier for us to see God there. But God is just as present in the HOW.
A marriage is a leap of faith where we trust that the importance of the WHY will provide the HOW when we need it, that this love we have been given will abide amid the inevitable challenges and setbacks and it will be enough. The same goes for the choice of a field of study. Or a move to a new job or a new home.
A good friend of mine recently reminded me of the full extent of the connection between WHY and HOW in what feels, in my life at the moment, like a final frontier. That, of course, would be having kids.
I see so many friends whose lives seem to have been totally undone by the challenges of children: sleepless nights, cancelled vacations, trips to the emergency room. My knee-jerk annoyance at every potential nice dinner out that needs to be changed to a picnic lunch with rotating playground duty confronts me with an overwhelming sense of my own selfishness. I wonder HOW I will ever be up to this sacred duty.
Without my even asking the question, during a recent visit my friend Becky, one of those new parents, answered it:
I just didn’t know it was possible to have SO. MUCH. LOVE.
HOW turned out to have the same answer as WHY.
Perhaps the way of wisdom is little more than integrating these two questions, coming to trust our experiences of a savior who calls us to be with him (there’s the why) and then nourishes us throughout the journey (that’s the how).
So the next time Jesus throws the pharisees, or you, a curveball made of WHY, or you’re tempted to shoot down someone’s big idea with a hostile HOW, remember that in the issues that matter, the answers to these questions converge in a synthesis only God could orchestrate.
When a task seems too daunting, or a truth too strange or even too wonderful, like the flesh of a savior offering eternal life, remember this simple Q & A.
How? By the gift of grace. Why? Always, ultimately, for love.
Image credit: “How and Why” by Roadsidepictures via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)