In Matthew 22, Jesus is asked question after question after question. All the other leaders wanted to catch him with these testing questions. As a parent, I feel like I can relate. My kids are not asking questions at the same depth as the Pharisees, Sadducees, and lawyers, but they feel just as penetrating. “Can I have ice cream for dinner?”
“No, not tonight.”
“Why not?”
“It’s more of a treat. We need to eat healthy?”
“Doesn’t ice cream come from milk? We have milk for breakfast. Isn’t that the most important meal of the day?”
“Well… ice cream has sugar” (I’m starting to get frustrated at this point).
“You say that cereal has sugar. Ice cream for dinner is just like having cereal for breakfast.”
“Just go to your room” (I’m trying not to yell and pay the $1 to the angry dad jar, but it’s a close one).
I don’t know how Jesus stays calm. All the questions keep coming, and yet he is cool under fire. I don’t think that I will ever have the wisdom that Jesus had to answer the seriousness of questions he did with that same coolness, but I wonder if it’s possible to stay cool under fire.
In each question that Jesus is asked, his answer points back to God and points back to scripture. Jesus can stay calm under fire because he is well grounded. He is confident in who he is, and he has spent time being grounded in God’s word. In John’s gospel, Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself, he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does” (John 5:19). Jesus stayed calm under questioning because he was grounded in his relationship with the Father.
What I see in Jesus is how his connection with the Father, his having scripture stored down deep within his heart, and his placing the focus on God instead of himself enables him to maintain calm under the questioning. I wonder if this might not only be something helpful for me to stay calm in whatever situation I am in, but also to move beyond the anxiety that comes when people question my faith.
One of the reasons why many Christians do not share their faith is because they are afraid they will not have all of the right answers. What if it’s not about having the right answers, but having the right relationship? Maybe it’s okay to say, I don’t have an answer to that question, but I can tell you what God has done for me.