What Do You Say?

by Rob Goodale

Have you ever watched all the ways a person answers a difficult question before he ever opens his mouth? The shifting of weight from one foot to the other; a pensive stare toward whatever happens to be six to eight inches to the left of the inquisitor; a clearing of the throat; a sudden sharp inhale or, contrariwise, a slow exhale.

I wonder what answers Simon gave before he opened his mouth to offer those now-famous words: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” If I were him, I probably would have stammered a bit and kicked some rocks and darted around the room with my eyes, all of which would obviously have been to say:

Everyone is looking at me and I know I could say something lame and easy and obvious like ‘Rabbi, you are quite good at telling a joke and also my first pick every time we play dodgeball,’ but I think I know who you actually are and so I’m about to stomp out onto a particularly flimsy limb okay here goes...

And I hope -- against all evidence of my own feebleness and fickleness -- that I would say what Simon said, in total disregard of how utterly batty a suggestion it is that a man who walks with feet like mine and speaks with a mouth like mine might be, to steal a line from Saint Paul, the one from whom and through whom and for whom all things exist (see Romans 11:36). That would be a cool thing to say out loud.

But part of me wonders why we are asked to say anything at all. What if I got the answer wrong? It seems like we could avoid a lot of confusion, Lord, if you just lectured and I took really good notes. This socratic method of teaching leaves a lot of room for error.

Without the room for error, though, I suppose there would be no value in getting anything right. That’s the crux (pun very much intended) of the whole free-will thing, isn’t it? One has the freedom to choose how one wants to answer that question, which is the question, when one gets right down to it. The answer one chooses to give to this question decides pretty much everything else, after all: what gets you out of bed in the morning, how you spend your nights and weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Where we’ve all collectively gone wrong is, we think true freedom, freedom to choose, gives us the power to decide what’s good. The conventional wisdom says a thing is good because I choose it: a flavor of salad dressing, a course of study, a style of craft beer, a sexual partner or lack thereof. What matters to most of us is not actually what we choose, but that we get to make a choice.

The problem is, having more options doesn’t help us much when there is a correct answer. It’s really freaking hard to figure out when there is one -- of course asiago caesar and a quality breakfast stout are clear, objective goods, but there are other questions where the right choice is a little murkier.

This seems to be one of those questions, at first glance. There are lots of things I could say that wouldn’t exactly be wrong, anyway. Teacher. Friend. Leader. Storyteller. Companion. These are all good answers. But they aren’t the right answer. Without something like Saint Peter’s answer, or Saint Paul’s answer, or Saint John’s answer -- “him through whom all things came to be, and without whom nothing came to be” (John 1:3) -- or Saint Luke’s answer -- “him in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) -- none of the rest of it holds any water.

There’s a fair bit of tension in this, as there is in all things that matter. My freedom does matter, and my answer probably ought to be different from my neighbor’s -- that’s where the diversity comes from, and that’s what makes the church so strong and beautiful -- but there are certain non-negotiables. Adding more choices when there’s a right one strikes me as the sort of thing Screwtape would recommend to muddy the waters and increase the likelihood of choosing wrong in the end.

My answer doesn’t have to be new, it just has to be both mine and correct. And so I stand with Simon, and Saul, and John, and Luke -- not bad company, I might point out, even if they did all end up getting killed or exiled or both -- in saying that you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God (Matthew 16:16), my reason for getting out of bed in the morning, and the one who shows me what it actually means to be a human.