A Most Important Question

This past weekend at our leadership retreat (which was fantastic, thanks to those of you prayed!) we looked at one of my favorite Scriptures in John 1--Jesus asks a question that regularly chases me down and makes me stop skimming and really be with him.

John the Baptist is front and center for a chunk of John 1, then Jesus shows up and John faithfully points to him: "The Lamb of God!" The disciples who had been with John up to this point, leave John and start following Jesus. As they do so, Jesus asks the most surprising question that I think he could possibly ask:

"What do you want?"

I don't read it (and I'm having to make an interpretive leap here) as annoyed or angry. I think he just said it: "What do you want?" It is the first words Jesus utters in the book of John, this question that I think ultimately anyone who is following him must answer at some point: "What do you want?"

And what captures me about the question is it's open-endedness. That the God of the universe should choose to begin these relationships with a question rather than a statement or proclamation is startling. That he would invite a genuine response is even more startling.

I think that we can never be truly intimate with Jesus until we have genuinely answered his question to these men: "What do you want?" We must tell him, really. At some points that means we will sound like petulant, spoiled children. But if we have no other voice to offer, than he would take no other voice that we might try to give. Some voices may sound more spiritual or pious, but it is the voice of who we are, incomplete creatures who need, that begins to build a bridge into the cosmic love story of "the God who came to get us."

We must be brutally honest with ourselves and our Lord--we must submit our answer to him and we must submit our answer to him. All petulance and whining will be accepted by our Savior; stubborn refusal to confess our wants and then let go of our desires or (worse) denial of any need at all leaves us outside the Land of the Trinity, where God's will is always enacted perfectly and free and transparent relating is the only kind of relating that is known.