We come to the end of our series on the Acts of Discipleship today as we look at studying. Now—for some, this act might seem rather boring. Many people despised school, at least when they were there, and especially hated studying. Ask many a school aged kid how much they like it, and you’ll probably get a tepid response at best from the majority of them. Of course, there are the exceptions, but most kids don’t care for school, or for studying. As we grow older, we might appreciate more that we should’ve tried harder in school. We come to realize that when the opportunity was there, we should’ve learned more, studied harder. Yet life is a learning experience. We never stop learning. The very anatomy, the physiology of our brains is designed precisely so that we continue to learn. If we stop learning, it’s a serious medical problem…and even then, even when we’re not aware and seemingly losing knowledge that we once had, the fundamental wiring of our brains is such that we continue to store experiential learning—if even unbeknownst to us. And so studying, as an act of discipleship, is just as fundamentally human as much as it’s fundamentally Christian. To learn more about our lives, in particular as our faith comes to bear on our lives and the way we live our lives in light of our faith—that is fundamentally both human and Christian. So we do well to focus today on why this is the case. Today we will learn more about why learning is so important to life of a disciple of Jesus.
Let us pray. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Who knows who said that?
Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush, said it, at a press conference on February 12, 2002, regarding evidence linking Iraq to supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorist organizations.
Aside from the political ramifications that gave rise to this response, what Secretary Rumsfeld said is actually a rather concise way of summarizing the totality of human knowledge and understanding. There are known knowns—things we know we know. There are known unknowns—things we know we don’t know. There are unknown unknowns—things we don’t know that we don’t know. The only one that isn’t covered here is “unknown knowns,” which is an oxymoronic contradiction. You can’t not know something you know—although I know a lot of people who are convinced of things they think they know that in fact they’re very wrong about, but that’s a whole other can of worms and something to deal with another day!
What we know…What we know we know. And what we don’t know—both what we know we don’t know and what we don’t know we don’t know. The quest for knowledge has marked the evolution of the human species since prehistory. Knowledge was necessary for us to come to where are today as people, the world over. First we had to learn how to tame fire. Then we learned how to cook the animals we killed. We learned agriculture. We learned city management. We then turned our attention to more existential matters like mathematics, science, philosophy. The more we learned, the more we realized we could learn. The depths of what we could learn are bottomless. The more we learn, the longer of list of known knowns grows. But so too does our list of known unknows. I’ve always said that the day that I don’t learn at least one new thing—that’s the day I hope I die. There’s always something more to learn, something more to know…
When we look at the story of Jesus as a young boy in the temple, many of us think of him as one beyond his years in wisdom and understanding, sitting and teaching the rabbis gathered around him, to drink from his fountain of wisdom. He’s the Son of God, after all—Wisdom herself become a person like one of us. Surely Jesus is expounding on the ways of God, unveiling the mystery of the divine to everyone around. “Let those who have ears, listen!” he says time again throughout the gospels. Why not here? But let’s look more closely at the text, shall we? His parents were worried about him, and after looking for him for three days, they return to Jerusalem, where presumably they last saw him, and head off to the temple. There they find him, “sitting among the teachers,” St. Luke tells us, “listening to them and asking them questions.” Sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions…And after an interesting exchange between Jesus and his mother—again, something worth looking at much more closely another day—we have Luke tell us, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” Jesus increased in wisdom…What’s that all about?
Well, we must not forget that Jesus is a human being—just like you and I. He is fully, truly unmitigatedly, unequivocally human. We confess that—“for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and became truly human.” This confession is twofold. First, we acknowledge that Jesus is divine. He came from heaven, and by Holy Spirit, he came down from heaven. Second, we acknowledge that Jesus is human. He was born of a real woman, Mary, and was born a human being like each and every other person ever to live—past, present, or future. Many get hung up on the confession about the “virgin Mary,” in particular her virginity and subsequent labor and delivery of Jesus—again, yet something else worth looking at much more closely another day—but this confession for early Christians was not about Mary, but about Jesus. It indubitability and unquestionably reinforces, underscores, and stresses that in no way is Jesus not fully human—anymore than he is not fully God.
So all this is to say, of course, there are things that Jesus will learn. He’s like us all—like you and like me. He will grow in knowledge, understanding, and wisdom as he ages—just by simple fact that he’s gathered experience. But what’s interesting here is that Jesus is in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. It’s not him here teaching, but rather, he himself is learning. He is growing in wisdom by listening to the teachers and asking them questions. It’s very much akin to the episode later in Jesus’ life where John the Baptist insists that Jesus baptize him instead of Jesus be baptized by John—yet this is incident is more fundamentally human even than that moment. Here, Jesus is very much the child who’s sucking up knowledge at the feet of teachers, those who’ve studied, dedicated their lives to the pursuit of wisdom, so that he might come to better understand his own relationship within the whole scheme of God’s creation. In this regard, Jesus is quite a model for us—the model of perfect learning.
But what’s more, it’s also something yet again that Jesus does for our sake. He learns so that he comes to grasp more fully what his purpose is. As we heard last week, Jesus reminds his own disciples, “the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Through wrestling with the deeper questions of his relationship within God’s greater design for life, Jesus understands more fully what his role as the Son of Man is, as God’s own Son, as the one sent to give his life as a ransom for many. In growing in wisdom, in listening to teachers and asking them questions, he comes to fully understand that his purpose is to offer himself for us in perfect devotion to God’s will and merciful love toward us. We can’t imagine that was a known known to the infant Jesus, or the pre-teen Jesus in the temple. That was something he came to understand more profoundly as he engaged his own faith tradition.
Thomas was an older man, who’d experienced a lot in life, and as he aged, he avoided news and made no effort to keep up to date on what was going on. Life was easier that way. His old brain couldn’t handle it anymore. Let younger minds deal with it. He just preferred to go about his life, doing what he did day in and day out, taking care of errands and so forth, without paying too much attention to what was going on. Novels were much better to read than this or that book on new ideas. The world was a sad, complicated place and he’d seen enough. He knew all he needed to know, and that was enough for him. What he didn’t know would not only not hurt him, but it’d shield him from more grief, pain, and sorrow. “Ignorance was bliss,” was his motto.
One day, Thomas fell ill—terribly ill. He tried this and that remedy, but nothing worked—at least not like it had before. He finally got himself together and went to the hospital, where he learned from the nurse that for the past several months there’d been a nasty flu going around. And Thomas had said flu. There, in that hospital bed, hooked up to IVs with various fluids and medicines pumping into him, weak and ill from the disease, and from not taking the proper precautions that doctors and other experts suggested, Thomas learned that his ignorance had not protected him; it had left him vulnerable. He realized that facing life’s challenges with knowledge and preparedness was far wiser than seeking solace in ignorance. Ignorance was not bliss…
There are many Christians who are satisfied to sit with simple known knowns about the faith. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. That is a profound belief—a core, solid, reliable source of comfort and hope in the midst of trouble, to be sure. It is a known known. It’s a known known that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. I hope those words, or some semblance of them, accompany you through your day-to-day life and give you comfort. Nevertheless there are many Christians who are satisfied to sit with such simple—albeit, profound—known knowns and expect them to carry them through everything.
Yet disciples of Jesus are called to wrestle much deeper with our relationship with God, with nature, with each other, and with ourselves within God’s pattern of the grand design of life. We aren’t to be satisfied with allowing the known unknowns remain unknown—at least not satisfied with denying to wrestle with them. And we aren’t to be satisfied to never consider what unknown unknowns there might be out there. God is far greater than our comprehension, to be sure, but that alone isn’t reason enough for us to rest on our laurels and not attempt to grapple with what it means. Faithfulness, akin to the kind of that our forefather Jacob had with God all through the night, is to wrestle with God—and to be transformed for it. A disciple, after all, is one who learns, who listens and questions…and who grows in wisdom as we grow older and in divine and human favor. For a disciple of Jesus, there is always something else worth looking at much more closely, today or another day—whether we be seven or seventy.
Don’t grow discouraged by what you don’t know—by what you know you don’t know and what you don’t know you don’t know. There’s always something more to learn, something more to know…Til the day our perishable bodies put on imperishability, and these mortal bodies put on immortality, there is something God wants us to learn. Don’t grow weary of listening. Don’t grow weary of asking. There are known knowns, there are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns—all waiting to be examined, explored, and embraced so that we grow in knowledge, understanding, and wisdom about just how much God loves us in Jesus. The more we know, the more complete our wisdom, and happy are they who find wisdom, and those who get understanding, for God promises, these are life to those who find them, those who discover them live, really live; their body and soul, they burst with wholeness. The true disciple knows this, a known known—knowledge and wisdom for your soul; find these, and you will find a future, and your hope won’t be cut off.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev'd Daniel W. Spigelmyer, Jr. 