Not Knowing What We Want or Do?

Passiontide is the term for the last two weeks of Lent in the western Christian traditions. Quite often the cross is veiled, at once present and known yet obscured and not fully known. It symbolizes an important principle that belongs to the educational project. Knowing that we do not know impells the quest to know. Our knowing is at best partial and at worst misguided and erroneous.

 

In a remarkable scene in Matthew’s Gospel read this week in Chapel, the mother of Zebedee’s children comes to Jesus “desiring a certain thing of him.” He asks her “What do you want?” She says “ Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” She seeks what she thinks is best for her children. No doubt all parents do and, no doubt, all of us seek what we think is best for ourselves. But do we always know what that is? What does her request mean? It means positions of privilege and power, of status and prestige for her sons. But that can only mean something for them at the expense of others. It is simply a desire for power for some over others.

 

There is a truth in her request but only insofar as it recognizes the power and truth of God in Jesus. But it is incomplete and misguided. How does Jesus respond? With the simple words, “ye know not what you ask.” It is at once gentle and devastating and a direct and clear statement about an important aspect of our humanity.

 

“There are known knowns,” Donald Rumself famously observed in 2003 as the US Secretary of Defence. “These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know that we don’t know.” This was, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek pointed out, a piece of amateur philosophizing which leaves out what is most significant. What is that? The “unknown knowns,” the things that you know but don’t know that you know.

 

Socrates’ great insight was that “I know that I do not know.” This is the beginning of wisdom; the complement to the biblical idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Our not knowing belongs to our desire to know but in the recognition that there is always more to know and that the more we learn the more we realize how much more there is to know. This is not to suggest that knowledge is simply quantitative, a mere adding up of bits and bytes of data or information. There are also ethical implications.

 

The dialogue in the encounter brings the ethical dimension out into the open. Jesus speaks about the radical meaning of his Passion: “drinking the cup that I shall drink of and being baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with.” These are explicit references to the sacraments, on the one hand, and, more fundamentally, to the reality of sin and suffering, on the other hand; in other words, he is speaking about human redemption. The Passion of Christ is what he wills to suffer for us for our good.

 

As such passion has a double meaning. It is both passive and active. The Passion of Christ reveals us as actors and as those who are acted upon. It reveals our disordered and confused desires of what we think is good about which we are often mistaken.  Yet there is a movement from us to God however uncertain and incomplete. But there is another movement; the movement of God to us in the perfect humanity of Christ. He wills to suffer for us in the very body of our humanity.

 

But Jesus makes it clear that while we are able to participate in the things that pertain to human redemption, the idea of power and prominence, of glory and prestige, are not his to give but belong to the will of the Father to which he himself is subject. His Passion is the complete willingness of the Son to wait upon the Father whose will he has come to do. “Not my will but thine be done,” he prays in Gethsemane. If for Christ, then so, too, for us. There is no jumping the queue. It is not about how to get ahead in the world, especially in terms of privilege. The dialogue excites the indignation of the other disciples against the two brothers. This leads to the real point of the passage. It is altogether not about power and privilege, prestige and dominance but the exact opposite. “Whosoever will be great among you let him be your minister; whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.” For that, he says, is the whole purpose of his coming: “not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many.”

 

Service and sacrifice are the principal themes of Passiontide. They open us out to a whole new way of knowing and being, to the greater movement of God’s gracious will towards us that redeems us from ourselves and the vanity and folly of our disordered desires that create division and animosity. “Ye know not what ye ask” highlights the radical meaning of Christ’s first word on the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

 

The wonder of the Passion is that there is something more upon which our knowing depends. It is God’s knowing without which all our knowing is incomplete and, even more, destructive in its folly. The realization of the limits of our knowing makes it possible for us to realize that our knowing depends upon something prior to us: an intelligible reality without which all our epistemologies are nothing worth. We “know not what we ask” and we “know not what we do” are strong counters to the culture of privilege and entitlement. They are the correctives to the obsessive pursuit of what we think is self-interest. Our ‘good’ can only be found in the good of one another and in a community of reciprocal respect.

 

Christ’s words here and on the Cross awaken us to the self-giving love of God in Christ’s Passion and to the paradox that in the giving of ourselves in service and sacrifice we discover the truth and dignity of our humanity. To know our unknowing points us to the ultimate form of sacrifice and love in forgiveness, the forgiveness which comes from God and is meant to live in us. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”