Have you ever been so afraid of someone’s reaction that you kept silent? You had something to say, but you didn’t say it. You had a need or a want that you wanted to express, but you knew the reaction was not worth the answer. We see this so much in marriages. A person gets tired of asking for help and not getting any. They get tired of reaching toward the other person and not having them reach back. Then they give up trying to reach. Reaching only leads to disappointment and pain. The reaching is replaced with silence.
I remember in elementary school having questions about the lessons and not asking the question. I didn’t want to look dumb or slow. What the other kids thought about be was important. I moved several times while I was growing up, so I was always trying to figure out how I fit into this new crowd. Where was my place? What could I add to the mix? So asking a question opened up my world of unknowns to the class. They would now know that I didn’t know what they so obviously did know. I now know that there were many others who had learned to be silent when they had questions.
Jesus has again told His disciples very openly and plainly that His enemies were going to kill Him and then He would rise from death. But they still don’t get it. They are in Jesus’ classroom, but they aren’t willing to raise their hands and ask the question. They all seem to have the same question, but no one asks it.
I think that Jesus’ plan looked so different from what they understood about the Messiah, that they weren’t able to see the exact fulfillment of those Old Testament Scriptures that had seemed so puzzling before. For centuries the Jewish people had read Isaiah 53 and were puzzled. How could the Messiah suffer? The Messiah is our triumphant hero, so there is not way He could suffer this kind of death. Even today in many Jewish circles Isaiah 53 is puzzling. They have reconciled this puzzle by making the singular person in that text be the whole population of Jews, the Jews collectively.
For the disciples, the resurrection was totally out of their realm of experience. They had seen Lazarus be raised by Jesus, but Jesus did the raising? Who would raise Jesus? They have questions, but they aren’t willing to ask. The text says that they were afraid.
Fear can stop us from asking, from reaching, from growing. They feared the unknown response. They didn’t want to seem slow on the uptake. They wanted to blend into the crowd. They wanted to blend in and be a team player. They didn’t want to rock the boat.
So instead of asking an important question, they get sidetracked onto very unimportant matters. We either deal with the important or our lives become a series of unimportant moments. Which do you want?
The Arnold Journey 