Do You Now Believe?

"Can anything good come from Nazareth?" Questions by their very nature are provocative: they provoke answers. Questions emerge from the desires of the human spirit. Questions lead to insight into the new, but those insights can be blocked by preconceptions that obscure present experience, including experience of the divine presence. At the same time, human beings cannot make progress in understanding without some amount of belief, which liberates understanding. Jesus faced these concerns in the people around him, and we face them in ourselves today. By examining the role of questions in the Gospels of Mark and John, we see Jesus's capacity to orient his listeners in their search for meaning, and thus cultivate in ourselves a willingness to believe what we have inherited as well as an openness to new experience, its call to reinterpret beliefs and, if necessary, to change.