speaker. When I was at school we had a mock general election, when various senior scholars stood as candidates for the major political parties. I was going through my anarchist phase at that time, so I declined to stand for office myself. But I did gain, I remember, immense satisfaction instead by interrupting every campaign speech I could by demanding in a loud voice, 'What about pig-rearing in the Shetland Islands?' None of the adolescent parliamentarians at my school, I discovered, had given much thought to this serious question. And not a few were reduced to total confusion by being asked to comment on it.
These days, unfortunately, I tend to be on the other end of such subversive tactics. In fact, any church minister who accepts speaking engagements at schools with a preponderance of 'A' level students quickly forms a list of old chestnuts of this sort. Who was Cain's wife? That's a good one. Did Noah have polar bears in the Ark? That's another. One soon learns that people who ask questions like this don't really want an answer, they just want to score points in an intellectual sparring match. It was Martin Luther who executed the most sardonic parry to such an enquiry. He was asked by one garrulous sceptic once, 'What was God doing before he made the world?' To which Luther is reputed to have replied (quoting his own mentor, Augustine), 'Making hell for people who ask stupid questions like that.'
When we read the gospels we discover that Jesus had to cope with a good many such insincere enquirers. Again and again the theologians of his day tried to trap him into making some injudicious comment by which he could be discredited. But it's interesting to observe the way that Jesus refused to be drawn into sterile, speculative arguments. He was, in fact, the master of turning such questions back on the interrogator.
In these verses we find a classic example of Jesus handling just such a would-be controversialist, an expert
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