The Second Question: Syschematizesthe and the Mold You're Sitting In

Jesus asks his disciples two questions back to back, and the speed difference between the answers is the whole episode.

First: who do people say that the Son of Man is? They have it immediately. John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. They rattle it off like they've been keeping notes.

Then he changes one word. But who do you say that I am? Out of twelve grown men, one of them speaks.

I've read that passage a hundred times and never noticed the difference in speed. They were fluent on the first question. They had to be dragged through the second one. And I don't think that's about them.

The second question is a different kind of question

Who do people say that I am is a survey question. Jesus is asking about the state of public opinion, and the disciples are genuinely good at it. They aren't guessing. They've been out on the road, they've been listening, they know what's being said in the market.

Who do you say that I am is something else. No research helps you. You can't read your way there.

And I want you to feel how much harder that second question has gotten in about fifteen years, because all of us are walking around with the world's answer to the first question in our pocket. All day. On every subject. You don't have to wonder what people say about anything anymore, about a movie, a candidate, a diagnosis, a person you know, a church, God. It's right there, it's free, and it arrives whether you asked for it or not.

We are the most fluent generation in history at answering the first question. I don't think we've gotten any better at the second one. I think we've gotten worse, because when the first answer is that available, it starts standing in for the second one before you notice the substitution happened. Somebody asks what you think and you reach for what you've read.

Which is precisely what Paul is warning about in Romans 12.

Syschematizesthe: the Greek word for being shaped by the room

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. That's one of those lines that's been read at us so often it slides right off, so it's worth slowing down on the word Paul actually chose.

Two things about how Paul uses it.

It's passive. He doesn't say stop conforming. He says stop being conformed. It's something that happens to you. Nobody wakes up and decides to be shaped by the world. It's ambient. It's pressure. It's what happens to anything soft that sits in a mold long enough.

And it's present tense, which in Greek means ongoing. This isn't a decision you make once at a retreat in 2014. Paul means stop letting it keep happening to you, today, and again tomorrow.

Then he flips to the other side. Be transformed is metamorphousthe, and you can hear metamorphosis in it. It's built on morphe, which is the opposite kind of word from schema. Morphe is the essential form, what a thing actually is underneath. So the whole line comes to: quit getting your outside shape from the room, and let your insides get remade instead.

Here's the part I sat with this week. Metamorphousthe is passive too. Same tense, same voice. Paul isn't offering a switch from being shaped to shaping yourself. Both are things done to you. The only live question is which mold you're sitting in.

A mold has to hold you still

That's the whole mechanism. Pressure, plus time, plus contact. And there has never been a device better at holding a person still than the one in your hand.

I'm not doing the bit where the guy on the podcast tells you technology is bad. I'm on a phone constantly and I make this show on a computer. The point is narrower than that. Syschematizesthe describes a passive process, passive processes need contact time, and we have handed an enormous amount of contact time to a machine whose actual job is to show us what people say.

Four or five hours a day of the first question. Then Jesus asks the second one and we've got nothing, and we assume that's a faith problem. It might be a mold problem.

Pharaoh dealt shrewdly. The midwives were in the room.

Which sends me back to Exodus, and a detail I skipped on Tuesday.

Look at how Pharaoh operates. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them. Shrewdly is a strategy word. A man in a room with advisors, working the problem at a distance. He never meets a Hebrew. He processes a population.

And every single person who breaks his plan does it by being physically present to one specific body. Shiphrah and Puah have their hands on the mother, on the birth stool, on the baby. No abstraction is available to them. Pharaoh's policy is a memo; what's in front of them is a person, crying, right there.

The mother holds the baby three months. Miriam stands in the reeds and won't leave. And Pharaoh's own daughter, the one person in the story with every reason to enforce her father's order, comes down to the river, opens the basket, and sees a child crying. The text says she took pity on him.

That's a policy failing in real time. It doesn't fail because somebody argued her out of it. It fails because a specific baby was crying in front of her face. Proximity beat the memo.

This is where Tuesday and today turn out to be the same sermon. You can only count people you're not standing next to. Nobody in that chapter changed Egypt with a better opinion. They changed it by being in the room.

Present your bodies

Which is why Paul's first line in Romans 12 says what it says, and it's a line we skate right past. I appeal to you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.

He could have said your hearts. He could have said your minds, and he does get to the mind one verse later. He starts with the body because a body can only be in one place. That's the whole feature. Your attention can be anywhere on earth right now and mostly is. Your body is stuck in a chair, in a car, in a kitchen, the least distributable thing you own.

Then he says living sacrifice, which is close to a joke on the original audience. Every sacrifice they'd ever seen was dead. That was the defining characteristic. A living sacrifice is one that climbs back off the altar and has to be put back on tomorrow, which is the same tense as syschematizesthe. Ongoing. Again today.

Two things before Sunday

First, take a question you actually care about and notice whether the answer you're carrying is yours or borrowed. Borrowed isn't bad. Most of what I believe I got from somebody smarter than me, and that's what a church is for, that's what a tradition is. But there's a difference between a belief you received and one you're renting because everyone in your feed has it. You can usually tell. The rented one has no scars on it. You've never once had to defend it when it cost you something.

Second, and this is the one I'd push you on: put your body somewhere this week. One hour, unmediated. In a room with a person, or in a room by yourself with the Bible open and the phone in a different room. Not face down. A different room. Face down is still contact.

You already know what people say. You've got that covered, and you're never going to be short on it. The other question only gets answered in a body, in a place, with time on it.

Peter didn't get his answer from the crowd, and Jesus says so directly: flesh and blood has not revealed this to you. He got it from three years of walking next to the man. He got it in his feet before he got it in his mouth.