I've never much liked the story of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. His answers to the temptations come across as overly pious. But last week I took another look at the story thanks to a book by Ched Myers (Who Will Role Away the Stone: Discipleship Queries for First World Christians). Rather than giving pat answers here, Jesus turns away from certainty.

This is clear when the tempter takes Jesus to the top of the temple and suggests that if he throws himself off, God will rescue him. The tempter quotes one of the psalms, which says that God will send angels to ensure the righteous one doesn't dash their foot against a stone. If Jesus tries this, he'll know that God is looking after him.

Part of my issue with this is that I find it hard to picture angels catching him. An ordinary person certainty would die if they tried this. It doesn't feel like a real temptation.

If it worked, Jesus would know that God was going to look after him no matter what. Jesus' answer was: "I'm not going to test God."

What that means, I realized, is that Jesus was going to go into his work without certainty. He was going to plunge in blind, just like the rest of us. There would be no proof he would succeed. It also means that in the end, he will go to the cross, not knowing what will happen next.

With this in mind, I took another look at the other two temptations. The first is to turn stones to bread. Because he has been fasting, he is famished. He's told he doesn't have to be hungry.

The thing is there are lots of stories where he did provide bread. Twice he fed huge crowds with just a few loaves of bread. He could have done for himself what he did for others.

The difference would be making bread for himself. To solve the problem for himself would blunt his awareness of hunger in others.

He tells the tempter he will live with hunger. He will live with physical hunger and with spiritual hunger so that he makes sure he understands the needs of others.

When we are satisfied, it is harder to understand those who hunger. This is both literal and metaphorical. When we jump to the answers we've always known, we blunt the edge of our questions about life. If instead we hold on to the question, we can understand what questions other people are still asking. We can understand the longings that are not answered by the way things are or have been.

By remaining hungry, Jesus understood the hunger of his people. We can do the same.

The second temptation takes Jesus up to a mountaintop. He can see all the kingdoms. He knows something of these places, the way Rome has carved them up, the way the kings of different places compete with the others. He knows the divide between the gentile lands and his own.

The temptation: you can bring them all together into one. Given the conflicts still raging in the land where Jesus lived, that feels like a worthy goal. But the path that is offered to the goal is the path of Rome: worship one visible God.

Jesus' answer is to quote from the law: worship the one unknowable invisible mysterious God.

Jesus knows the brutality of Rome's insistence on oneness. He decides to live with what is unknowable and find a way to draw the broken together without unanimity, within a misty uncertainty.

This is an important part of the story for us given the modern temptation to monoculture. Be the same, and there won't be conflict. Do things "the way they've always been done," and we will get along.

How do we draw different people together if we aren't imposing one homogeneous pattern? That is the question Jesus decided to live with.

This time when I looked at the story, I realized that Jesus chose not to answer the questions. He chose uncertainty. We usually think that light and guidance come with the answer to a question. But if we answer too quickly, we fall back on old answers and don't see the deeper truths. Sometimes the question itself is the light that opens our eyes.

Cathy Hird lives on the shore of Georgian Bay.