Isidor Isaac Rabi, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, and one of the developers of the atomic bomb, was once asked how he became a scientist. Rabi replied that every day after school his mother would talk to him about his school day. She wasn’t so much interested in what he had learned that day, but how he conducted himself in his studies. She always inquired, “Did you ask a good question today?”

“Asking good questions,” Rabi said, “made me become a scientist.”

In order to ask a good question I think you need to have noble motives behind the question. You have to want to know the truth. The Pharisees, by contrast, already had the answers to their questions. They felt they already knew the truth. How many times have we had it in for someone, asking a question designed to trap
them?

I see it all of the time on television – the way some reporters have already made up their minds about the answer before they even ask the question. It sickens me… I cringe and turn the TV off when it gets to be too much. We even do it to our loved ones. In a moment like this we are not trying to learn; we are trying to injure.

In the gospel, rather than responding cruelly, Jesus carefully cuts through the nuanced layers of the law to give an easily swallowed summation of the whole law

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”
This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second
is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
(Matt 22: 37- 40)

Yes, the answer is Love.