Who is Jesus?

If time travel were possible, I’d choose to visit the Holy Land during Christ’s 3 years of earthly ministry. In particular, I would choose to tag along with the twelve disciples, the specific men Jesus chose to give up-close and personal, intensive training about the Kingdom of God.

One of the places I’d like to go in my time-travel journey with “the Twelve,” is on a road to a place called Caesarea Philippi, a Roman city 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee. Road conversation was pretty typical for Jesus and the disciples, but this particular discussion would have been especially poignant.  One of them, a former tax collector named Matthew, recorded it in his Gospel:

When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, ‘Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?’ So they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered and said, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.’ (Matthew 16:13-16)

I imagine Jesus posing this question as they walked on the hot, dusty road, and the group strolling on with several disciples tossing out the representative answers. But then I picture Jesus stopping abruptly, and the group halting with him, and then posing the follow-up question: “Who do you think I am?” I can hear a long pause, and then watch Peter, after looking around at the others, resolutely turning his head to Jesus and making his great declaration: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” In an astonishing moment, Jesus affirmed Peter’s declaration: “ Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:16-17). No disciple could have gone to sleep that night without the dawning realization that this Jesus they were following was far more than they could have expected.

The significance of that ancient roadside conversation remains. Our culture, like the culture of Jesus’ day, has many things to say about Him, about who He is, and how He fits with a particular agenda or another. During the past presidential GOP primary, I heard a caller on a talk show argue that Jesus would favor one particular candidate, and that He most assuredly would not be in support of another. I recently saw a bumper sticker that read “Jesus was a Feminist.”  It seems that no matter the particular corner of culture, Jesus has been co-opted into their cause.

Peter’s answer to Christ’s question shattered all preconceptions the modern culture had of Jesus; He wasn’t just a good prophet, He was the One the prophets had foretold.  He wasn’t just a political Messiah to save the Jews from the Roman state, or a social reformer come to put the religious elite in their place.  He was the Son of the Living God, who had come to be the Savior of the World.

This same Jesus shatters all the preconceptions that our world attempts to box Him into today. Despite the attempts to label Him and co-opt His message, Jesus Christ cannot be reduced to an ideology, or simplified to a slogan. To borrow from C.S. Lewis’ description of the Christ-figure Aslan of the Narnian chronicles, “he is not a tame lion.” Eventually, every ideology is confounded by His teaching, overruled by His lordship.

Meanwhile, Jesus confronts every person with the same question with which He confronted His disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” The answer cannot be merely intellectual. It must be answered with the conviction of genuine belief, as did Peter, or else it has not been truly answered at all: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

Photo credit by Chapendra in creative commons