Who Do You Say I Am?
I think it’s important that church is a place where it’s safe to ask questions. One of the things that was an absolute revelation for me was when I was in my undergraduate studies and I was studying the theologian Paul Tillich. And Tillich said at the heart of faith, that what faith essentially is, is a question.
Now, Tillich was using this to say that doubt isn’t the enemy of faith but an essential part of faith. That every question has an element of doubt in it and that this doubt, this question of faith - questions like who or what God is, how do we relate to God, etc - keep us searching to connect to God and understand God better. For Tillich, faith is a question and it’s no coincidence that the word question contains the word quest right in it.
To say faith is a question is to say that faith is a journey that keeps us searching and looking and striving to know God better, to find how to connect to God deeper, and how to understand both God and our world better.
Who do you say I am seems like such an easy question for Jesus to ask and for us as Christians to answer. We agree with Peter. It’s a no brainer. You are the Messiah. You are the Christ. That pretty much settles it. Next question.
But what does that really mean? Can that be an open ended question? What does it really mean to affirm that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God? Does it mean the same thing to us as it would mean to Peter? What does it look like in our lives to answer that Jesus is the Messiah?
It might be easy to give what we think is the correct answer to the question of who Jesus is. We’re in a church after all, and we’ve been told what the “Correct” answer is over and over again in our lives. But do we really think about the answer we give or why we give it or if we really believe it? Because when we start thinking about the implications of that answer, things begin to get tricky. It’s not as easy as one and one makes two. To say that Jesus is the Christ, the messiah, to say that Jesus is the son of the Living God has profound implications and should have a profound impact on our lives and how we choose to live in this world. Because to answer with Peter, to agree with him and say that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God means that Jesus is the reflection of God here on earth. Jesus is our example of what God is like. If we want to know what God is like and we believe that Jesus is the Messiah and Son of God, then we look at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to both understand God’s heart and where our hearts should be.
There’s an interesting phenomena that happens in my house around my son Isaac. I’ve noticed it doesn’t happen with my step-kids and it doesn’t happen so much with my daughter Olivia. It’s almost exclusively Isaac that this happens to. I’ve noticed that when Isaac does something good or kind or even wonderful which is often, Isaac is referred to by my wife as “our son.” She’ll say, “Our son just spent his recess helping his friend look for his glasses.” BUT the moment he does something questionable or frustrating or wrong, the moment that kid gets in trouble, suddenly my wife stops referring to Isaac as OUR son and starts calling him YOUR son - as in “Do you know what YOUR son did today?” See, Olivia rarely gets in trouble. So she doesn’t get the same shift in language. But what I love and what frustrates me and what scares me about my kids is that they are reflections of who I am. They aren’t the same person as me. They’re very much their own people. But I can see so much of myself in them - both the good and bad. And I’m starting to go down a rabbit hole here but it’s an interesting side note, that even though I’m adopted people my whole life have told me that I’m a lot like my father. And what’s scary is the older I get the more I see it in myself.
To say that Jesus is the Son of God, to say that Jesus is the Messiah is to say that Jesus is the direct reflection of God here on earth. So, if we agree with Peter, if we aren’t just trying to give the correct answer as if there’s a test, but we’re trying to give the answer that we really believe and we say that Jesus is the messiah... If we really believe that Jesus is the Messiah and son of God, then what that means is that if we really want to know who God is, all we have to do is look at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
How do we know God cares about poor people? Because Jesus cares about poor people.
How do we know that God is a God of love? Because Jesus is a lover.
How do we know that God is in the business of forgiving sins? Because Jesus forgives sin.
How do we know God is inclusive? Because Jesus is. How do we know that God is a God of hope and a God of life and a God of reconciliation? Because we see that through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
How do we know God cares about Justice? Because Jesus is about Justice.
If we want to know what God is like, then we look at Jesus. If we believe Jesus is the son of God, then we believe he is the direct reflection of God on this earth. If we want to know what it takes to have a relationship with God or what that looks like, then we look at how Jesus lived his life. If we want to know how to treat other people in this world, then we look at how Jesus treated other people. And if we want to know what’s truly important to God, then we look at what’s truly important to Jesus.
You see, if we truly want to answer the question Jesus asks us of who do we say he is with the same answer Peter gives, we may give the same simple answer. You are the messiah. You are the son of God. But the implications to that answer should be and are staggering and not easy. Because we have no excuse then. We know what it looks like to live a transformed life. We know what it looks like to live a life of Faith. We know what’s on God’s heart. So we don’t have any excuse for it not to be on our own hearts.
To be faithful means to live in Grace - to embody grace. Let’s flesh that out a little bit. I think it means to be patient, to be loving, to be grateful, to be forgiving, to care about something more than yourself, to be kind, to be a source of healing to people. And that’s exactly the life that Jesus calls us in to living. To say that he’s messiah, to answer his question with Peter, is to answer by living our lives in grace.
Now, here’s what I find myself wondering about this week. Let’s look at some real world application here - where rubber hits the road. With another mass shooting that seems to be made only more tragic by happening at a school again, and as this debate about why and what can be done rages on again, and I don’t know the right answer to that question - I really struggle with it - I wonder if in some ways it isn’t an indictment on how we’ve answered this question Jesus asks of “who do you say I am?”
I’m not trying to make the argument that we kicked Jesus out of the schools or anything like that. It isn’t the school’s job to teach our kids faith; its our job both here and at home. I guess what I’m saying is that if we did that better, if we as a nation and society that loves to sometimes proclaim we’re a Christian nation built on Christian values which I think means that a lot of us agree with Peter’s answer here; if we really believe Jesus is the reflection of God and the model of what our lives are supposed to look like, then would these things still happen? Would they happen to the same degree?
I don’t know. But here’s what I worry about. We can legislate and ban and take away anything we want to and it may not be a bad idea in some cases. But the truth is that it won’t take away the brokenness of the people who perpetrate such crimes. That’s the only way I can really understand or make sense of how someone could do that. They’d have to be horribly, horribly broken. And if we truly believe that the answer to “Who do you say I am” is the same answer that Peter give, that Jesus is the messiah, the son of God, and that Jesus is the reflection of God here on earth, if we truly believe that we learn about who or what God is through Jesus, then we see a God who is all about making broken things whole again. If we get nothing else out of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, we should at least get that. God wants us to make broken things whole again just like God does. So why aren’t we doing more to really help broken people find that wholeness?
It might just be a theory but I think it would actually work. If we lived lives of Grace, if we answered Jesus’s question with more than just words, if we tried to mirror more closely his life as he mirrored God to us, if we cared for the outcast and cast-aside and broken people just as much as Jesus did, we’d see violence in this country drop - maybe even dramatically drop. You want to know what we can do about it regardless of what Congress may or may not do? We can go out and love someone. We can go out and try to make broken people whole again. We can answer the question with Peter and let it transform our lives. We can live in grace. We can go being Jesus to people who need Jesus the most. We can affirm Jesus as Messiah not just with our words but with our very lives.