Nancy E. Petty
September 17, 2006 – Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Text: Mark 8:27-38
An Essential Question
All great sages, prophets, poets, and philosophers have long asked the central question of existence: Who am I? We go to therapists to sort out this question. We seek pastoral counseling. We go into the desert and seek the answer in silence and solitude. Some of us even we take up yoga. On her deathbed, Gertrude Stein is famously, if not dubiously, quoted as asking her partner, Alice B. Toklas, “What is the answer?” After no response, Gertrude then said, “In that case, what is the question?” Then she died. This rather odd conclusion to the life of a genius points to the whole issue of identity, of faith, and of mystery. Here at Pullen, we pride ourselves on not focusing on the answers to life’s dilemmas but, rather, asking significant questions, often rhetorical questions, to which we expect no response. Even the names of our Sunday school classes reflect this preoccupation with questions. One group calls itself the Seekers. Another is called the Grope Group. Still another calls itself the Reclaimers. And each of these names, though they reflect the intellectual and analytical climate of the church—and its humility in not providing answers but instead on journeying, with no destination in mind—is evidence of our discomfort with the flat-out bluntness of Jesus’ question to his disciples, “Who do you say I am?”
In the text we read from Mark’s gospel, Jesus
is actually asking two questions: first, he wants the disciples to tell him who
people say that he is. Their answers vary—some say Elijah, some say one of the
prophets, and still others say John, the Baptist. In this first instance, dare
I suggest that Jesus is asking the wrong question? It seems to me that he is
strangely off the mark. And the responses he receives indicate the error of his
inquiry. All of us, even Jesus, want to know what others are saying about who
we are. Who is that crazy woman preacher down there on
The question seemed to interest Jesus, especially as he drew near the end of his ministry. He had spoken to the masses, to individuals, to a wide variety of unlikely people from all walks of life, and surely he must have been curious about the reputation he had left behind him. He might further have been testing the disciples, like a good school teacher, to see what they had learned about his mission, his calling. He must have sensed that each of them might respond differently to the question of who people believed he was, rather like the members of a slightly contentious and highly inquisitive group of liberal Baptists. Indeed, it shouldn’t be that surprising that when Jesus asks, “Who do people say I am?” he doesn’t get a simple answer. After all, Christians at the Council of Laodicea incorporated into their canon four different perspectives on the life of Jesus…thus we have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
But this question, interesting though it may be, is the stuff of too many Sunday school classes, and too many bible study groups. After all, it’s easy to characterize somebody else, to sum up that person with a phrase or an analogy and feel in so doing that we have appropriately driven that unique individual into a slot or role or image. We may know better that Jesus is not Elijah, or John the Baptist, or one of the prophets: however, we have our own set of pat answers to this question: he was a great leader; he was a learned rabbi; he was the son of God; he was one with the holy trinity; he was fully human; he was fully divine; he was fully human and fully divine; he was the offspring of a virgin birth; he was the Messiah. While the pronouncements throughout church history have shaped our understanding or lack of understanding of who Jesus was, none of us seems to have a ready answer when we are asked directly, “But who do you say I am?” This question is the one on which the entire passage turns. So compelling and direct and unequivocal is the question that one gets a chill just trying to think of an answer. Here is the central issue of the gospel. And yet this simple question is one we cannot answer even about ourselves. Asked who we really are, we tend to respond with a set of characteristics, but rarely if ever can we discover the core identity of each of us, stripped of our reputations, our positions in society, our family roles, our careers, our property, our children.
The mystery of who we are often eludes others as well as ourselves—and in addition, we seem uncomfortable, especially in the South, until we get everybody in a family or a community properly placed and categorized. Therefore, our confusion about the mystery of who we are in families and communities should make clearer the far more urgent question in this passage from Mark. Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “But who do you say I am?” And Peter, the very disciple upon whom the church would be built, answers without hesitation: “You are the Christ.” And what does Peter get for the directness and immediacy of his answer? A severe rebuke. “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Is Jesus saying that Peter is being presumptuous in answering? Is Jesus rebuking Peter for stripping the mystery of Jesus’ identity, his essence, for more earthly designations? Or, more significantly, is Jesus saying, after having set up the disciples, so to speak, that it really doesn’t matter what other’s say about who he is? What are we to make of this exchange, all the more alarming because of what follows. First the rebuke. Then the warning. “For what does it profit a man or woman if she gain the whole world and lose her soul?” Even if we try to answer the question with the historical facts of what we know about Jesus, we fall far short of getting at who Jesus really is. For example, to know that he was from Nazareth, that he was a carpenter’s son, that he was brought up in the Hebrew tradition, that he spoke Aramaic, that he lived most of his life in Palestine—these facts do not truly help us to answer the question: “Who do you say I am?”
Perhaps Jesus rebuked Peter so severely because of a tendency we all have to categorize, place, mythologize, and propagandize Jesus, the man. We seem to have built around him a temple of sorts that amounts to idolatry and that so diminishes our individual understandings of who he was and is. Nothing others say about Jesus is exactly right. Nothing we say as a collective body of believers is exactly right. Rather, the question Jesus puts to us is one of vision and purpose and clarity for how we live in this world. By applying names, attributes, and facts to Jesus, we have imagined ourselves to be insiders when what Jesus most wanted of us was to remain the outsiders. To be an insider is to protect the institution and our place in it, to centralize power, and to dictate the terms and conditions of belief; to be an outsider is to be powerless, wordless, invisible—in the world but not of it. And in the American culture it is the insiders who have shaped and defined who Jesus is and how we are expected to answer the question “Who do you say I am?”
While I believe that each of us, with thought and discernment, must answer the question of who Jesus is on an individual basis, I am prepared this morning to share with you how I answer this question. In the spirit of being a good Pullenite, I will begin with what I do not believe. I do not believe that Jesus is God. I do not believe that Jesus was fully divine. I do not believe that Jesus understood himself to be the messiah. I do not believe that Jesus had to die on a cross to save us from our sins. I do not believe that Jesus is the only way to God.
I do believe that Jesus was far more than any of us can imagine. I do believe that how Jesus lived his life as God’s beloved has affected our world more than any other human being in history. I do believe that the way Jesus lived his life brought salvation and redemption into our lives. I do believe that today Jesus’ spirit can transform our lives and our world in unimaginable ways and always in love and always for good. I do believe that Jesus had a vision that was not of this world, that it was all encompassing, that it grasped the very nature of existence, the very nature of the God of all creation—and that this vision came to him through grace as it comes to each of us. I do believe that of all the human beings to live and walk on this earth, Jesus showed us most clearly what it means to live in relationship with God. And I do believe that if I live my life by the teachings of Jesus that I too can become God’s transforming love in this world. And finally I believe that it doesn’t matter whether Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, buried, and rose again on the third day, but it does matter that in this life those of us who call ourselves people of faith affirm God’s spirit moving in our midst, that we acknowledge that God is doing the impossible, that life is springing forth from death, that hope and redemption and salvation are real. And, as Jesus said then and is equally true today, that if we follow in the way, we will find God.
Like Peter, when we give in to the temptation of simply creating another list of attributes, characteristics, titles, mythologies, we move farther and farther away from being able to answer the question “Who do you say I am?” The only authentic response to this question is a commitment to living as Jesus taught us to live. Only then can we know what it means to love unconditionally, to love our enemies, to truly care for our neighbors, to pray without ceasing, to welcome the stranger, to feed the hungry, to visit the prisoner, and to clothe the naked. Only then can we understand his words about denying self and losing life in order to find life.
I wish that answering this question was as easy as saying, “Thou art the Christ.” That it would be enough to say that Jesus was God’s only Son—born of a virgin—and the one who became the savior of the world. I wish that it were as easy as a statement of beliefs that would inspire me to live a life of faith. But as most of us know and as most of us have experienced, statements of belief and doctrine fall short of the ineffable mystery of the divine. “Who do people say that I am?” is indeed an interesting question. “Who do you say I am?” is an essential question.