Who Exactly Is Jesus Christ?

09/18/11 Mark 8:27-33 Grace UMC

A. W. Tozer begins the first chapter of his classic work, The Knowledge of the Holy with these words, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." He makes the point that, so long as we think that God is a really big deal, we will give everything we have to worship with our whole hearts. On the other hand, however, if we don't really think that God has all that much to say to us, or that we can learn what we need to know just as well from another source, we will not take our worship seriously. God will simply not play that much of a role in our lives.

In spite of the fact that Tozer's book has played an important part in my Christian life, I want to be just a bit critical of what he has to say, not because I think it is fundamentally wrong, so far as it goes, but rather because I think he is being just a bit vague. It is clear that, when Tozer says "God," he means the Christian God borne witness to in the Bible, but he also says things like this. "The history of [humanity] will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and [humanity's] spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God." Is Tozer suggesting that we should focus more on whether our view of God is "high" than on whether our view of God is "true?" I don't think that he would say that, but I think, if we want to think about God as Christians, we must ask a little more precise question. Instead of asking, "Who is God?" or even the old pagan question, "What is God," I want to pose the question, "Just who, exactly, is Jesus Christ?"

This is a question that Jesus himself asks in our passage for this morning, in a story that is at the same time well known and also surprising. Jesus asks his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" And the disciples answer him and say, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others one of the prophets." Clearly, the people think that Jesus is a mighty prophet, sent by God, to deliver the word of God to the people of God. In spite of the fact that we want to emphasize that the people are missing some of the point, we must realize that the people did not think that Jesus was just an ordinary man. He is being compared to the most dramatic prophet of contemporary times as well as to the most famous, miracle-working prophet of the Old Testament. To paraphrase the peoples' response to Jesus' question, "Who do people say I am," we might say, "A mighty prophet, nearly without parallel in history. You are the one through whom God is delivering his word and saving his people." Clearly, the people had a fairly high view of Christ. It is unlikely that they spoke of anyone else around like this.

That is an interesting response, but it is clearly not what Jesus is looking for. He then turns to his own disciples and says, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answers, saying, "You are the Messiah." Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ who has been promised to Israel from long ago. In the church throughout the ages, this response of Peter has been widely held to be correct. After all, we all confess Jesus to be the Christ, the Messiah of God, come to save his people, do we not? Now, you know what you mean when you say "Messiah," and I know what I mean when I say "Messiah," but what does Peter mean when he says "Messiah?" It might not be totally clear, because Peter lived in a very different culture than we do.

You see, the word "Messiah" or "Christ" did not mean, at the time, "The Incarnate Son of God who takes the sin of the world on his shoulders and redeems us from sin and brokenness." The Hebrew word "Messiah" and the Greek word "Christ" simply mean, "One who is anointed." Prophets were often anointed into their office, priests had a kind of anointing. However, most people, when they spoke of someone being an anointed one, would be referring to kings. Now, Israel was not self-governed at the time, but was ruled by the Romans. For Peter to say that Jesus is the Christ is to say that he is the instrument that God will use to radically deliver the Israelites from foreign oppression, not unlike when God delivered Israel from Egypt. When we understand this, we realize that Peter's confession could be paraphrased this way. "You are the Christ, the son of David, who will conquer like David did, who will rescue us from evil rulers like David did, who will extend our borders like David did. You are the mighty king who will set up God's kingdom here on earth by making Israel the most glorious nation in the world."

Biblical scholars have long noticed a tendency of Jesus to not want to speak of himself as the Christ. When unclean spirits call him Christ or Messiah, he silences them, when other people call him by that title, he brushes past it, and he nearly never takes the title on his own lips. Why would Jesus do this? Why would Jesus, whom the church has always confessed as the Christ, not allow himself to be called the Christ? Why keep this Messianic secret? Some have argued that the reason that Jesus did not want to be called the Christ is because he wasn't the Christ, that he refused the title because it simply wasn't true. I think there might be something more to it and we can use this passage as the best example I can think of.

I am more and more convinced that Jesus refuses to be called "Messiah" here because Peter has absolutely no idea what he is saying when he uses the term. This is made clear when Jesus begins to tell about how he is going to suffer, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and finally be killed and raised from the dead. When he hears this, we read that Peter begins to rebuke Jesus. However, Jesus does not then change his mind and say, "You're right. I don't know what came over me, those things aren't going to happen." Instead, he rebukes him, a word that is often used for exorcisms in the New Testament, and says, "Get behind me, Satan!" Peter went from seeming like he understood Jesus better than anyone else to being called demonic. Clearly, the desire to make Jesus merely an earthly king is to miss the point.

So, who exactly is Jesus? According, even to this passage, Jesus is not merely a prophet and he is not merely an earthly ruler. How else might we understand Jesus? Let us look at how Jesus confronts us and wrestle with it. We will find that, when we do this, we find ourselves confronted by all the main ways people throughout history have understood this issue.

In the New Testament, especially in the gospels, we are confronted with a Jesus who encounters his disciples as God in human flesh; we even have Thomas fall to the ground and cry out, "My Lord and my God!" Repeatedly, we see Paul and others speak of Jesus alongside of God, ascribing the same qualities to each. We read that Jesus is absolutely vital to our encounter with God, that our knowing of God is absolutely identified with our knowing of Jesus. We see the opponents of Jesus complaining that, in doing the miracles he did, and by forgiving sin, he is doing what only God can do. They say things like, "It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God."

Even in the New Testament documents, we see that the church not only thinks that Jesus is a great teacher, but that he is God among them, and we read that they are worshipping him as God. The only problem is that Jesus himself prays and worships as well, and he worships and prays to a God he calls Father. Now, we have a God the Father and a God the Son. But remember, the first disciples were radically monotheist Jews, who had one and only one God. How were they to deal with this fact that there was still a God called Father, but now there was also a God the Son? This is a real problem, and one that cannot be brushed aside. The early Christians had to work out where they stood in their confession of the Father and the Son as well as their confession of the One God.

How might they deal with it? Well, they might have argued that, borrowing from what they had learned from Greek culture and philosophy, there is a heavenly realm where God lives and an earthly realm where we live and the two never touch. We cannot have anything to do with heaven, for we are broken and sinful; heaven cannot really have anything to do with us for the same reason. If this is so, then Jesus cannot possibly be God, the argument went, for if God were to come among us and take on our humanity, the corruption in which we find ourselves would taint God and make him less than he was before, and this is unentertainable. So, if the one who came among us as Jesus of Nazareth was not God, who is he? Well, he is a creature, but not just any creature, not just like everyone else. Jesus would have to be the greatest of all creatures, the firstborn of all creation, the greatest and most glorious creature in all the universe.

But does that really do justice to the New Testament? Is Jesus really different from us in degree, but not in kind? If that were so, what could we make of Jesus' forgiveness of sins? What could we make of the worship of the church? Brothers and sisters, we come here to worship Christ, not just to say he was a great teacher. Are we committing idolatry in our worship of Christ, which we surely are if he is anything less than very God of very God? When we see Jesus on the cross, does that actually tell us anything about the love of God, or is it nothing more than an example of human compassion? No, I am convinced, as was the early church, that, unless Jesus is an actual incarnation of God in our midst, we've got better things to do on a Sunday morning.

So, if that solution doesn't work, if it destroys the very fabric of the gospel, then what can we say? What if we were to say that Jesus and the Father are both God, but, since we want to affirm that there is only one God, that even though, when God interacts with us, he does so as Father and as Son (and also as Holy Spirit), those distinctions have nothing to do with who God actually is in God's own life? God interacts with us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but God actually is only the One God, totally isolated, the abstract, all-powerful, totally free individual who is unhindered by relationships, except those which he freely chooses to participate in. In this way, we can honor the fact that God actually interacts with us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, without having to deal with the messy three-ness of it all.

And you know what? That sounds pretty good. But it is actually a disaster. Yes we can say that God is three in one way, but is one in another sense, but if we take this route, we have once again destroyed the gospel. What we are saying is that, when God comes among us and reveals himself to us in his fullness, it doesn't actually bear any resemblance whatsoever to who God is. If the single most profound revelation of God, Jesus Christ, portrays a God who is three-in-one, but that Triunity has absolutely no relation to who God actually is, is it really a real revelation of God? It seems that, if Jesus tells us that there is a God the Father, personally distinct from himself, and that simply is not true, then we cannot trust Jesus in the most important part of his ministry. We see Jesus in the gospels continually trying to teach humanity about God, about how we ought to be in relationship with him, but if his words aren't actually backed up with reality, what good is it? If Jesus does not actually reveal God to us, even in his prayer life, then whatever else he might be, he is not really God, for he is only a manifestation of God that bears no real and deep relation to who God actually is.

There is a third option, and that is to say that God the Father and God the Son are two separate Gods, who might work together, who might agree in just about everything, but who are not united in the sense that we could say with the Nicene Creed that Jesus is of one and the same being as the Father. If we were to choose this solution, however, it would mean that we have left monotheism behind. When we remember that one of the most important prayers in Israel's history, is "Hear, O Israel: The Lord is your God, the Lord is One," and we have to understand Jesus in the history of Israel, then we can't really say this, either.

What are we left with? If starting with a preconceived notion of holiness and the transcendence of God did not work, and if starting with a preconceived notion of the unity of God that we cling to tenaciously, even in contradiction to what we see in the actual life of Jesus didn't work, and if utterly rejecting any commitment to monotheism didn't work, what can we say? What can we do?

It is my firm conviction that we need to set aside our preconceived notions altogether, and allow them to be reshaped, not by pure argument, not by wishful thinking, but by the actual life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. When we actually look and listen to Jesus and take him seriously as Immanuel, God with us, God in flesh, then we find that our preconceived understanding of the holiness and transcendence of God is flawed. As Athanasius of Alexandria pointed out in the fourth century, when God comes among us as a human being, when he enters his creation as a creature, he does not become tainted and made any less God. After all, when Jesus touches the lepers, he is not made unclean, as the law says he should, but rather, he cleanses the leper. God is not brought down by our brokenness, but heals it by entering into it.

We also find that our preconceived notion of the unity of God is challenged by Jesus Christ. Jesus has no intention of overthrowing monotheism. After all, he takes that prayer, declaring the unity of God, on his own lips, affirming it just as the Israelites had done for hundreds of years. However, he also says things like "Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise," "The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands," "Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him," "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me...I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also...Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father?' Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" He prays, saying, "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." Perhaps most astonishingly, he says, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have reveled them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." Jesus and the God he calls Father are personally distinct; they both call the other "you" as opposed to "me," but they are so closely bound in unity, that, if we know Jesus, we know the Father, and not otherwise.

The moment we try to fit Jesus into a box, we find that he bursts out of it in glory as he did out of the tomb on Easter morning. We find that Jesus is always greater, always more remarkably profound, always more challenging, than we expect him to be. If we come back to our question with which we started, "Just who exactly is Jesus Christ," we find that we have something of an answer. It is not an answer that allows us to rest in the comfort of our success, as if we had solved a difficult puzzle that now requires no more thought. It is an answer that demands everything of us. Jesus is nothing less than the God of the universe. As the creed says, Jesus Christ is "the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one being with the Father; by whom all things were made."

Brothers and sisters, if this is true, how amazing the gospel really is! It means that God has not abandoned us in our sin and death, but has come close, to shoulder our burdens, to bear our pain, to overcome our enemies, even enemies such as death itself, and to offer himself up on our behalf and in our place. It means that there is indeed a God and that this God does indeed love us, that he loves us with a love that will not let us go, that, as he was willing to die rather than be without us, we must say, though we must clap our hand over our mouths and say it with fear and trembling, that God loves us even more than God loves God's self.

This is the God we proclaim, this is the Jesus Christ whom we worship. And if Jesus is God, then we cannot think of God in any way that bypasses God's actual self-revelation in Christ. And brothers and sisters, it changes everything. Let us invite the Holy Spirit to transform us, that we might truly become fellow heirs of Christ, that is, heirs of God. Let us pray.

AMEN