Who Do You Say That I Am
Reflections on the Lectionary for August 27th
“Who do you say that I am?”
It’s a good question.
When Jesus asks this question in Matthew 16:15, he’s in the middle. Jesus is in the middle of his public career, in the middle of the town of Caesarea Philippi, and in the middle of a conversation with his disciples. And it seems that Jesus might have been in the middle of an identity crisis. He asked his disciples a question—the kind of question you might ask when you are somewhere in the middle.
“Who do you say that I am?”
I think Jesus meant that question. I don’t think it was rhetorical. I think Jesus wanted to know. He wanted to learn what people thought about him; he really wanted the answer to his question. He asked because he didn’t quite know, and he wanted a real answer. I don’t think he wanted to know because he was anxious or insecure about what people were saying, the same way you might google yourself to see if anything interesting pops up. Instead, I think he wanted to know what people thought of him—who people said that he was—because he wanted to get his bearings on his own answer to the question.
Jesus was an extraordinary person—I don’t know how it would be possible to dispute that. No matter what you think about his divinity or humanity, it seems clear from the record (both the record found in the gospels, and in the subsequent historical record) that Jesus’ life left quite an impression on the world. He drew a lot of attention, caused quite a ruckus, and left a big wake. Some of the buzz about Jesus’ identity that’s found in the gospels might be imported back into the story of his lifetime from a later vantage point—it might be that Jesus’ life was more remarkable in hindsight than it was in real time—but there’s no denying that he became, and was, the kind of person about whom people had, and have, a lot of opinions.
I take it for granted that Jesus also questioned his own identity. Even if you take the most confident opinion (which I do not), that Jesus was a fully-divine being with tons of foresight and knowledge, you still have to account for places in the gospels (like most of Mark’s gospel) where Jesus seems less certain. And this passage in Matthew shares a lot in common with those kinds of stories. Here, we have a piece of what is often, in Mark, called the “messianic secret,” which is the motif where Jesus wants people to stay quiet about his identity. In Matthew 16:20, near the end of this passage, Jesus “sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the messiah.” I take this as evidence that Jesus was on an honest quest for opinions about himself, and about his potential role in the world, and that he was not yet ready for the kinds of answers he was hearing. When he asked the disciples what people were saying about him, and when he asked Peter specifically what Peter thought, I think Jesus was genuinely curious. He was looking for leads on a mystery that was consuming him; he was trying to figure himself out.
That makes sense to me. It has always made more sense to me that Jesus would have been somewhat confused and burdened by his own life, rather than being supremely confident and in control at all times. That might have become more and more true as his public career progressed; Jesus might have felt the stakes of his life ratcheting up, and wondered to himself what kind of purpose and end he might have, and what kind of role he would play. By this point in Matthew, it makes sense that Jesus would have felt things moving toward a decisive or even violent conclusion, and it makes sense that he would have turned to his friends and followers to cross-check his own conclusions. “Who do you say that I am?” I think it’s an honest question. Jesus really wanted to know.
Peter’s answer is a textbook confession: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” (I’m using the NRSV translation here, and keeping its capitalizations, although any capitalizations in the text are always artifacts of translation, and their emphases and meanings byproducts of the translators’ unavoidable theological biases…it’s not clear to me that either “messiah” or “son” should necessarily be capitalized). Peter’s answer lines up perfectly with the theological claims that later Christianity would privilege about Jesus’ identity, which perhaps should make us suspicious. But I prefer not to see Peter’s confession here as a theological one, exactly, and certainly not in the modern confessional sense. I see Peter’s “confession” as an act of theo-political hope.
In calling Jesus a “messiah,” or a “christos” in Greek, Peter is using a heavily loaded term. It is in no way a neutral word, and it’s a far cry from being strictly theological in the sense we might experience it today. “Christos” is the Greek rendition of the Aramaic and Hebrew word from which we get our word “messiah,” which simply means “anointed one,” and it has deep connections to the Israelite (and Judahite) monarchy. It was a political descriptor that was linked to the coronation of a king. Christians have made it into a mostly-theological term, and to it we have attached mostly-theological claims. But in the first century, among Judeans, the word would have been understood as a claim not about theology, but about politics. It would have been a claim that Jesus was the rightful claimant to the throne of David, which was, in turn, a claim that Herod and Caesar were not rightful claimants to the political power in the region. By calling Jesus the “christos” or the “messiah,” Peter was pitting him against the whole array of political power, and claiming that God backed Jesus as a rival to Rome’s rule.
The vocabulary of early Christianity was full of words like this one—words that were borrowed from the discourses of power, and that did double duty as political words. Words and phrases like Lord, servant, son of God, messiah, salvation, peace, kingdom—they were all words about power and politics that came to take on theological meanings. But to the earliest Jesus-followers, and to Jesus himself, these words were inflected with the exercise of empire. They could never be neutral.
So, when Peter made his “confession” and called Jesus both a messiah and a son of God, he was saying some very dangerous things. He was making a political confession as much as a theological one, and he was putting Jesus in a compromising position. He was elevating Jesus right into a position of peril.
You can see this in Jesus’ reaction to Peter’s words. It’s twofold. First, he praised Peter, and told him that he had received this insight through God, and not through human beings. And second, he told him (and everyone else) to shut up about it. It was exactly the kind of reaction you might expect from someone who has received a compliment, as Jesus had, but who had also just been implicated in an insurrection. “Thank you, Peter, but please keep that to yourself.”
One of my favorite quotes about this comes from the biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, who makes the observation that you can’t help but think, watching Jesus’ life and ministry unfold, that “someone is going to kill this man.” I would say that this is especially true of the gospels according to Mark and Matthew; Luke tries hard to present Jesus as an unjustly accused and executed man, and John really treats Jesus’ death differently. But in all four gospels, you can see the ways Jesus is being caught in the swirling currents of power and violence, from the beginnings of his story to the end. (Don’t forget that the gospel of Matthew, from which this text comes, begins with the story of a king trying to kill the infant Jesus. The stakes were always high). The gospels’ account of Jesus life, from start to finish, suggests that his fate is always entangled with politics, even as it relates that political story substantially in terms of theology.
So when Jesus asks his disciples to tell him what people are saying about him, I think he wants to know. I think he wants a real answer. I think the disciples were a focus group that Jesus had convened, for the purposes of figuring out whether everyone else could see what he was starting to see. Peter’s answer, that Jesus was messiah and son of God, was the one Jesus was expecting, or at least the one he wanted to hear. But he wasn’t quite ready to share it yet.