“Who Do People Say I Am?”

A sermon based upon Mark 8: 27-30

Preached by Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, 

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

12^th Sunday After Pentecost, August 27th, 2017,    (Series:  Questions Jesus Asked  #10)

Everybody has an opinion when they answer questions like:  “What do you think the weather will be today?” “What do you think should be done about North Korea?”  “Do you think religion makes sense in today’s world?”  “Should the government be in the health care business?”  

This spring and summer there has been a highly publicized court case in England to decide the fate of the terminally ill infant named Charlie Gard.  In April, the courts decided that little “Charlie” had no chance of recovery and should be placed in palliative care.  Charlie’s parents refused to settle for the court’s decision.  They mustered popular opinion to raise money for experimental treatment, even gaining the attention of the Pope and our America President.  “The government should not decide the fate of our child,” the parents said.  Those parents worked fearlessly to gain the attention of the world and to get popular opinion on their side.  They even caused the British courts to take a second look at their own decision. (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/11/parents-fighting-to-keep-baby-charlie-gard-life-support-lose-high-court-battle). 

In matters like this, and many others, we all have our opinions.  Sometimes our opinions agree with courts and governments, but others times they don’t.   Our country, with its emphasis on democracy and freedom, invites popular opinions and our government often makes decisions based on what people think.  Other countries, like England, rely more heavily upon expert opinions, but they are still opinions.   Even the expert opinions can prove to be wrong. 

WHO DO PEOPLE SAY I AM?

When Jesus passed through Caesarea Philippi, a large Gentile town, far off the beaten path for most Jews, he asked his own disciples about people’s opinion about him:  “Who do people say that I am?”

We must understand that Jesus’ own ego was NOT driving this question.  Jesus was not doing opinion polls.  This was a ministry question, preparing his disciples for their future mission into the world.  This Gentile town, far away from “hot” Jewish politics, was just the right spot.  It was a on the edge of the world beyond Jerusalem.

The answer the disciples gave reflects much of the popular opinions surrounding the ministry of Jesus at that time: “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets" (Mk. 8:28 NIV).  In the minds of the common people, these were all great, good men.  John the Baptizer fearlessly spoke truth to power, so did Elijah and other prophets.  Whoever Jesus is, popular opinion is saying that he is in the same category as one of these great preaching prophets.   

Today, in our world still, opinions about are many.   Most every religion and most of the world would agree that Jesus was a great prophet and teacher.    Tons of books are still being written about him.  Theologies are still constructed around him.   Christianity is still the largest religion in the world, at 2.2 Billion adherents.    If you were doing a study of him, you might suggest that Jesus was great, Jesus was good, and that many still claim that Jesus was God; although Jesus never actually called himself any of these.  In fact, when someone addressed Jesus as ‘good teacher’ his immediate response was ‘Why do you call me good, there is no one good but God’ (Mk 10:18).  Here, as shocking as it might seem, Jesus refuses to be called ‘good’ or ‘God’.  

In regard to greatness, Jesus himself said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).  This statement came right after Jesus scolded his disciples who wanted greatness ‘like the Gentiles do’ (Mk 10: 42-44).   In addition to the gospel story, the Greeks and the Romans (and the Jews too for that matter) had long lists of requirements for human ‘greatness’, but Jesus would not have made any of their lists.  In other words, Jesus was not a great military leader like Alexander the Great, nor was he some kind of mythical Greek hero like Hercules, killing monsters with his bare hands.  And even in the most conservative of terms, wrote John Ortberg, Jesus would not have made any ‘most likely to succeed’ list, then or now.

Even in the biblical record itself, we need to recognize that Jesus was executed as a common criminal.  Both professional and popular opinions went against him in the end.   Whatever you or I think about him today, Jesus was not “good” or “great” in any conventional way.   And in regard to being “God,” in the gospels at least, Jesus preferred to call himself “son of man,” meaning ‘human one’.  Even after Peter confesses Jesus as “the Christ” or Messiah, Jesus warns his disciples ‘not to tell no anyone about him’ (v. 30).

WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?

Perhaps Jesus wanted to keep his identity secret because he wanted to make it known on his own terms.   What we do know is that because of the very low-profile Jesus took, the question about him remains a living, open and very personal question, rather than a closed, dead or impersonal answer.   No one can answer this question for you or for me.   Each of us has to answer for ourselves: “Who do YOU say that I am?”   It’s a question that remains forever ‘close to our hearts’.

When it comes to considering this about Jesus, not just from Jesus, we can’t rely upon popular opinions or professional opinions.  Mere opinion or easy answers can’t save anyone.  The apparent clumsiness and ambiguities of the gospel records themselves do not allow easy, simple, or final conclusions to ever be made.  The gospels neither give complete historical details about him, nor do they give us any kind indisputable facts or deductions.   What the gospels do give us, is an invitation to faith, which is to answer for ourselves who Jesus is.  As Tom Wright has rightly said, even the people who didn’t like Jesus, talked about him.  Others could not rest easy until they did everything they could to get rid of him.  Whatever you decide, Jesus is, as Wright says, the ‘kind of person who demands our attention’.

Many years ago, the Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis, informed the English speaking scholarly world how the question about Jesus ‘demanded’ his own attention.  Lewis wrote: “[My aim] is to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing people say about Him, such as “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.”  That is the sort of thing that we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic— on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg— or else he would be the Devil of Hell.   You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit on Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God”  (From Mere Christianity, p. 55-56).

While we can appreciate the astounding evangelical logic of C.S. Lewis, most people don’t come to decide who Jesus is based on pure logic.  Most folks either accept what their parents taught them, or make decisions about Jesus during a time of great personal crisis.  It’s not because they feel like they have a choice to make, but because they feel they have no other choice to make, but to make a very desperate, life-impacting decision about Jesus.   Many decide for Jesus like the Philippian Jailer, right after the earthquake broke down bars and walls, freeing the prisoners he was responsible for and putting his own life in jeopardy.  In the book of Acts we overhear him pleading with Paul and Silas, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved” (Acts 16:30)?   The need for someone to trust and find hope in, is not voluntary, but it’s mandatory for saving one’s life.

This is exactly how the now 91 year-old Jurgen Moltmann, described his own personal decision to ‘believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and be saved’ (Acts 16:31).   Even though Moltmann has been one of the most highly respected theologians in the world today, he came to make his own decision about Jesus based not upon logical argument, but based upon the most personal terms of great anguish and quiet desperation.  In the Preface of one of simplest books, Jesus Christ for Today’s World, he wrote: “Who is Christ for me? I don't want to evade this personal question through generalities, so I will begin with a personal memory.  In 1945 I was imprisoned in a wretched prisoner-of-war war camp in Belgium.  The German Reich had collapsed.  German civilization had been destroyed through Auschwitz. My home town Hamburg lay in ruins; and in my own self things looked no different. I felt abandoned by God and human beings, and the hopes of my youth died. I couldn't see any future ahead of me.

In this situation an American chaplain put a Bible into my hands, and I began to read it. First of all the psalms of lament in the Old Testament: “I have fallen dumb and have to eat up my suffering within myself” (was Luther's forceful translation) '. . . I am a stranger as all my fathers were' (Psalm 39).   Then, after that, I was drawn to the story of the passion of the cross, and when I came to Jesus' death cry I knew: this is the one who understands you and is beside you when everyone else abandons you. 'My God, why have you forsaken me?' That was my cry for God too. I began to understand the suffering, … God-forsaken Jesus, because I felt that he understood me.

….I grasped that this Jesus is the divine Brother in our distress.  He brings hope to the prisoners and the abandoned.  He is the one who delivers us from the guilt that weighs us down and robs us of every kind of future. And I became possessed by a hope when in human terms there was little enough to hope for.  I summoned up the courage to live, at a point when one would perhaps willingly have put an end to it all.   

This early companionship with Jesus, my brother in suffering and the liberator from guilt, has never left me.  Christ for me is the crucified Jesus.  In the public and private conflicts of my life I came to understand (His) presence.  (From Jurgen Moltmann. Jesus Christ for Today's World (Kindle Locations 37-48). Kindle Edition).

When I consider his personal testimony, I can’t help but recall the day Jesus became ‘personal’ for me.   I was about nine years old in the third grade.  We had just moved out of town into the country, where I had to start attending a new school.  We were still attending a small town church, and on this particular spring Sunday, my Junior-grade, Sunday School teacher, Bud Taylor, presented the gospel to me in the most personal way.   As I recall, he basically said that he loved us and Jesus loved us, and that he didn’t want us to ‘go to Hell’, so we needed to receive Jesus as our personal savior.”

Since everything else in my life was falling apart at that time, the last thing I needed was to go to Hell.  So, I prayed to receive Jesus in Sunday School class that day.   Mr. Taylor told those of us who made decisions that we needed to tell our parents.  I was waiting on my Father when he came out of his own class and I told him.  But instead of accepting everything at face-value, my Father told me to go down the hall to Pastor Brackett’s office and inform him.  I didn’t want to do that, but I still didn’t want to go to hell either, so I decided the pastor couldn’t be that bad.   Rev. Brackett went over the basics of gospel to make sure I understood, and then told me I had to come up front, after the service, during the invitation, and make it everything public.  I didn’t want to do that either, but again I figured that even standing in front of a church couldn’t be as bad as going to hell, so I did.   Later, I was baptized in the cold spring waters of Snow Creek.  When I went under that 50 degree, almost mountain water, it took my breath away so bad, that at least to a nine year old, it did feel like hell all frozen over.  But shortly after I caught my breath again, I was O.K.   

YOU ARE THE CHRIST…!

But, as I look back now, it wasn’t the first decision that I made for Jesus as a nine year old, or the cold water baptism that has made the biggest difference.  It is been the many decisions I’ve made for Jesus after that.  It has been the life I’ve lived ‘in Christ’, as the apostle Paul named it.   After Paul came to believe in Jesus, he said he came to be ‘crucified with Christ’, saying, I live, but I really don’t live, ‘but Christ lives in me.  And the life I live now, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’  (Gal. 2:20).   Did you hear that: “The life I live now?”  It is the life we live for Jesus that makes our answer about Jesus more than just another opinion.

Since believing Jesus is living Jesus, what happened after Peter’s Great Confession is even more important than Peter’s confession itself.   After Peter named Jesus ‘the Christ’ (Messiah), Jesus began to give a whole different meaning to the word ‘Messiah’.  To most people then, including the disciples, Messiah meant someone who would come to change the world.  But to Jesus, the Messiah could not change the world, but a suffering Messiah could call people to change within themselves.   Peter objected to this whole idea of suffering, holding on to his opinion, so Jesus rebuked him in the strongest terms.

But it is what comes after Jesus’ rebuke of Peter that still challenges us, even after we have acknowledged Jesus as our own ‘personal’ savior.   After silencing Peter, Jesus turned to the crowds to make one of the most overlooked clarifications of what it means to believe in Jesus: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me (Mk. 8:34-35 NIV).  For Jesus, to be our savior, he must be also become our lord in that we must make him ‘personal’ by taking up (our) cross and following him.”  Taking up a ‘cross’ is a scary thought.  Recently, in a TV movie, I watched and listened as a Muslim woman was being criticized by a Christian woman for wearing a Burka:“It makes you look like you’re either a terrorist or you’ve got something to hide,” the Christian remarked.  The Muslim woman responded, “Well, at least I don’t wear a symbol of human torture around my neck like you do.”  (As Heard in the BBC series, The Tunnel, First Season, 2016).

When Jesus said we must ‘take up our cross’, he said ‘OUR cross’, not ‘HIS cross’.   Taking up ‘our cross’ can mean many things, including suffering or making sacrifices for the sake of doing good.  However we answer Jesus’ question: Who do you say that I am”, it must mean that we put our ‘life’ into the confession of faith we have in him.  We can’t save our life by saving it, or by ‘being saved’, but we only save our life by entrusting ourselves to God, losing ourselves for the gospel as we put our lives into it. 

I got a good idea what this meant when on the news, I watched a man drive a car sideways on only two wheels, while a woman was doing a headstand off a chair balanced on the car’s roof.  When the news reporter asked the man how long he could drive a car like that, he answered, “I can drive for about 4 laps around the track, and then the tires wear out.”  It was then that I became much more impressed by the woman on the roof, than the man driving the car on two wheels.   He was only driving a trick car, but she ‘put her life into it’. 

Now, of course, that was a circus trick, but following Jesus is not about playing tricks or playful antics.   When Jesus asked, “Who do you say I Am”, he was not asking for a show, an opinion or even a mere confession of your faith.   Jesus was asking the  kind question that will remain forever ‘close to the heart’.   Your answer, my answer, and even confession or profession of faith, means nothing and is only another opinion, unless we put our lives into it.  Amen.