"Who do you say I am?" :: 1

This is the first part of a talking I'm giving over this next weekend. The passage is Mark 8:27-30.

"On Wednesday the 22nd of August of this year a young man set off from his home in Liverpool with a set purpose in mind. At the same time a young boy set off with a friend and a football with no purpose in mind, only to have some fun kicking a ball around. The lives of this young man and this young boy were set to become inextricably linked to one another. The young man was setting out to end the life of another man. The young boy, Rhys Jones, was to become the victim of mistaken identity. Most of us know how this story ends. Rhys Jones, an 11 year old boy, just a week or so away from starting senior school was killed after he was mistaken for someone he wasn’t. Sadly Rhys Jones identity had become, for him, a life or death issue.

Our identity is hugely important to us, to all of us. It’s the essence of who we are; it affects our lives and shapes our thinking. It’s not just how we view ourselves though that we consider to be important. We want others to think well of us too. The way that others view us makes up our self esteem. We want popularity and if not popularity then at least respectability. When people see us, think of us and talk about us there are things that we do, and don’t, want them to associate us with. None of us want to be mistaken for something that we aren’t; none of us want an identity other than the one that we try to create for ourselves. Most of the time when our identity is mistaken we don’t suffer like Rhys Jones did, but we are almost always offended nonetheless.

This is what we see in the short passage that we read from the book of Mark. Mark is a series of eye witness accounts all related to the life and teaching of Jesus. The whole book is written to ensure that we come to the right conclusions about who Jesus is, what he said and what he did. Mark has told us, right from the outset, that he wants us to understand what an extraordinary man Jesus was and that the things that he said and did have huge significance for all of us. When we know the big picture of what the author is trying to convey to us it makes it all the easier to understand what it is that their getting at in each section. So, lets just examine, briefly, what it is that Mark, and indeed Jesus, want us to understand and realise about Jesus identity.

Jesus identity is obviously hugely important to him. Jesus was fully aware of the fact that the way people saw him influenced the way that they responded to him and Jesus, like us, wants people to respond to him in a particular way. He wants people to recognise him for who he is. We can see through the book of Mark so far that different people have recognised different parts of Jesus’ character and identity – the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the time, have recognised Jesus as a rather controversial teacher, the people, the joe-public of the day, have recognised Jesus as some healing “guru” who you can go to for a quick, free and easy physical fix, but Jesus has made it clear to his followers, we see in chapter 1 verse 38, that he has come to teach."

God Bless.

Dear Freedom