"Who do you say I am?" :: 2

This is the second part of a talking I'm giving over this next weekend. The passage is Mark 8:27-30. You can find the first part by clicking *here*.

"When we meet Jesus in this passage he is trying to ascertain from his closest followers who they think he is. He has asked them “who do people say I am?” He’s met with a bit of a mixed response. His followers tell him that he has been compared to many great men from Israel’s past. This is surely a great thing to be identified as? Imagine sitting down with a few of your mates after a game of football and asking them what people think of you and they reply to say that you’re being compared to Rooney, or Shearer or Bobby Charlton! That’d be awesome… Maybe that doesn’t resonate with some of you! But we all know how good it feels to be considered among the greats who have gone before us. Strangely though Jesus doesn’t seem to be satisfied with being compared to some of Israel’s men of history; he doesn’t say; “oh great, I’m getting some good press, excellent!” No, he addresses his disciples and says “who do you say I am?” Jesus wants a personal response from his disciples.

At this point Peter, one of Jesus’ closest followers, pipes up with his answer. “You are the Christ”. We tend to miss the implications of this. We hear the name Jesus Christ banded around all over the place as if Christ was Jesus’ surname, but the meaning of this statement is huge. Peter’s phrase “the Christ” means “Messiah”, “the anointed one”, “King”. We’re so used to people being described as “Messiah”; so-and-so being described as the “messiah” for such-and-such a sports team, or political party, or country, or people group. The word has somewhat lost it’s meaning; the idea of an entire people group, the people of Israel, waiting, waiting for thousands of years, for a promised, a foretold, a pre-described “anointed one”. Peter’s statement carries huge political, social, economic, cultural and religious baggage. Ultimately Peter’s belief that Jesus was “the Christ” would mean death for Peter himself.

Everyone in Israel knew about the Messiah, everyone belonged to some sort of group of thought that ascribed to and emphasised certain aspects and characteristics of the promised Messiah. This is why Jesus often told people not to spread the word that he was the Messiah – as we see in verse 30 – it came with too many false assumptions. The idea of the “Messiah” had become a false identity in itself. Jesus wants to define the term, in its original meaning, and to demonstrate it in his own life. Jesus knows that understanding his identity as the Messiah and responding appropriately to that has massive life implications – so he wants to make sure that we understand him properly.

But we’re not first century fishermen, we’re not even Jewish, so who cares?! Well, Peter’s recognition of Jesus identity as God’s chosen one has massive implications. What Peter has shown us, Mark is telling us and Jesus wants us to respond to, is the fact that he is God in human form, that he is the almighty, creator God, the one who made us, all of us, who knows us intimately and who loves us. This is God in space-time-human history. And if this is God in space-time-human history and he is God then, then, by implication, he is God now and we have to make a response to him, a decision about him.

C.S Lewis was a Christian academic at Oxford University, he is the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, and he said this about Jesus:

“You must make up 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 at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

The people at the time acknowledged Jesus as being a “good man”. Jesus was compared with some of the greatest and finest men of Israel’s history, but he wasn’t interested in those comparisons. He doesn’t want us to respond to him as some sort of “good man”, a “moral example”, a man with “good principles” or “nice teacher”. Jesus wants us to respond to him as God. Now either that is incredibly arrogant and untrue, and consequently Jesus is a bad and evil man, or it’s true."

God Bless.

Dear Freedom

"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