"Who do You Say I am?"
A sermon  based on Mat.16:13-20
by Rev. F. Schaefer

To summarize our Scripture reading in a nutshell: the disciples report to Jesus what people are saying about him, and Jesus asks them: "well, who do YOU say I am?" Peter, of course--who else--, is the one to speak up: "you are the son of the living God." Jesus is pleasantly surprised and says: "this time Peter, you're right on, the only way for you know this, though, is because God has revealed it to you." And then Jesus goes on to bless Peter and declares him the gate-keeper of heaven: "what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loosen on earth will be loosed in heaven."

"Who do you say I am?" is still Jesus' question posed to us today, and it is being debated like our life depends on it--and in some respect our life does depend on it. If we take a look at some current portrayals of Jesus we will find Christ as revolutionary, Christ the liberator, Christ the Caucasian, Christ the black African, Christ the socialist, Christ the capitalist, Christ the legalist, Christ the sexist, Sophia Christ, Christ the politically correct, and so on.

And all the while we are revising and retheologizing our Christologies, we don't even realize that what we're really doing is quarreling with God. Most of us have a problem with who Christ really is, with the way Christ chooses to do things. Tom Long recalls a prayer by 6-year old Norma:

Dear God, did you mean for giraffes to look that way, or was that an accident?

Long observes that this prayer already expresses a rudimentary quarrel with God: Norma would not have made giraffes the way God made them--and neither would we. God's thoughts are not our thoughts, and God's ways are not our ways. If it was up to us, Christ would be exactly the way we wanted him to be--if we were black, Christ would be black, if we were business people, Christ would be a business man. We read the Scriptures about Jesus and we cut and paste our own view of him--to suit our life-style and our theological preference. As a reaction to all the different and confusing theologies about Christ, someone came up with the following anecdote:

Imagine the great theologians of this century Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and James Cone found themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi in about 30 A.D. Who should come along but Jesus, and he asked the four the same Christological question, "Who do you say that I, the Son of Man, am?"

Karl Barth stands up and says: You are the totaliter aliter, the vestigious trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christo-monism.

Not prepared for Barth's brevity, Paul Tillich stumbles out: You are he who heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and existential estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities.

Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: You are the impossible possibility who brings to us children of light and children of darkness, the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contiguity and existential anxieties of our ontological relationships.

Finally James Cone gets up, and raises his voice: You are my Oppressed One, my soul's shalom, the One who was, who is, and who shall be, who has never left us alone in the struggle, the event of liberation in the lives of the oppressed struggling for freedom, and whose blackness is both literal and symbolic.

And Jesus writes an Aramaic word in the sand which could be translated into the English with, "Huh?"

In one sense our theologizing of Christ, our different answers to the question "who do you say I am" is understandable: Jesus is Immanuel--God with us. But, we often forget that our way is not necessarily God's way. God-with-us doesn't mean God-according-to-our-view.

Why is Jesus so excited about Peter's answer "you are the Son of the living God"? What other people said about him wasn't that far off either: some said he was Elija, a prophet, John the baptist raised from the dead, all of these designations had spiritual meaning. Yet the difference is, Peter suspended his quarreling with God.

The followers of John the Baptist saw Jesus as his reincarnation, members of the prophetic movement saw him as the prophet, and members of the apocalyptic movement counted Jesus into their camp. Yet, Peter realized that there really was no way to categorize Jesus, control Jesus, or even quarrel with him. And Peter was of the party of the Zealots (who, as the name indicates, were zealous to restore Israel's independence from Rome). So, Jesus probably expected him to answer: you are the new king of Judea. But he didn't. By saying: you are the Son of the living God, Peter chose to give up his quarrels with God and to put his trust in God's way that surpasses all human understanding.

What about us this morning? Who do we say Jesus is? How do we answer when Christ asks: "who do YOU say that I am?" Do we try to make Christ the focus of our agenda? Do we have a cut-and-paste Christ? Do we still quarrel with God?

If this is our Christology, then we won't be prepared for the times of trial and the storms of life. Only if we simply say: "you are the Son of the Living God," will we be able to stop quarreling with God and start trusting Him and see the wisdom and power of Christ's way for us. And only then can we hear Jesus saying to us as he did to Peter: "you are the rock upon which I will build my church." Amen.