Who Do You Say That I Am?
When Jesus and his disciples were near the town of Caesarea Philippi, he asked them, “What do people say about the Son of Man?” The disciples answered, “Some people say you are John the Baptist or maybe Elijah or Jeremiah or some other prophet.” Then Jesus asked them, “But who do you say I am?” Simon Peter spoke up, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus told him: Simon, son of Jonah, you are blessed! You didn’t discover this on your own. It was shown to you by my Father in heaven. So I will call you Peter, which means “a rock.” On this rock I will build my church, and death itself will not have any power over it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and God in heaven will allow whatever you allow on earth. But he will not allow anything that you don’t allow. Jesus told his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.
Matthew 16:13-20 Contemporary English Version
I remember a great retelling of this story as told by Joe Garlington back in the early 1980s. Here’s how it goes:
Peter replied, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kerygma of which we find the ultimate meaning in our interpersonal relationships.” And Jesus said, “What?”
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There’s a more sophisticated version, probably only appreciated by theologians…
Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and James Cone find themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Who should come along but Jesus, and he asks the four famous theologians the same Christological question, Who do you say that I 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 analogia entis, 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, your 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 says, “What the!?!”
