Ep 101 - The Question Before the Answer

Father Isaac explores what it really means to call Jesus “Christ” — reminding us that Christ is not Jesus' surname, but a title meaning “anointed one” or Messiah. More importantly, he asks whether we have sometimes rushed to Jesus as the answer without first asking the deeper questions that lie within our own lives.

What are we looking for salvation from? What are we longing for? What does our world need to be saved from, and what do we need to be saved from ourselves?

Peter's journey to recognising Jesus as the Messiah was shaped by years of waiting, questioning and searching. We too are invited to do that soul work — to bring our deepest questions to Jesus and discover how his life, words and actions speak into them.

And there is a beautiful final movement in the Gospel: when Peter recognises who Jesus is, Jesus tells Peter who he is. In recognising Christ, Peter discovers his own identity and mission.

This Sunday, Father Isaac invites us to ask not only “Who is Jesus?”, but also “Who is Jesus for me?” — and to allow that answer to reveal who we are called to become.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello and welcome to Episode 101, A Brother from Another Father, as we celebrate the 21st Sunday in ordinary time. In today's Gospel, we see Peter confessing Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Often, we as Christians treat the title Christ as if it was Jesus' surname. In fact, Christ was not Jesus' surname. It is a Greek word that translates the Hebrew word Messiah, a title meaning anointed one. I would presume that most of you would know this. But perhaps what you might not know is that in the Synoptic Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus never once identifies himself as the Messiah. It is always on the lips of other people, usually as a question which Jesus never directly answers, or as in our Gospels today, as an affirmation, a title that Peter gives to Jesus. But it is never a title that Jesus claims for himself. There are many reasons for what has been called this messianic secrecy, this reticence on the part of Jesus to claim his messianic identity. I don't propose to go into them today. I only propose in this homily to touch briefly on Jesus' own approach to his identity in the hope that it might be spiritually helpful for us. There are two titles that Jesus does claim for himself. The first is that of prophet, as for example when he says that a prophet is never welcome in his own hometown. The second title is that of the Son of Man, which we hear in today's gospel, a title that is very cryptic and that has generated much controversy in biblical scholarship. In fact, of all the titles that are applied to Jesus, this title of Son of Man is the one about which the most ink has been spilt. And in many ways there is little consensus about what exactly Jesus meant by choosing it. But again, I don't want us to get lost in that quagmire. I will simply dwell on one possible meaning of the expression Son of Man that I find very alluring and has been spiritually helpful for me. The most well-known reference of the title Son of Man comes from the book of Daniel, where it refers to a heavenly figure that appears in one of Daniel's apocalyptic visions. This is not the meaning that we will dwell on today. There is another meaning, a somewhat lesser-known meaning, but far more commonplace at the time of Jesus. The expression Son of Man was an idiomatic expression that simply meant I. It was a way of facilitating the Jewish requirement for modesty by providing a roundabout way of referring to oneself. Anyone who has any knowledge of Middle Eastern cultures will know that they are cultures that thrive on ambiguity, on wordplays, and they abore brashness. And so Son of Man was therefore a way of humbly referring to oneself, especially when making important statements about one's own actions or identity. Some scholars go even a step further to say that on Jesus' lips this expression had the effect of showing Jesus' intense identification with simply being a human person. And so they translate this expression from the Greek to mean the human one. Whichever option we take, we can deduce from this expression a certain reticence on Jesus' part to impose his identity on other people. Jesus knew his special mission that he had received from his father and the identity that this mission conferred on him. However, he realized that instead of announcing it to people explicitly, it would be far better for people to come to their own conclusions about who he really was. The title that he chose for themself was chosen specifically to give enough space to his disciples and his listeners to make up their own minds about him and what he represented for them. Jesus wants us to do the soul work of letting him into our lives and then deciding for ourselves who he is for us. He won't give us any easy answers here. When he chooses this title, Son of Man, it is deliberately ambiguous. It deliberately does not give us any real clues about his ultimate identity. It is a humble way of Jesus allowing us into the question of who he is and allowing us to make up our own minds about what he has come to do for us. Amongst all the interpretations of who Jesus was floating out there, the prophet Elijah, John the Baptist, Jeremiah, a prophet, each person who met Jesus had to decide who he was. Jesus' identity posed itself as a question to most of his contemporaries, including his disciples. The answer that Peter gives when he identifies Jesus as the Christ is not simply that something that comes to him on the spur of the moment in a flash of inspiration. Rather, it is the fruit of years of waiting for the Messiah. It is the fruit of months of reflection during his time spent with Jesus as to whether Jesus could be the answer to all his waiting, seeking, and searching? Peter, like many other Jews, was waiting for salvation, waiting eagerly for God's definitive intervention into the history of Israel. When Jesus comes along, a prophet powerful in word and deed, the question obviously poses itself to all who meet Jesus. Could this be finally the person that Israel has been waiting for for centuries? God's messenger, sent to finally deliver God's definitive salvation to Israel. So when Jesus answers Peter to tell him that it is not flesh and blood that has revealed this to him, but rather his Father in heaven, Jesus is telling Peter that the Holy Spirit has been assisting him in this search and finally in recognizing Jesus as the one sent by God, the Messiah, God's anointed one. He has been helped by the Holy Spirit to realize that God's salvation has arrived in Israel. Unlike the crowds of people who have been merely listening to gossip and idle speculation about Jesus' identity, people speculating that he could be John the Baptist or the prophet Elijah or Jeremiah returned from the dead, Peter has done the soul work necessary to allow the Holy Spirit to reveal to him Jesus' true identity as the nexus between God's promises and Israel's expectation of salvation. From this analysis, it should be clear how if we simply treat Christ as Jesus' surname, we have made an end run around a crucial stage of questioning in our faith. We need to understand that if we simply treat Christ as Jesus' surname, we have skipped over all the processes that led the disciples to finally confessing Jesus as the answer to all their questions, as the answer to all their waiting. In some ways, we are going in the reverse direction of the disciples. What we have done is to populate the notion of the Messiah with everything that Jesus did and said. If we do understand that Christ is not Jesus' surname, we need to realize that for us as Christians, when someone asks us, who is the Messiah and what does he do? we simply point to Jesus and we say, Well, the Messiah is the Savior who died on the cross to take away our sins. What we have done is to populate the notion of the Messiah with everything that Jesus said and did. And so we've gone in the reverse direction of Peter. In Peter's case, before he ever met Jesus, he had an idea of who the Messiah should be. In other words, he knew what kind of salvation he was looking for from God. And he was filled with questions about the meaning of life, and with hopes and expectations for himself, for his family, and for the nation of Israel. As Peter came to know Jesus, he came to realize that he was the answer to all his longing and questing, to the longing and questing that had inhabited the nation of Israel for the past four centuries. In our case, we first knew Jesus, and then we were told that he is the Christ. In other words, we have not even had the time to formulate our own questions before we are being told that Jesus is the answer. There was once a piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall somewhere, which said, Jesus is the answer. And then someone much later had scrawled in red below this, but what is the question? And I think this is essential. Before we come to Jesus as the answer, we need to know, well, what is our question? Sometimes Jesus Christ is presented to us as simply two answers. Jesus is the first answer and Christ is the second. We need to realize that Christ is not actually an answer. It should be, first of all, a question for us, to which Jesus is the answer. And so we need to go back to our own questions. What is it that we are looking for salvation from? What does our world need to be saved from? What do I need to be saved from? Where do we have the most questions about the meaning of life? And once we formulated these questions to ask ourselves, we then can come to Jesus' life, his actions, his words, and find therein the answers to our questions. So when Jesus comes to us and asks, Who do you say that I am? we can tell him that you are the answer to my questions, you are the salvation to my problems, and use whatever language or name we choose to give Jesus. Because what today's gospel also tells us is that when we are able to tell Jesus who he is for us, Jesus will then tell us who we are for him, and that is the most important identity that we can have. When Simon tells Jesus that he is the Christ, Jesus tells Simon who he is and gives him a new name. You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. This then becomes his identity, and from that day forward, instead of being known simply as Simon, he becomes known as Simon Peter, and then eventually just as Peter. The mission that Jesus gives us confers on us an identity, an identity that will shape the rest of our lives. Let us ask this Sunday for the grace to be able to tell Jesus who he is for us, so that we might let him tell us who we are for him. God bless and have a good Sunday.