mission & ministry | practical theology | priesthood

Trinity 14 Mark 8:27-end

Who am I?

This is one of the foundational questions of all humanity. It has been asked in all ages and is asked across all cultural divides. It is a question that has had many answers, perhaps as many as there are human beings. Although many individuals often have many differing answers throughout their lifetime.

The question gets to the heart of what it means to be a human and the way we answer it shows a lot about what we value. We are many things and we are often judged on the things that are easily seen; our work, or non-work, what we wear and look like, where we live, the way we speak… People can answer the ‘who are we’ question by looking at these things, but these things can and often change.

If I want to find some stability to the way I answer this big question, ‘Who am I?’, then I need to go much deeper to find the things that don’t change about me.

I can’t change that I am a son, first born of John and Sue Stacey, and as it happens, born white, British and working class. I’m also a brother, three times over. Even though I became a husband in 1996 and that became who I mostly am, I can’t forget that I am a son. But I am mostly a husband and this is something I can’t change either. I am also, of course, a father to my three children. With these ones at the core, I have many relationships that I can’t change and it is these things that are stable in my life, whatever life may bring. It is these relationships that enable me to answer the ‘Who am I?’ questions with some clarity, fear and hope.

When Jesus asks the disciples “Who do people say that I am?” he is wondering whether people have been able to see beyond the miracles and compassion and gentleness and wisdom, to who he is in relationship. The answer that comes back to Jesus is that the crowd has not yet seen who he is. So then he asks the disciples plainly: “But who do you say I am?” When Peter said “You are the Messiah.” he probably wasn’t expecting the kind of answer he got, nor the rebuke he was to get for objecting to it. But Peter did see Jesus for who he really was and is. Beyond the things he did, where he travelled, the way he spoke, the job he did [by which I mean his teaching and healing], Peter saw that this person was related to the Divine.

You are the Messiah, or you are the Christ… you are the one sent by God, anointed by the Creator, filled with the Holy Spirit. You have a relationship with the Lord like no other human we have known! Notice that at this stage they have not made the giant leap to Son of the Father, even though Jesus refers to his Father as Father many times. What they have noticed, or what Peter has noticed is that there is more to this man who is the Son of Mary and Joseph, although there is rumoured that there was some tricky business about that. There is more to this early retired carpenter from Nazareth and Peter puts his finger on it by saying he is related to the Divine, the Lord.

Peter’s answer did not bring this about, it was always there; and our answer to the same question will not alter it one bit either. Jesus, as they were later to realise and we now declare, is the only begotten Son of the Father. Our answers to the same question that Peter answered won’t change that, but they do change us.

How we answer the same question that Jesus put to his first disciples; “But who do you say I am? Doesn’t matter what others think, what do you say?”; how we answer it has a massive effect on us. If we can perceive, can really see, albeit imprecisely and vaguely, that Jesus is related to the Divine in such a way that he is not just sent by but sent from, as one with the Divine, then…

then following, becoming a disciple, is probably more than we ever thought it was.