WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

A sermon preached at S.LUKE’S QUEEN’S PARK BRIGHTON  on 23rd August 2020. Text: Matthew 16.13-20

Jesus asks Who do people say that I am?

Well we know the suggestions  that were offered: John the Baptist? Elijah? Jeremiah?

And we know that Peter got 10 out of 10 for You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.

And you would find out in the next few verses that Peter swiftly had his marks severely downgraded - not by a flawed algorithm but because what he next said showed that he’d got the wrong end of the stick. But that’s another story.

So I’ll ask instead: Who do people today say that Jesus is?

.Because this is obviously something which concerns our risen Lord just as much as it did on that long ago day in the district of Caesarea Philippi.

The least important point is what we think He looked like. Let’s dispose of that first.

Well He wouldn’t be very encouraged by reading back numbers of the Church Times. I remember a past issue where the front cover was given over to a full page colour reproduction of a Victorian oil painting entitled “I will come with you”. It was a very stylised and sentimental depiction of Jesus with the arm round, and hand-in-hand with, a boy of about 13 dressed in a Sea Scout’s uniform.

The Church Times caption was “Holy and Wholesome” which prompted the following letter to the editor a week later: “Sir, it takes a good deal of cultural conditioning to describe this picture as “holy and wholesome”. To a non-Christian with no preconceptions, it looks like a clearly frightened small boy being led off the path by a bearded weirdo dressed in what look like bedclothes.”

This business of guessing what He looked like seems to have become particularly sensitive since Justin Welby queried the validity of our European images of a white-skinned Jesus.

I pointed out a few weeks ago that all nations and cultures instinctively portray Jesus in their own image: black Jesuses, Chinese Jesuses, South American Jesuses. And I suggested that the purest political correctness would demand a world-wide ban on anything other than representations of a swarthy middle-eastern Jew.

But leaving aside this silly debate about His skin colour, the more worrying problem is that so many children and adults in our society these days have only the foggiest idea about who Our Lord is.

·        Some people even think He was only some mythical invention like Adam or Job, despite independent evidence of His actual life and death from unbiased Roman historians.

·        Other people are aware that He did actually exist but think He was just some exceptionally good and praise-worthy human being like Ghandi or Florence Nightingale or Nelson Mandela.

You and I, through the grace of faith, can line up behind Peter the apostle and go for broke. We know who He is. He is the Christ. The Son of the living God.

Quite right too. But it’s not enough. Because we need to know what that means. What the consequences are. Peter certainly didn’t appreciate what being the Christ meant in terms of cost. “Far be it from you, Lord, to suffer and to die”.

And one of the other disciples, Simon the Zealot, probably thought any Messiah worth his salt should be a sort of revolutionary figure in a Che Guevara beret, leading an armed resistance movement against the Roman empire.

Then there are James and John and their stage-struck mother who thought “the leader” was destined to be a pomp-and-circumstance, ermine and baubles-style king who would be dishing out gilded thrones of glory next to His which could be reserved in advance.