Jesus asked Peter two questions: (1) who do others say he is, but also, (2) who it was Peter believed him to be. These questions are not just for Peter. They are for us. Ever since the beginning of his ministry, Jesus’ followers have wrestled with this question: who do we believe him to be? This has been an important, if not the central question, of the Christian faith. To answer it, Christians developed an elaborate Christology, with the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451 giving what has been seen by most as the normative response:
Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all teach that with one accord we confess one and the same, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in human nature, truly God and the same with a rational soul and a body truly man, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity, and consubstantial with us according to human nature, like unto us in all things except sin…[1]
Although Chalcedon provides us an important description of Jesus, it does not provide an all-embracing answer of who he is. This can be easily seen by the fact that so quickly afterwards, Christians continued their debate about Jesus, showing it didn’t end the questioning. Indeed, they continued to contend harshly against one another as they tried to clarify the council’s definition. It is a sad fact of history that Christians, who should love one another, have often hated each other and have treated each other with the greatest of cruelty, all because they cannot come to an agreement in how we should describe the person of Christ.
If Jesus’ life provides to his followers an example of what it means to love, and if his followers are meant to imitate his love in their life, it can be asked, why do Christians continue to fight amongst themselves trying to determine who it is that they worship? Why do they focus on divisive questions that bring out such an emotional response? Why does the question, “Who is Jesus Christ” continue to be asked? What reason do Christians have for trying to find an answer to this question? What value do they see in this question that they would risk such bitter hatred amongst themselves?
As Christians, we believe that the answer to this question enriches our faith and our life. It aids our relationship with Jesus. But it is more than that. We want to share our faith with others. Having an answer to this question, we will have an idea of what he can be for others. If we find ourselves in dialogue with people who are interested in our faith, people who ask us why we are Christians, we would like to have an answer for them.
We believe Jesus is more than a mere hero. He is more than just a good, charismatic leader. He is the God-man, the revelation of God. We believe Jesus lived life perfectly as man and for this reason he demonstrates the potential that exists in our human condition. He invites us to follow him, to follow his example. This is the point of creedal confessions when they state that Jesus was fully human. They show that we believe that his life is a human life, that, accordingly, he did not live a life differently from us, but rather, he is one of us, and what he asks us to do is possible through him. Even though we find our lives to be different from his, nonetheless, there is something so normative in him that, beyond the different circumstances life might bring, when we look at Jesus, we find the meaning of life itself can be discerned.
But he is more than merely the best of all humanity; as was said above, we believe Jesus to be God. Or, as the Apostle John put it, he is the Word or Logos of God who became flesh. He “lived among us and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth (John 1.14b).” Thus, Jesus is more than just a prophet, more than just the expected messiah of the Jews, more than just a man who represents the perfection of humanity, but rather, Jesus is the embodiment of the Word or Revelation of God. As the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum states, in Jesus “… the entire revelation of the most high God is summed…”[2] In Jesus we find what God wants us to know, for Jesus opens to us the hidden depths of God. “He is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15a),” that is, in Jesus, we are given a visible glimpse of the hidden God. Or we can say that Jesus is the mystical symbol (image) who points to the incomprehensible (invisible) God, allowing us to touch upon and grasp, through pious meditation and theological exploration, the mystery of the transcendent God. “It pleased God, in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself and to make known the mystery of his will (see Eph 1:9), which was that people can draw near to the Father, through Christ, the Word made flesh, in the holy Spirit, and thus become sharers in the divine nature.”[3] God desired to reveal himself to humanity, and in Jesus we have a summation of that revelation.
We can say that it is not merely hero worship that draws us Christians to explore the identity of Jesus Christ. It is rather our desire to understand ourselves and to understand God that draws us to him, and to learn more about him. We should be forewarned that our search should not be seen merely as an academic exercise. Rather, the purpose is to enrich our own experience of life and our own experience of God. If we neglect the reason for why we would undertake such a search, and so if we make the search an end in itself, we have not really understood the revelation that we are exploring. If we are looking at what it means to be human, for example, and have come up with some conclusions through our examination of Jesus, should we not act upon them? It is sometimes too easy to sit back, contemplate on the mystery of who Jesus, but then to do nothing about it. The question would then be: what have we gained by our study? We must always allow Jesus to take us in to himself, to change us, to dismantle us from within so that we can become one of his. Without such change, we would be but voyeurs, and Christ didn’t merely to be watched, but to be engaged. Our search for Christ, our search for understanding who Christ is, leads not to mere rationalistic declarations of Christ, but to faith, fidelity, where we put ourselves in obedience to him, an obedience which can only be the obedience of love.
Footnotes
[1] Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, Trans. Roy J. Deferrari (London: B. Herder Book Co., 1954), Citation 148.
[2] Dei Verbum, in The Basic Sixteen Documents of Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations. Revised Translation. Ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport, New York: Costello Publishing Company, 1996), Chapter II. 7, p. 101.
[3] Dei Verbum, Chapter I.2, p.97-98.
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