Who Do You Say That I Am?

Now Jesus and His disciples went out to the towns of Caesarea Philippi; and on the road He asked His disciples, saying to them, “Who do men say that I am?” So they answered, “John the Baptist; but some say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered and said to Him, “You are the Christ.” Then He strictly warned them that they should tell no one about Him.
Mark 8: 27-30

I don’t know about your situation, but I have never had a job that required me to do much walking over any distance to get to the next worksite. When I started my working life I was hired by Boston University to work on their “Main” campus in Employee Relations. BU’s campus was strung along the banks of the Charles River for several miles in the Back Bay section of Boston. So from time to time, I would have to visit an employee’s worksite or a supervisor’s department, and it might take me all of twenty minutes round trip to get there and back. When I came to Cincinnati as the administrator of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, I found I could also consume a good twenty minutes going to the morgue in the hospital basement and then the Flow Cytometry Lab in the Goodman Lab building and then back to my office in the Medical Science Building.

Over the span of my working life, the organizations I labored in became progressively more complex and were less and less organized as contiguous departments and more and more often participants in geographically dispersed partnerships, joint ventures and collaborations. I spent many a day jumping in and out of my car, negotiating local streets with a cell phone in my ear and work papers in the seat next to me (a very unsafe practice I don’t recommend and deeply regret). I sometimes took the unused moment to reprioritize my day’s activities, integrating the needs and info from the calls my secretary took into the already overstuffed agenda for the day. But I never needed to take a long walk from one point of activity to the next, and I hardly ever traveled with a friend.

However, now, having been blessed by the Lord through my wife’s prodigious efforts to have largely left those fast paced environments, I remember as a young boy being very active in an active Boy Scout troop. My troop, Troop 5, of Plainfield, New Jersey, was not much into boys earning Merit Badges and earning promotions to Star, or Life or Eagle Scout: we were very much into camping in the “wilds” and hiking long distances, preferably steeply uphill, long distances. We camped in the winter snows and dog days of august, canoed in June and July and the rest of the year we hiked. The buses departed from the church parking lot at 4:30 a.m. and we were on the trail by 7:00 am. It was nothing to hike 20 miles in a day, up the biggest hills you can find in the eastern states of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Our scout master and assistant scout masters loved the outdoors, and they enjoyed the camping, canoeing and hiking as much or more than any of us scouts. As a consequence, they never spent much time making sure we walked in a group, or kept together, or kept up the pace. As a twelve year old - once that bus deposited you at the foot of the trail- you had a lot of leeway. And, if you learn to walk 30 miles in a day, you learn discretion. For instance, you quickly learn never to walk with the kid who brings more non-essentials in his pack than he can carry, nor the kid who empties his canteen by 10:00 a.m. You become wary of jokers and pranksters because what might be funny for a moment in a classroom on Monday may be tiresome by the 13th mile on Saturday.

I found a couple of companions among all the other scouts who were quite self-sufficient, very congenial, and walked at a comfortable pace. We would talk about all sorts of things on those hikes. Being young boys, lots of our talk turned on sports. Was Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris the better home run hitter? Was Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale better at throwing strikes? There was the very specific and therefore unending question like, “Could Juan Marichal and Willie Mays beat Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle?” (This was long before inter-league play, so unless their respective teams made it into the World Series, this would always be hypothetical). There were the hopelessly general and open ended questions like, “Did the pitcher, who threw pitches, or the catcher, who signaled what pitch to throw, really control the pitches actually thrown?” “Could one ever actually get to first base faster by sliding than just overrunning the base?” We whiled away the hours in utter happiness-even acknowledging without rancor the rare bird, moth or insect inevitably pointed out by the nerd who had no interest in our sports chatter, nor of where stood the argument he was interrupting, and giving one of the whiners who had emptied his canteen early, a sip.

It is this latter “Scouting” experience that I think carries me into the experience of Jesus and his disciples, setting out from Bethsaida on a more than 20 mile hike for the cities around Caesarea Philippi, which the gospel writer Mark describes in the four compact verses (27-30) of the eighth chapter. This walk upon which Jesus poses the now famous question, “But who do you say that I am?” is a very different affair from the equally epochal event six days later when Jesus awakes Peter, James and John early in the morning and takes them up the mountain where He, transfigured, appears talking with Moses and Elijah. The latter event is “special” from the “get go,” the former, not so much. The former is mundane, informal and very intimate: it is a bunch of guys walking together over a long distance without much specific to accomplish except make the journey. Witty repartee, “one ups-man-ship,” boasting or “braggadiccio,” won’t wear well over the course of a six to seven hour walk together.

The disciples, like young teens, were not much focused on the future, near term or longer. Twice in the gospels the disciples have averred to Jesus that they have given up everything to follow Him. They have no where to go or to “go back to.” They are, at best, expecting to go to Jerusalem for the next Passover, and except for troubling statements Jesus makes about the Son of Man dying, they are expecting this new ministry to perform pretty well on the great stage of Jerusalem at Passover against the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, magicians, cultists from the Diaspora and the rebellious sicarri. It is in this of necessity affable, time-killing conversational milieu that Jesus, almost casually, interjects his first question, “Who do men say that I am?” And the answer his disciples make is in a very similar vein, casual and detached. “Well, you know, Jesus… just sort of what you would expect, John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets…whatever.”

Now the disciples have actually said quite a mouthful: this is big. The disciples have just allowed that the everyday “Joe” of first century Palestine is willing to believe that some major figure of their national faith is back from the dead and walking around in the person of Jesus. What people don’t have to put themselves out to believe, what they don’t have to work hard at to conclude, what leaves them undisturbed to keep on doing just what they were doing before this guy came along is to take it as true that one of the colossal figures of their history is up out of the grave and parading around as the son of an old local village carpenter and his young wife. In other and more modern words, “Hey Jesus, what they are really saying is ‘No biggie, but get a load of this! Whew, those Romans better watch their step; one of these days they’re gonna go too far and old Yahweh is gonna let that Jesus due to a regiment of Pilates palace guards what Elijah did to the prophets of Baal. Could get interesting!’ ”

But Jesus doesn’t pursue this patently incoherent response to his ministry. He is not a Semitic Socrates. The contradictions of the mass of humanity are not his concern, nor what he wants to focus the disciples’ attention upon. Instead, Jesus, casually asks a second question, “Well, then guys, who do you say that I am?” I just know the pace of the walk just slowed way down. The hikers are bunching up. People’s gazes are being drawn to Jesus’ face. It feels like things are getting a little serious a long way from the destination. The rampant question among the disciples is really, “How did we get here all of a sudden?” But Jesus’ question burns right through, “Well guys, who do you say that I am?”

Of course, it’s Peter that answers. He can’t stand the stoppage, the pause, the silence. “Don’t you guys get it?” he is saying to himself. “Can’t you see?” This is the real deal; this isn’t Elijah with a triple portion, this isn’t some guy telling us to build a wall with one hand and wield a sword with the other or to divorce our goyisha wives. This is GOD, or at least his ANOINTED ONE! We win, guys! Better than Gamaliel, we chose God to follow! Common admit it: this is GREAT!” It helps if you have seen Disney’s animated film, Aladdin, and can hear the voice of Robin Williams, who impersonated the Genie, saying these words, or Danny Divito from Disney’s Hercules.

Mark records Peter’s answer as, “You are the Christ.” The term “the Christ” is a translation of the Greek for “the anointed.” Jesus admonishes Peter not tell anyone about Him. The recognition, after all is said and done, that Jesus is the anointed one can not be given one by an insider, it must, after all, come out of one’s own experience of seeing and hearing. One has to encounter Christ, the anointed one, and answer to Him His question, “But who do you say that I am?” And we do encounter Christ, you know. He has already told us that the answer to the question about when did we see Him and when did we react to Him in the way that is held up at judgment is when we saw and reacted to plights of these the least of our brethren.

I do not think that the least of our brethren is a code word for “the worthy poor,” or “the deserving poor.” I do not think that Jesus said that we saw Him and reacted to Him in a way that determines whether we are judged into everlasting life or everlasting hell when we saw and reacted to the plight of good, well meaning people who suffered misfortune; after all one of Jesus’ greatest acts of compassion is reserved for a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. Jesus walks with us as we journey, often quite unconsciously of what we are really doing, to the cities around Caesarea Philippi, and along the way, in the intimacy of us doing our daily activities, He asks, “But who do you say that I am?”

As we listen to the endless mendacity of humans on the televised news each evening and in mounting anger exclaim our hope for the harshest punishment of the malefactors, Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?” As we listen to the gossip of our neighbors’ or co workers’ venal foolishness and conclude in our hearts as we hear what calamity befell them as a consequence that they got what they deserved, Jesus ask us, “But who do you say that I am?” As we book our vacations and plan our time for recreation and family where we can get away from it all, Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?” As we extend the work day to get one more thing done for the boss, as we root for the loss of the other side at our sons’ or daughters’ scholastic competition, as our elected officials inform us they’ve changed the government’s spending and it has this or that impact, Jesus asks the next question, “But who do you say that I am?”