MATTHEW 16:13–17
Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them “But who do you say that I am?” Simon replied “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him “Blessed art thou Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven.”
When a great personality appears on the stage of history, the opinions about him held by his contemporaries are often diverse. It is certainly true that the views held about Jesus of Nazareth by the men and women of his generation differed widely. All of them, rabbis and rulers, priests and peasants, were agreed that here was an astonishing person; but only a very few could say with truth as well as conviction who and what manner of man he really was. Some, to be sure, imagined that they had found the clue to the understanding of him; but for the most part their attempted explanations were at best inadequate and at worst little more than the products of ignorance and prejudice.
Verdict Of Contemporaries
Those who disliked him most, the scribes and the Pharisees, forced as they were by the evidence to recognize his supernatural power, concluded that he was a dangerous sorcerer in league with the prince of devils, regardless of the lack of logic such a verdict involved; for how could Satan cast out Satan? On the other hand, the ordinary folk among whom his early life had been spent, baffled by the mystery of his person and behavior, dismissed him as abnormal and eccentric. “He is beside himself,” they said. Moreover those of a more jealous nature could not forget that he belonged to their own level of society. “This is the carpenter’s son,” they complained, “whose father and mother we know”; and the implication was that he was obsessed by an exaggerated idea of his own importance. Whatever the views men came to hold about him, one thing was certain; here was a man who made others conscious of the impact of his personality and compelled them to attempt some answer to the question “Who do you say that I am?”
Jesus was no doubt aware of much that was being said about him; but one day when he was alone with his disciples in the district of Caesarea Philippi, when they were free from the danger of interference from the partisans of Herod the tetrarch of Galilee, at a time in his ministry when he was anxious (if they were at all ready to receive it) to tell them about the necessity for his own submission in the near future to a criminal’s death, he felt constrained to question them about what men were saying of him. What in fact was the gossip they had heard about him in the synagogues, the bazaars and the country towns of Galilee? And in reply they gave him three specimen answers, typical no doubt of the more thoughtful and less superficial views that were current. “Some are saying,” they answered, “that you are John the Baptist risen from the dead; others that you are a second Elijah; and others that you are another Jeremiah.” All three suggestions had two things at least in common. They all identified Jesus with a figure of the past instead of acknowledging him as unique, someone whose like had never been seen in this world. And they contained dangerous and misleading half-truths; for, though Jesus possessed some of the characteristics of each of these three great men, he transcended them all.
Greater Than The Baptist
But, we naturally ask, why should some of his contemporaries ever have imagined that Jesus was the martyred John the Baptist returned to life? We cannot be sure of the answer. We only know that John made a very deep impression upon his fellow countrymen when he first appeared in the desert of Judea. People flocked to hear him, and all sorts of people responded when he called upon them to repent and return to the Lord their God, in view of the impending judgment. Soldiers, tax collectors and many others came to him for practical advice as to how they ought to conduct their lives in this critical time of waiting. John, moreover, in true prophetic tradition, had boldly rebuked vice even when he found it in royal circles and rebuked it with such effect that Herod, who had somewhat reluctantly given the order for his execution, never forgot the impression that this martyred prophet had made upon him. When subsequently news reached him of what Jesus was doing, he was ready enough to believe the rumor that Jesus was John, the troubler of his conscience and the disturber of his dreams, restored to life. “This is John the Baptist,” he said to his servants, “he has been raised from the dead; this is why these powers are at work in him.”
There was, it is true, some likeness between John and Jesus. Both were children of the divine wisdom. Both had vital parts to play in the working out of God’s plan for man’s salvation. But the difference was far greater. Many, who knew both men better than Herod did, had been quick to observe this difference both in their behavior and in the way they exercised their ministry. John, they noticed, lived an ascetic life typical of the holy man of the east; Jesus came, as they put it, “eating and drinking.” John moreover ministered away from the haunts of sinners, Jesus was known as “the friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Jesus to be sure repeated, with equal emphasis, John’s call to repentance, but he also did what John could never do. John could prepare men to receive the reign of God in their hearts, but he could not enable them to receive it. He stood on the threshold of the kingdom of God: Jesus was the door alone through whom men could enter the kingdom. The truth was that sinful men and women had need of a Saviour, himself human and divine, who could make atonement for their sin, as no ordinary man however pious could ever make it and restore them to fellowship with the all-holy God—and that Saviour John could never be. Some said “John the Baptist”—but they were wrong.
Greater Than Elijah
But others were saying, “Jesus is another Elijah.” It is perhaps less difficult to understand how this identification should ever have arisen; for Elijah had come to occupy a unique position in Jewish thought. As the earliest of the great prophets of Israel, his name had become representative of the entire prophetic revelation, just as Moses represented the entire revelation embodied in the sacred law. The blows that Elijah had struck for true religion at a most critical period in Israel’s history were both mighty and decisive. He had been indeed “the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof” glorified in his mighty deeds; and according to biblical tradition he was translated to heaven without experiencing death. So wonderful did the achievements of Elijah seem to subsequent generations that he was regarded as more than human; so much so that James (as we read in the Epistle in the New Testament which bears his name) when he wished to hold up Elijah as a supreme example of what a man of prayer can effect, had to remind his readers that Elijah was in fact no demigod or superman, whose example they could not be expected to follow but a man of like nature with themselves.
There are real parallels between Elijah and Jesus. Both were men of prayer; both performed supernatural works of healing; and both waged triumphant war against false religion. But the victories of Elijah were won by physical force, while the victory of Jesus was won not by shedding the blood of others but by allowing his own blood to be shed. One day his impetuous disciples requested him to command fire to come down from heaven, as Elijah did, and consume the inhabitants of a Samaritan village that had refused him entrance. But the answer of the Master came swift and sure: “Ye know not of what spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives but to save them.”
Elijah, moreover, wavered in his vocation, but Jesus set himself consistently and steadfastly to accomplish the work he had come into the world to do. Single-handed, Elijah defied 850 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel; but a little later we find him cowering in a cave at Mount Horeb, crushed by a sense of futility and failure, a victim of an almost suicidal self-pity, wincing at the thought of his own spiritual isolation and requesting, even though his work was unfinished, that he might die. Jesus, on the other hand, learned not self-pity but obedience through the things he suffered. He was faithful to him who had appointed him, faithful even unto death. He endured to the end, despising the shame. Some said “Elijah”—but they too were wrong.
Greater Than Jeremiah
But others were saying, “Jesus is another Jeremiah.” This estimate was perhaps nearer the truth than the other two. For of all the historical characters of the Old Testament Jeremiah approximates most closely to Jesus himself as an outstanding example of patient endurance of undeserved suffering. He was known to subsequent generations of Jews as “the prophet”; and they looked back to him for inspiration and courage in their own trials and persecutions. This hypersensitive, warm-hearted patriot, commissioned by God to proclaim a succession of divine messages to his countrymen that were unpopular because they were of necessity pessimistic, who was so sympathetic with others in their sufferings, was himself beaten, put in the stocks, imprisoned in a dungeon and thrown into a cistern by the very men he gladly would have saved, had that been possible, from the doom that awaited them. Surely this weeping prophet, whose eyes ran down with tears day and night for the sins of his people, was indeed akin to the divine Man of Sorrows, who, on a spring morning over five hundred years later, wept over the faithless city of the children of his people, the city outside whose walls within a week he himself was destined to be crucified.
But for all the nobility of his character, Jeremiah remained a prophet and no more. He foretold the new covenant, by which men with their sins forgiven would be given a direct knowledge of God, but neither he nor any prophet like him could ever bring it into being. For all his sympathy and patience he was not good enough, as Jesus was good enough, to pay the price of sin, by allowing his own blood to be shed in the only perfect sacrifice by which the way was opened for sinners to draw nigh boldly unto the throne of grace.
Some said “Jeremiah”—but they too were wrong.
Verdict Of Disciples
What then did Jesus’ own disciples think about him? The answer they would give was of vital importance. For if their estimate of their master had not risen to a higher level than the answers of their contemporaries, he could never have gone on to teach them the most vital truth that they had to learn. Men may do many things for other men. They may die for other men as so many in our own lifetime have done. But no man may deliver his brother from the penalty of human sin or make atonement to God for him: that was precisely what Jesus had come to do. And it was the fact that he was divine as well as human that alone could give infinite value to all that he was to suffer as man on behalf of men. Simon Peter’s answer to the great question, however, did not disappoint him who had asked it. However slow and even unwilling Peter was to prove in accepting the further truth that Jesus was now to unfold to them about the necessity for his death, his confession at least showed that he understood one thing very clearly. The age of prophecy was over because the hour of fulfillment had come. Peter knew there was no need for another John the Baptist, another Elijah or another Jeremiah, because he to whom all these prophets had been pointing was standing there before him. He knew that Jesus was not just another in the long line of prophets to whom the living God had spoken in many and various ways in the past but the Son of the living God who knew, as only such a Son could know, the mind and purposes of his father. And because his Master was the Son of the living God Peter knew that he need not—nay he could not—look elsewhere for salvation. “Lord to whom shall we go?” he said to him on another occasion when some were turning away from him; “Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
Christ The Son
This great confession of Simon Peter (as the last part of our text reminds us) was no wild leap in the dark: he did not make it on the spur of the moment as if “stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.” Nor was he voicing at second-hand an opinion learned from some other human being. Flesh and blood, as Jesus told him, had not revealed it unto him. On the contrary, ever since that day when he first stood before Jesus and felt compelled to say, “Depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” and yet in spite of that reluctance had found himself irresistibly led to respond to Jesus’ call and leave his nets and follow him—during all the time that he had witnessed his master’s mighty works and listened to the words of eternal life that fell daily from his lips, the living God, the God who acts and intervenes in the affairs of men, had been leading him to see that Jesus was indeed his Son—his Christ or anointed one, anointed to bring the Gospel of salvation to sinners. In consequence, there was only one answer that Peter could make. It was: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus pronounced him blessed, just because his heavenly Father and no one else had made this confession possible. “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”
And the way by which Peter was led to make this confession is always the way by which men are led to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God. No man is even led to this faith solely as the result of human reasoning or solely through the example of others or solely through hearing the Gospel preached. All or any of these things may play, and do play, a vital part in the process by which men are brought to Christ. But unless the Spirit of the living God is at work in the human heart, the deductions of reason, however convincing, will not lead to a life of active discipleship; the example of others, however inspiring, will have but a temporary influence; and the message of the Gospel, however faithfully proclaimed, will fall on soil where it takes no permanent root. Only the Holy Spirit can take of the things of Jesus and so reveal them to us that we are led to make with Peter the great confession: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
So may I put to you the question that Jesus put to Simon Peter: “Who do you say that I am?” It may be that you have tried to answer it in the past, but that your answer has not risen much higher than the answer given by so many of Jesus’ contemporaries. It may be that to you, as to them, Jesus may have been just one more, even though perhaps the greatest, of the prophets. But it may also be that the Holy Spirit of God is leading you to a fuller confession of faith. And it is certain that if you listen to his voice, you will be able to say what only a Christian can say: “The life I now live I live in faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me” and you will be counted among those blessed ones, who, though they have not seen Jesus as Peter was privileged to see him, yet have believed.
For twenty years the Rev. R. V. G. Tasker, M.A., B.D., has served King’s College, University of London, as Professor of New Testament Exegesis. The sermon printed here was preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.
