(The Nationalist, 15 September 2006)
The Gospels were written for everyone. That means that Jesus asks us the questions he asked his disciples. We may think of him as always talking, but he also asked questions, over 120 different ones in the Gospel.
The focus of his questions was to get us to think. They were a wake-up call, to get us to look at the world around us, and the world within us, to become aware of what kind of people we are, and are becoming.
Imagine Jesus sitting beside you, and he asks you the question, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ He asks it gently, not in like an examiner who wants to hear an answer that you read in a book, or an interrogator trying to trip you, but a friend who wants to lead you forward on a journey of discovery, about God, yourself, and others.
Some people answer the question by saying that Jesus was a great teacher, a moral philosopher. But what teacher would ever be so arrogant as to say, not merely ‘I teach the truth’, but ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’?
Some say Jesus was the great pioneering social worker: he pointed the way to solving problems, he cared for the needy, he healed, he lifted up the down-trodden, he fed the hungry, he even raised the dead to life. But that was not why he was killed on a cross, was it?
Some see him as a Santa Claus on a cosmic scale, a great giver of gifts, a soother who anaesthetizes us from the harshness of reality, a celestial comforter who gives us a cuddle and a kiss and puts us to sleep. Far from it: Jesus did comfort the afflicted – but he also afflicted the comfortable! What is comforting about being told to love your enemies, to bless those who curse you, to do good to those who hate you, and to pray for those who persecute you?
Saint Peter’s answer to Jesus’ question was to say, ‘You are the Christ, the anointed one of God’. That answer may not be yours or mine, but Jesus asks us only to be honest. He is not asking us to repeat Peter’s answer like a child at school, but to answer from the heart.
His question remains, and everyone will have a different answer to it. What Jesus asks is that we consider it seriously, and answer it honestly. In trying to answer it, we learn about ourselves as well as about him; we go on a venture into the interior, a pilgrimage of discovery.
Looking at the evidence of the gospel, I think Jesus has to be one or other of three things: either he was the most unscrupulous and shameless conman who ever lived; or a madman, deluding himself with notions of divinity; or who he claimed to be – the Son of God.
For those in a hurry: ‘Jesus was either of ultimate significance or of no significance.’ (Alexander Herzen)