Opening Illustration: Jesus has become popular again. His name pops up in the news all the time. In 2004 Mel Gibson did what Billy Graham could not do. Through his movie The Passion of the Christ, he took the cross of Jesus and planted it squarely in the middle of American public life. For a few fleeting weeks, everyone was talking about Jesus. I remember turning on TV the morning the movie opened across America. On CBS they were talking about Jesus. On the Today show, Katie Couric was talking about Jesus. On Good Morning America Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson were talking about Jesus. It was the same on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. That afternoon I turned on CNBC, a financial channel, and they weren’t talking about the latest news from Wall Street. They were talking about Jesus. That night on Hardball, Chris Matthews was talking about Jesus. Although he lived 2,000 years ago, for a brief moment, Jesus took center stage not only in American public life but globally and no one could ignore him.
Introduction: From time to time it’s good for us to stop and ask that question—what is it that we are trying to do here?” It’s good for all churches to ask that question occasionally. I think it’s especially important to ask that question just before school starts because September traditionally marks the beginning of our Fall programs.
In your calling it will not be important what outsiders testify about you but what your team has witnessed about you so that they can unhibitedly testify about you and your ministry to others. Sometimes people will taint a distorted picture about you just as many did for Jesus but that did not stop Him to move forward. However there were a bunch of 12 disciples who stood by Him and Jesus just kept moving closer toward the goal till He attained it. Whose affirmation, endorsement or testimony are you waiting for to step into the call that God has upon your life?
Queries about your calling:
1. What do the people generally comment? (vs. 13-14)
This was the first Gallup Poll. Jesus already knew the answer. He wanted his disciples to acknowledge what other people were saying. So they gave him the four most popular answers about who Jesus is. “Some say John the Baptist (that was Herod’s answer); others say Elijah (that was very popular because the Jews expected Elijah to return); and still others, Jeremiah (he was the greatest of the later prophets) or one of the prophets (that is, he was a spokesman for God).”
I’m sure that when we read a passage like this we tend to downplay those answers because we already know the right answer to the question. And we think, “Those fools, they didn’t know the answers.” But those answers were meant to be flattering. It would be as if someone came in and said, “Who do you think I am?”, and people said, “Well, I think you’re George Washington” or “I think you’re Abraham Lincoln.” If they really meant it, which would be a great compliment even if they were wrong.
Even if they were wrong, you have to give them credit. At least they were wrong on the right side of the issue. At least they knew that Jesus wasn’t a bad man. One commentator said that when the common people gave these answers they were like “a moth hovering around the light.” They were fascinated by what they could not understand.
There are two worthwhile points to note: First, the common people loved Jesus even though they did not fully understand him. Second, it is quite possible even with a very sincere heart to misunderstand who Jesus is. It is possible for a person to be very sympathetic to spiritual truth and still not understand who our Lord is. That is, it is possible to misunderstand with the best of intentions.
This is quite typical of America today. There are many people who like the Lord Jesus but do not worship him. They think he’s a good man, even a great man, even a man who had a special relationship to God. But they do not believe he is the Son of God from heaven.
Still others agreed that Jesus was someone special, but they did not know who, perhaps just one of the prophets of old risen back to life. Now notice that they could not deny that what Jesus did was supernatural, therefore He must be someone special, but they could not accept the fact that He was the Messiah. The signs and wonders that Jesus did proved that He was the Messiah because they were in keeping with the prophecies about Him, but the miracles did not convince the people.
People are still the same way. Philosophers revere Jesus as a great thinker. Ethicists call Him the great moral example. Liberal religionists say He provided the model of how we should live. Atheists have proclaimed Jesus as the “greatest among the sons of men.” Rock stars have sung that Jesus Christ is the “superstar,” but in every case the acclaim and pronouncements of these people is far below who Jesus really is.
We must remember that people have their eyes “blinded by the god of this age.” The people in Jesus’ time were firsthand witnesses of miracle after miracle. They were present to hear lesson after lesson from the greatest teacher ever. They experienced His love and compassion, and yet they did not recognize Him and turned away from Him. People do not believe because their minds are blinded to the truth, their hearts are dead in trespasses and sins.
Many of you are familiar with C. S. Lewis, probably the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century. He taught for many years at Oxford University and later at Cambridge University in England. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis spoke to the issue of people who like Jesus and respect him but do not worship him. This is what Lewis said:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
To be almost right about Jesus is to be totally wrong. Why? Because we are not saved by good opinions about Jesus. We are not saved because we have a good feeling about Jesus. We are not saved because we like his moral teaching. That is not enough.
2. What does your team think? (vs. 15-19)
That is why the Lord having asked the first question, now asks a second one. “Who do you say that I am?” (15) In the Greek text, that word you has an enormous stress. In fact, the “you” really goes at the first of the sentence. It is as if Jesus is saying, “But you who have followed me and have known me from the beginning, who do you say that I am?” It is the greatest question in all the universe and it is one which every man must eventually answer.
You will notice that Peter answers for all the disciples. That’s because he was the D.L.—the Designated Loudmouth. Whenever there was a question, Peter would always be the first one to answer. And when Peter answers here, he is not speaking simply for himself, but for all the disciples.
His answer is very, very specific. “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Again if I may go back to the Greek, the word “the” is repeated four times. You could translate it this way: “You are the Christ, the Son of the God, the Living One. Peter was saying, “I know who you are. You are the Messiah sent to save us and you are the Son of God from heaven.” It is short and simple. Everything necessary for salvation is included in that statement.
I think some people would read that statement and say, “Well, that’s no big deal. I would say that, too.” Sure, everybody here would probably stand up and say, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” But Peter was the first person in human history ever to say it out loud. And he said it when few were with Jesus and many were against him. He deserves all the credit, for without his confession there would be no Christian church. In that sense, there is a direct line between Caesarea Philippi and Oak Park. Without Peter’s confession, we wouldn’t be here today.
There are two other things we should notice here. Peter said, “You are the Christ.” Not “I say you are the Christ” or “People say you are the Christ” or even “We got together and took a vote and we think you are the Christ.” It is a declarative statement—"You are the Christ.” Nobody can say that except by the work of the Holy Spirit because no man can discover that truth on his own.
That is why Jesus in verse 17 gives Peter a blessing. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my father in heaven.” It’s almost as if Jesus is saying, “It’s a remarkable thing, Peter, that a mere man discovered this.” Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you. That is, you didn’t go to seminary to figure this out. And you didn’t get this because you had a Ph.D. This came because God in heaven revealed it to you.
There’s a principle in verse 17 worth thinking about. The truth about Jesus Christ can only be revealed to those to whom the Father chooses to reveal it. That is, the truth about Jesus is divinely revealed. If a man does not see this, we are not to despise him or to argue with him, but we are to pray for him. If a man is blind, you don’t curse his blindness. You pray God to open his eyes.
3. Should you publically vocalize your calling? (v. 20)
Why is Jesus intent on keeping his messiahship a secret? Why not let it out? And now that he has admitted who he is, and the disciples all know it, does he really think that this secret can be kept? Won’t it travel from mouth to ear at the speed of novelty? The voices that ask, “Have you heard?” will multiply rapidly across the land.
It’s not just this once that Jesus wants his identity to stay a secret. Repeatedly throughout the Gospels he tries to keep from becoming the talk of whatever town he’s in. Yet when he performs such deeds as healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding the hungry, when he fulfills the messianic job description, how are people expected to keep his identity to themselves? And why should they? What he does in one community after another is a publicist’s dream. The guy’s got the makings of a star. He’s going to be big, really big.
There’s a name for everything Jesus does in an effort to pass unrecognized for who he is. Students of the Bible call this the Messianic Secret. What’s behind it? The most convincing explanation is that he does not want to be acknowledged as the messiah outside of his death and resurrection. Only in the light of those events can people begin to recognize what his messiahship really means.
If they hear he is the messiah before he even gets to the cross, they are sure to misunderstand him. Jesus does not want his ministry to be seen in the wrong light. For this reason, he prefers that only his immediate circle knows that he is the one God has sent. The opportunity will come later for them to announce his messiahship. That opportunity will come once the crucifixion takes place, and he returns from death.
The Messianic Secret helps us understand what goes on in the Gospel story, why Jesus sometimes behaves in a way that seems incomprehensible. But the Messianic Secret is more than that, for it has a contemporary application. People in his own time were ready to misunderstand Jesus because they wanted, indeed expected, a messiah of a different kind to be sent to them from God.
People today are also ready to misunderstand Jesus. We want, we expect, a messiah different from the one sent to us. We expect someone who saves us easily and asks from us nothing much at all. We want a Jesus who doesn’t die, or at least doesn’t expect us to follow him in doing so. While we hope for something easy, what the Gospel offers us is a scandal.
Application: Jesus wanted to know whether His disciples kept track of what the outsiders were perceiving about His calling and ministry. All the answers that He got were way below what He truly is. They were not willing to accept Him as the anointed one … the son of God or even the Messiah. That is exactly how outsiders are going to perceive your calling. This should not stop you to live out God’s call.
But Jesus made his question personal to His disciples. Let me make it personal to you. Who do you say the Son of Man is? Is He a good moral example? A great thinker? A model for life? A good teacher? A superstar? Or is He what He Himself claims and what Peter declares here that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. The manner in which you live your life will tell the world who Jesus really is to you.
Now with the media tracking you and keeping you accountable, the way you live out your life daily will send a message to others who you really are and what is your calling?
