Why Does Jesus Tell His Disciples Not To Tell People That He Is The Christ Series

KEEP QUIET: Proclaiming that Jesus was the Christ would create a lot of wrong expectations.

- Luke 9:18-21.

- It’s an odd thing to hear Jesus telling His disciples to not tell people that He is the Christ. You would generally think that He would want it proclaimed often and loudly from every rooftop.

- The most frequent explanation I’ve heard to explain this concerns the timeline. There were a lot of dangerous things swirling at this time. There was a particular timeline for the passion of the Christ. You don’t want the situation getting too “hot” too early and so Jesus told His disciples not to share that He was the Christ to keep things from getting ahead of schedule.

- I think there is something to that view and I have preached that myself.

- This passage, though, I think points us to another explanation. It’s not that this is contradictory to the timeline explanation. They both can be true and contain parts of the reason but this passage’s last verse I think clearly points us in another direction. I need to unpack the rest of the passage first but we will close with that last verse.

- In v. 21 we see Jesus telling His disciples not to tell that He is the Christ.

- The preceding verses give us some helpful context to that statement. Jesus asks them who the crowds are saying that He is. They have guesses and they are all wrong. (In defense of the crowd, no one could have figured out on their own the nature of the Christ - who would have imagined God Incarnate?!)

- So what we see in vv. 18-21 is that the people don’t understand who Jesus really is.

- Peter - and presumably by extension the disciples - accurately understand that Jesus is the Christ. So they are one step further down the road. But then Jesus immediately sets out to show them that beyond getting the title right they don’t have an accurate understanding of the Christ.

- This is probably a good moment to stop and define “Christ.”

- A lot of people just think of it as Jesus’ last name. That's not what it is.

- It’s a title.

- It means that He is the Messiah, the Anointed One. It means He is the one who everyone has been waiting on to change things.

- What follows in vv. 22-26 is Jesus letting the disciples know that they basically don’t know anything about what it means that the Christ has come. In a moment I want to unpack what Jesus reveals to them about the true nature of the Christ’s Kingdom.

- For right now, though, I want to make the opening point about why Jesus does not want the disciples proclaiming He is the Christ: because proclaiming it would do nothing but create wrong expectations.

- There was a list of expectations that the Jewish people had of what the Christ would do when He came on the scene. Those expectations were inaccurate but the people sincerely believed them.

- For the disciples to go forth loudly proclaiming that Jesus was the Christ would not help the mission Jesus wanted to accomplish. In fact, it would work in exactly the opposite direction because of all the additional baggage the people had heaped on that title.

- So let’s get into the specifics that Jesus tells His disciples about this Kingdom.

THE UNEXPECTED NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST:

1. The Christ didn’t come to conquer Rome but to conquer sin.

- Luke 9:22.

- One of the major expectations that the Jewish people had of the Messiah was that He would free the Jews from Rome’s oppression and create a strong, independent nation of Israel once again.

- In other words, the Messiah would conquer Rome.

- Jesus says something in v. 22 that points in a different direction.

- Now, we know what He’s talking about: it’s obviously about His path to the cross and His resurrection three days later. It makes sense in hindsight because we know the whole story. It made no sense to the disciples at all.

What was Jesus talking about? Suffering? Death? Those aren’t words associated with the Messiah. Words like victory and independence are Messiah words.

- The disciples’ (and the Jewish people’s) expectations about the Messiah didn’t match up to the actual mission that Jesus the Messiah came to fulfill. Jesus didn’t come to conquer Rome; He came to conquer sin.

- Of course, this is a bigger, more impressive mission. It’s far more important. It’s far more expansive. But they didn’t have a vision for that.

- This is one reason why Jesus told them not to say that He was the Messiah: it would only lead to people looking for a political revolution rather than a spiritual one.