(Luke 9:18–20)
Once when Jesus was praying alone, with only the disciples near him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” They answered, “John the Baptist; but others, Elijah; and still others, that one of the ancient prophets has arisen.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “The Messiah of God.”
Jesus has just fed five thousand people. By any standard, that’s an impressive number. His reputation is growing. By this point in his ministry, according to Luke, Jesus has been preaching, teaching and healing, gathering a core group of disciples, and answering a variety of disingenuous, if not outright malicious, questions from the authorities. It must not have been easy.
Likely exhausted, Jesus is praying alone with the disciples nearby. There would have been many reasons for the five thousand to come to hear him, and to linger on, and Luke makes a point of saying that Jesus welcomed them. Knowing they must be hungry, he took a negligible inventory of five loaves and two fish, blessed and multiplied it, and managed to feed everyone with twelve baskets of leftovers. For those whose hunger was merely physical, this would have done the trick, but there must have been others whose longings lay deeper. Perhaps Jesus wondered about this as he prayed because he asks the disciples: “Who do the crowds say that I am?”
The disciples, naturally, had their ears to the ground. They answer, “John the Baptist; but others, Elijah; and still others, that one of the ancient prophets has arisen.” In other words, a reincarnation, or re-embodiment, of someone famous from the past, not his own person. Bearing his mission in mind, we don’t know if this troubled or frustrated Jesus: he moves on. “But,” he asks, “who do you say that I am?”
Jesus is asking two sorts of questions. One is to elicit a sense of what others are thinking or saying about him by asking people who might know. It is a human desire and often practical to know what we mean to other people.
But by then asking the disciples their opinion, Jesus is taking a risk. If he is thinking only of his reputation, the fact that five thousand people came to hear him makes the reasons behind it moot. John the Baptist? An ancient prophet? Did it matter?
However, turning to your dearest friends and asking what they think of you is another story. And maybe most of us don’t do that enough. Within what was possible for him in that time, Jesus understands human nature. There is a line in the play A Man for All Seasons in which the King, in a moment of rare insight, tells Thomas More “there’s a mass that follows me because it follows anything that moves.”[1] There would have been people around Jesus like that. And note that the disciples are quick to respond with the opinions of the crowd: when Jesus asks about what others think, they can tell him right away.
The second query requires them to think. And, to some extent, commit. Jesus is not asking them about the scuttlebutt, but what they actually think and believe. This is more challenging, to us, as well as to the disciples.
We only know of Peter’s response, and it is firmly declarative: “The Messiah of God.” That is coming from a place deeply within, based on what he has personally seen and known of his friend Jesus. Though we know Peter was later to wobble, this is coming from his heart.
If Jesus is to ask me, who do I say he is, based on what I have personally seen and known of him, how declarative, despite my wobbling, would my answer be?
[1] Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (Scarborough, Ontario: Bellhaven House Ltd., 1971), 32.