Who do you say I am?

Reflection on Gospel of Luke 9:18-24

After being with his disciples for some time and teaching them, Jesus wanted to know from them what people were saying about him: "Who do the crowds say I am?" They must have been hearing what people were saying, good things and others that were not so good. Tactfully, they chose to tell him only the good ones. Some people were saying that he was another John the Baptist, others that he was Elijah, yet others were saying that he was the re-incarnation of one of the ancient prophets. They did not tell him that some people were calling him a glutton, drunkard, friend of sinners, even Beelzebul, prince of devils. Jesus himself knew that people were calling him those other things too. All that did not really matter much to him.

What mattered most to Jesus was what his own disciples were thinking and saying about him: "But you, who do you say I am." Peter answered on behalf of all of them: "the Christ of God." The word "Christ" translates the Hebrew "Messiah", which means "the Anointed One," There were many anointed persons in the history of the Jewish people. Priests were anointed, kings were anointed, certain categories of prophets too, were anointed. But the Jews had been told that one specially anointed person was going to come. He would not be just another anointed person, but the Anointed One, the Messiah. He would come to set his people free from their subjugation to spiritual and temporal forces. Peter’s reply meant that he recognized Jesus as that unique Anointed One. Jesus did not deny it. But he gave them strict orders not to tell anyone about it. The reason was that people had a completely different idea of the of the promised Messiah than Jesus represented. They believed that the Messiah would be a warrior, a general of some sort, and he would lead his people out in battle against their enemies and conquer them.

Jesus was not that kind of Messiah. Rather, he would be the kind of Messiah that the prophets had foretold, like Zechariah in today's first reading. His own Messiah, ''the Son of Man, was destined to suffer grievously and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and be put to death, and to be raised up on the third day." It was through suffering, death and resurrection that this Messiah would set his people free.

Having spoken about the kind of Messiah that he was, Jesus then invited his disciples to follow him along the road of suffering, the way of the cross. They could not follow him in any other way. If they chose to travel another road than that of suffering and the cross, they would not be following him. They might be following other masters, but definitely not Jesus. If they thought to save their lives by avoiding suffering and the cross, that was exactly when they would lose their lives (their souls). But if they were prepared to lose their lives by embracing suffering and the cross, then they would save their lives.

It follows that suffering and the cross are essential to Christianity. A Christianity without the cross does not exist; it has not yet been invented. If-someone is trying to self us a brand of religion devoid of the cross, it is not Christianity. You will not find Christ there. You can never find Christ without his cross; Christ and his cross are inseparable. Therefore any religion or ideology that is devoid of Christ is not his religion, the one he founded; it is not Christianity. If we are Christians, and wish to remain so, we should embrace the real thing, Christianity with the cross in it, and not settle for a mere palliative, an analgesic or emotional stimulant pretending to be Christianity.