Who Do You Say I Am?

Read it: Mark 8–9; John 11

For a long time Jesus had been healing, teaching and feeding crowds. People argued about Him constantly. Then, about halfway through Mark’s Gospel, He took His disciples far to the north, to the villages around Caesarea Philippi at the foot of Mount Hermon. It was a non-Jewish area, full of shrines to the Greek god Pan, with a temple built in honour of the Roman emperor. In a place packed with rival gods, Jesus asked the question that every reader of the Gospels has to answer.

The big question

“Who do people say I am?” (Mark 8:27). The disciples reported the rumours: John the Baptist come back to life, or Elijah, or one of the prophets. All of these were compliments. None of them was enough.

Then Jesus made it personal. “But what about you?” Jesus asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29). “Christ” is the Greek form of the Hebrew word “Messiah.” Both mean “anointed one,” the King God had promised. Peter had seen it.

But what came next shattered Peter’s picture of a king. Jesus “began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and that He must be killed and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31). Peter took Him aside and actually told Him off. Kings don’t die. Messiahs win.

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! For you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men” (Mark 8:33). That’s a shocking thing to hear minutes after getting the big answer right. Peter had the right title and the wrong idea of what it meant. And Jesus told the whole crowd what following Him would involve: “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me” (Mark 8:34). Everyone in that world knew what a cross was. It was how Rome executed people. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36).

On the mountain

Six days later Jesus took Peter, James and John up a high mountain. There, in front of them, He was transfigured, which means His appearance was changed. “His clothes became radiantly white, brighter than any launderer on earth could bleach them” (Mark 9:3). Moses and Elijah appeared and talked with Him: Moses, who received the law, and Elijah, the great prophet. The whole Old Testament was standing on that mountain beside Jesus.

Peter, terrified and not sure what to say, offered to put up three shelters. Then a cloud covered them, the same kind of cloud of God’s presence that had covered Mount Sinai and filled the tabernacle, and a voice spoke: “This is My beloved Son. Listen to Him!” (Mark 9:7). Suddenly Moses and Elijah were gone, and “they saw no one with them except Jesus” (Mark 9:8).

Coming down, they met a desperate father whose son was tormented by an evil spirit. When Jesus said everything is possible for the one who believes, the father cried out, “I do believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). Jesus healed the boy. That prayer, half faith and half doubt, is one of the most honest in the Bible, and Jesus answered it.

Yet the disciples still didn’t get it. Jesus told them again that He would be killed and rise, and they responded by arguing about which of them was the greatest. “If anyone wants to be first,” He said, “he must be the last of all and the servant of all” (Mark 9:35).

“Lazarus, come out!”

John’s Gospel tells a story that shows exactly who Jesus is. In Bethany, a village near Jerusalem, lived three of His close friends: Martha, Mary and their brother Lazarus. When Lazarus fell seriously ill, the sisters sent for Jesus. John says something surprising: Jesus loved them, “So on hearing that Lazarus was sick, He stayed where He was for two days” (John 11:6). By the time He arrived, Lazarus had been in the tomb four days.

Martha met Him with grief and a hint of blame: “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). Jesus replied with one of the greatest claims ever made: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies” (John 11:25). “Do you believe this?” And Martha, like Peter, answered: “I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world” (John 11:27).

When Jesus saw Mary and the mourners weeping, “He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled” (John 11:33). Then come the two shortest words in most English Bibles: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He knew what He was about to do, and He still cried. He doesn’t stand at a distance from our grief.

At the tomb He called out, “Lazarus, come out!” (John 11:43). And the dead man walked out, still wrapped in burial cloths. Many believed. But the religious leaders met in alarm, and “from that day on they plotted to kill Him” (John 11:53). Giving Lazarus his life would cost Jesus His own.

Where Jesus is in this

Peter never forgot the mountain. Years later he wrote, “we were eyewitnesses of His majesty,” and remembered the voice: “And we ourselves heard this voice from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain” (2 Peter 1:16, 18).

The words “Listen to Him!” reach right back to Moses, who had promised that God would send another prophet like him and said, “You must listen to him” (Deuteronomy 18:15). After Pentecost, Peter told a crowd in Jerusalem that this promise pointed to Jesus (Acts 3:22). And the strange idea that the Messiah must suffer, which Peter fought so hard, is the key to the whole story. As Jesus put it, “even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

Think about it: Peter got the right answer and still had the wrong idea about what it meant to follow Jesus. If someone asked you “Who do you say Jesus is?”, what would you say, and what would that answer actually change about your week?

Go deeper: Hurlbut’s Life of Christ for Young and Old by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut — Hurlbut retells the scene at Caesarea Philippi simply and clearly, explains what “Messiah” and “Christ” meant to Jews waiting for a king, and shows why Peter could not fit a suffering, dying King into his picture. Start with chapter 48, “The Great Confession”.