Bishop's Column
Posted Sunday, July 01, 2007
You Peer Inside Yourself
July 2007
Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them… “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “The Christ of God.” (Luke 9:18, 20).
Our usual interpretation of this text is that, like any teacher, Jesus already knew the answer to his question, that he was examining his students to see if they knew it, too, and that Peter was the first with the correct answer, namely, that Jesus is “the Christ of God.”
Then we usually assume that the evangelist Luke was right to have Jesus go on to say, “If anyone is ashamed of me (i.e., fails to follow Peter in correctly confessing me)... the Son of man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory” (Luke 9:26). And we take for granted the church’s celebration of “The Confession of Peter” every January 18.
But what if Jesus’ motive was not to test his students about their knowledge, or their acknowledgement, of his messianic identity? What if, rather, he was trying to teach them that he did not depend on others’ evaluation of him, or their ascription of an identity to him, for him to know who he was – and that, by example, we should not do so, either. What if he saw the question – “Who do people say that I am?” – as vacuous and inappropriate and asked it of himself only to get them to never ask it of themselves?
Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, the social science critics of the New Testament endeavoring to help us understand the text from within its cultural context, argue that in the ancient Palestine of Jesus people had no concept of individual identity. Personality, rather, was understood “dyadicly” – each person understood who she was only over against some, and as embedded among others.
Prejudicial stereotyping based on origin, language, race, religion, or occupation, consequently, was pervasive. Jesus was not known only as Jesus; he was “Jesus of Nazareth” – just as Saul was “Saul of Tarsus,” and Simon was “Simon of Cyrene.” After Jesus was arrested those standing with him outside the courtyard of the high priest said to him, “Surely you are one of them, for you have a Galilean accent” (Matthew 27:73). Predicting the challenges Titus will face on Crete, Paul warned him that “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:12).
But because Jesus actually is “the Christ of God,” prejudicial stereotyping based on the kind of dyadic evaluation and ascription whereby the question “Who do people say that I am” would have meaning, and by which Peter reached his confession, is now, or at least should be, passé.
Peter, however, never shook the habit of seeing himself only as others saw him. He remained “under the influence” of others, seeking their affirmation on the basis of the “marks” of origin, race, and religion. As long as no Jewish Christians were present who continued keeping kosher, he broke the former food laws and ate with non-Jews to win their acceptance. But the minute the traditionalists showed up, he backed off from his association with the non-Jews and went kosher again (Galatians 2:11ff.).
Paul consequently “opposed him to his face” (Galatians 2:11), because the only “marks” for which Paul had regard were “the marks of Jesus” that he “bore on his body” (Galatians 6:17). Boasting in any other “mark,” Paul thought, amounted to wanting “to make a good impression” (Galatians 6:12). Paul’s only boast was “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to [him], and [he] to the world” (Galatians 6:14).
Here Paul mirrored Jesus’ own focus on the cross. How telling that Jesus did not congratulate Peter for his answer, move him to the head of the class, put him on the Dean’s List, or nominate him for Phi Beta Kappa. He suspected Peter’s was but a “plug answer” – just the right formula, but without any real comprehension of its meaning on the answerer’s part. He strictly warned everyone not to repeat it. He, rather, predicted the suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection of the Son of man, and taught that to follow him we must deny ourselves and take up our cross daily. (Luke 9:21-23)
Thus, where Peter fell short, Paul succeeded. Although “extremely zealous for the tradition of [his] fathers” (Galatians 1:14), converted he saw that, “from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ from a worldly point of view, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:16-17). He understood that we “are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ,” that “there is neither Jew nor Greek,” that we “are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). To him the former traditions were “rubbish,” and he considered “everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:8). The messeage he preached came, he said, by God’s direct revelation to him, independent of others (Galatians 1:15-20).
In her single “On the Radio,” the Russian-born, New York-bred, 27-year-old Jewish pop singer-songwriter Regina Spektor contrasts the two options before us. On the one hand, there is the possibility of ceaseless struggle in the face of life’s mortality, necessity, vanity and futility:
This is how it works
It feels a little worse
Than when we drove our hearse
Right through that screaming crowd
While laughing up a storm
Until we were just bone
Until it got so warm
That none of us could sleep
And all the Styrofoam
Began to melt away
We tried to find some words
To aid in the decay
But none of them were home
Inside their catacomb
A million ancient bees
Began to sting our knees
While we were on our knees
Praying that disease
Would leave the ones we love
And never come again
This is how it works
You’re young until you’re not
You love until you don’t
You try until you can’t
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath
We live in a celebrity, trash culture which seeks to tempt all of us, particularly the young, to seek our identity through others’ evaluations and ascriptions, their affirmation and acceptance. It would seduce us with the desire to be someone else for our own sakes, rather than be ourselves for the sake of others. Insidious, prejudicial stereotyping based on origins, language, race, religion, and occupation spawns frighteningly increasing violence and social fragmentation.
But there is another way – the way of the cross, of looking inside ourselves, and taking the utterly unique gifts each one of us possesses, and offering them freely, in love, to others May this summer offer you and me the time and space to take up our cross daily and follow Jesus’ teaching by echoing Regina Spektor’s own No>
No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else’s heart
Pumping someone else’s blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don’t get harmed
But even if it does
You’ll just do it all again