“But who do you say that I am?”
“It happened in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John. On coming up out of the water he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:9-11)
The Gospel of Mark starts with the story of John the Baptist, who was baptizing “all the people of Jerusalem” in the Jordan River out in the Judean countryside. Mark’s Gospel mentions the foreshadowing of John’s ministry by quoting the prophet Isaiah. He then states, “It happened in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John…And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” From this announcement of who Jesus is, the Gospel of Mark goes on to recount the earthly ministry of Jesus.
These verses are so quick, and stated so matter-of-factly, that it is easy to miss the fact that the Divinity of the God of the Universe was revealed in Jesus–a real human being– in these short sentences. In fact Pope Benedict XVI cautions us in his book, Jesus of Nazareth:
“A broad current of liberal scholarship has interpreted Jesus’ Baptism as a vocational experience. After having led a perfectly normal life in the province of Galilee, at the moment of his Baptism he is said to have an earth-shattering experience. It is then, we are told, that he became aware of his special relationship to God and his religious mission… But none of this can be found in the text.” (p. 24)
God in bodily form is a shocking idea! To my knowledge, the Buddha never said that he was “god.” Rather, tradition states that he was an enlightened being who could show humans the way to Nirvana. A few hundred years before Jesus, Alexander the Great, had claimed to be a descendant of Zeus, and used his delusions of god-likeness to empower his conquest of the civilized world, from Egypt to India. However, his own people did not believe that he was a god.
Yet, Jesus not only said that he was the Son of God, so did his followers. In the Gospel of John, Jesus taught his disciples that his flesh was the way to eternal life. This teaching caused many of his disciples to abandon him (John 6:66).
These are just some of the mysteries of Jesus that are so often glossed over in the Western cultural understanding of Christianity. In Mark chapter 8, Jesus asked his twelve disciples who people were saying he was. Then Jesus asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” and “Peter said to him in reply, ‘You are the Messiah’” (Mark 8:29) This is the question we must each answer for ourselves. “Who do we say Jesus is?”