Jesus asks: "Who do you say I am."

This thought becomes my meditation on the train ride to work, this morning.

While I am glad for my Episcopalian upbringing and thankful for continued fellowship in various religous communities. I'm not generally happy to find myself proselytizing. If I speak of Jesus, it is generally to critique what I think falls short in that which others have said.

I can't tell you why this particular thought came to me, but I'm glad it did.

So often we are told what one should believe about Jesus. We are told over and over who others say he is. The Christian world is full of people who, if you listen closely enough, are each saying something slightly different. They may agree that salvation is necessary, but C.S. Lewis points out that "...no two agree agree on how salvations comes about."

Like Amway salesmen who insist that you too can be successful in business, yet fail to provide education in basic accounting to most of those they enlist, Christians often ask for our belief without bringing forward the "rules of evidence" that might applied to the various assertions of fact. It is as if we think zealous faith is more important than rational faith, and it implies to non-believers that we doubt that our beliefs can be held in a purely rational context.

Jesus asks this question of Simon Bar-Jonah, the fisherman. It is recorded in three of the gospels: Mt 16:13-28, Mk 8:27-38, and Lk 9:18-27. Stories that show up so similarly in more than one of the gospels are better evidence than those that show up in only one.

Simon answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

Jesus then tells him: "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven."

Many who preach the bible, and who are not Roman Catholics, stop without reading what follows. They want you to hang your hat on text that asserts the divinity of Jesus, but ignore the complicating subsequent text that changes Simon's name to Peter (Rock) and seems to annoint Peter as the head of the church.

Down this road you will find the faith fraut with human politics.

Jesus does go on to say more: "And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven, and whatsoever You shall bind on earth, it shall bound also in heaven: and whatsoever Thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven." - MATHEW 16:18 -19

Reading up on this, I'm told that the actual name was Cephas which meant a large, massive stone in Aramaic.

What came to me in my meditation is that it is not Simon the man that has impressed Jesus, but his profession of clear faith coming from one in a group of disciples who were not yet people of faith. The question "Who do you say I am?" Is important to Jesus. More important to him, is our own answer.

Perhaps it is the answer alone upon which his church is built.