This fall at Kenilworth Union Church Katie, Christine, and I have been preaching this sermon series called WJDA (What Did Jesus Ask?) We’re looking at 13 of the 307 questions that Jesus asks in the four gospels. As Katie has mentioned, next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, which means this is the final Sunday in the Church year. This is New Year’s Eve and we call this Christ the King Sunday. We celebrate the reign of Jesus of Nazareth. I think this is a perfect passage for Christ the King Sunday, Matthew 16:

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist but others Elijah and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

I like to think that I live my life in the interrogative mood. Like Jesus himself. I like to think I have a healthy curiosity about other people’s lives, so I query them to find out. “What’s the most important thing you learned at the University of Michigan?” I’ll ask my son. I’m curious about this because that education cost me $250,000.

I’ll ask my future daughter-in-law, “What’s it like providing health care to 130,000 employees at Intel?” And I’ll ask my daughter, “What’s the best book you loaned out today in the Children’s Room at Greenwich Library?” I guess maybe sometimes I overdo it, because my kids call me The Grand Inquisitor.

Jesus lived his life in the interrogative mood. He asked 307 questions in the four Gospels, including the two I read a moment ago: “Who do people say that I am?” he asks his disciples. They answer. Jesus likes their answer.

And then he asks a much more personal question: “And who do YOU say that I am?”

One of his disciples named Simon Bar Jonah gets the right answer: “You are the Christ, the son of the Living God.” Jesus likes this answer, so he says to Simon, “From now on, I’m going to call you Peter.” In Greek, you see, “Peter” sounds like the Greek word for “Rock.” “You are Peter, and on this Rock, I will build my Church.” In the first century, “Peter” was not a given name; it was not a name you christened your baby with; it was a nickname. From then on, Jesus calls Simon “Rocky.” He probably even sounded like Rocky Balboa.

“Who do people say that I am?” asks Jesus. Good question. You can learn a lot about the Lord when you find out what other smart people think about him. He called himself the Son of Man. Other people called him the Son of David. The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner described him as “a perfected human person.” Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson called him “the human face of God.” The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann called him “The Crucified God.” American theologian James Cone called him “The Black Christ.” Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber called him “Superstar.” Martin Copenhaver’s four-year-old daughter called him “God’s Best Friend.”[1]

Who do people say that I am? People use towering superlatives when they talk about him: The Brightest. The Bravest. The Wittiest. The Most Iconoclastic. The Best.

When the iPhone came out in 2007, Apple’s competitors like Microsoft and Samsung and Blackberry scoffed. “No one’s going to buy that phone,” they said. “It costs $500; no one’s going to pay $500 for a phone. And it doesn’t even have a keyboard! Jobs, you idiot. You’re in big trouble now.”

And then, the night before its release, people were pitching tents on the sidewalk waiting all night for the doors to open. And now, 17 years and 2.4 billion iPhones later, here we are: 2.4 billion!! You know what they called the iPhone? The Jesus Phone.[2] Not only because it saved Apple from its sins, but also because it was The Best. Steve Jobs said, “This device will change the world.” Boy, did it ever! It was the Jesus Phone.

You can learn a lot about the Lord from what other smart people say about him. But then Jesus asks a more personal, intimate, intrusive, existential question: “Who do you say that I am?” He asks that question to each one of us. Do you have an answer?

For me, he is my greatest comfort and, to be honest, my greatest scourge. My greatest comfort: The Heidelberg Catechism asks: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” and my answer is: “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”

But also he is one of the central anxieties of my life, because he eludes me. I can never reach up to his towering stature. He turned water into wine, a little lad’s lean lunch into a banquet for five thousand, and common fisherfolk into brave heroes. He treated women as equals and not objects or inferiors. He welcomed the least, the last, the lost, the lame, the leper, and the loser into his loving embrace. He faced down the craven, ruthless, pitiless authorities without a trace of fear and drove them into a tight corner of the sacred Temple where they had to see themselves for what they were.

Reinhold Niebuhr called him “the impossible possibility.” That is to say, he is impossible to copy, but it is vital to try, and that sums up my quandary.

Still he is my guide, my compass, my gauge. He is “The Great Pilot of My Onward Way.”[3] He is my North Star. If ever midway the journey of life I find myself lost in a dark wood alone, I need only look up into a stygian sky stippled with stars and find the brightest one, and I will know where I am and which way I must go.

Conrad Hyers tells us that in the 1940’s and 50’s the daily broadcasts of a well-known radio commentator were heard by millions of listeners in the United States and around the world. This radio commentator received thousands of letters from listeners. Most of them were answered by secretaries with form letters. A few of them, however, landed on the desk of the commentator himself, including this one.

It was poorly written and riddled with grammatical errors. The writer said that he was a shepherd in the hills of North Dakota. His wife had died many years ago. His children were grown and had moved to distant places. His nearest neighbor was 20 miles away. His only companions were a dog, a radio, and a violin. The radio was his main contact with the outside world. He thought of the radio commentator, whom he had listened to for years, as an old acquaintance.

The reason he was writing the letter was that his violin had gotten out of tune. He was turning to the radio commentator, the closest thing he had to a friend. He wondered whether the commentator on his national broadcast would play an ‘A’ on the piano so that he could get his violin back in tune.

Normally, such a letter would have been discarded. At best it would have been answered with a form letter. But one evening, right in the middle of a nationwide broadcast, right in the middle of commentary on the most important world affairs, right in the midst of the names of presidents and generals and star athletes, there was a pause.

“Shepherd of the North Dakota Hills, are you listening? Shepherd of the North Dakota Hills, are you listening?” Then a note was struck loudly and clearly on the piano. “This is your ‘A.’ This is your ‘A.’”[4]

Don’t you see that Jesus is our ‘A’? His is the perfect pitch by which we calibrate our lives. When we go flat or sharp, we always return to his perfect pitch to tune it up. “Shepherd of the Northern Hills, are you listening? This is your ‘A’.”

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[1]Martin Copenhaver, Jesus Is the Question: The 307 Questions Jesus Asked and the 3 He Answered (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014), pp. 101–102.

[2]Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 474.

[3]A phrase written by Jessie Adams in the hymn “I Feel the Winds of God Today.”

[4]Conrad Hyers, And God Created Laughter (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987), pp. 77–78.