Who is Christ... for us 1

The first of a short series of three sermons, probing the question, 'Who is Christ... for us?'  Not an historical question, but one that concerns our identity as Christians living in the concrete here and now.  Jesus question to the Pharisees, 'What is your opinion about the Messiah?' hints at our question, as does the double question put to his disciples at Caesarea Philippi. 

 The question of who Jesus is and how he ispresented to us in the New Testament is always elusive.  There is no such thing in the New Testament as a neutral presentation of the life of Jesus.  Although there are family resemblances among the Gospel narratives, the story of the life ofJesus as told by Mark is not the same as the story of the life of Jesus as told by either Matthew or Luke, while the story told by John is very different indeed.  Jesus is the beginning point and provides the raw material for each Gospel, but that does not alter the fact that each evangelist tells the story differently, for each writes for a different audience and with a differrent purpose.

Attempts to obscure these differences does the Church more harm than good, and in the view of many thinking people affects adversely the cogency as well as the validity of the Church's witness to God.  When I read a Gospel from beginning to end, I do not read the story of the life of Jesus pure and simple.  Rather, I encounter such an account filtered through the eye of faith, the eye of the Evangelist.  That is no bad thing.  The Jesus we meet in our daily experience, the one we call Lord, is no longer the Jesus of history but the Christ of faith.  It is by faith you and I meet him; it is by faith we apprehend him, and it is in faith that we commit ourselves to him and to the service of his God and Father.

The second sermon in this short series will look briefly at the relationship of Christ and God, while the third will be concerned with 'Christ and us.'