Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!”
And Jesus responded, “Simon son of Jonah, you are blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father in heaven.” (Matthew 16:16–17)
“You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
So now, Peter’s answer.
From the beginning of this gospel, Jesus’s life and ministry have been his means of self-revelation, the uncovering of a mystery. He has been showing his disciples who he is. This is the moment for them to face what they’ve seen, to acknowledge it, to embrace the truth. And to confess it.
Peter steps up, boldest among them, a bold leader. I said in the last post that Jesus’s identity defines reality. It also defines Christianity, in a critically important way. As Jesus himself will say in just a moment, Peter’s confession is the rock on which the church is built.
(In another sense, Peter himself is also the rock on which the church is built, but we’ll get to that later.)
Again, Christianity is based on the identity of Christ, and Christ is who he truly is, not whatever we want to make him. He isn’t the infinitely malleable child of academics or denominations or mystics or spiritual movements.
I stress this because I’m not sure we’ve ever lived in a time when so many “quests for the historical Jesus” have vied with so many “experiences of the Christ consciousness” for the minds and hearts of Christians.
But Jesus is not whatever we happen to want him to be. He is who he is.
Peter’s confession is clear about that, and so the limits of what can truly be called “Christian” are clearly defined by it, even as we realize that nothing can be called “the church” that is not built on it.
So what did Peter confess?
You Are the Christ
“You are the Christ,” Peter said.
This, the big secret, the explosive, revolutionary truth that Jesus had been dancing around throughout his ministry.
“The Christ”—“Messiah” in Aramaic; “Christ” is the Greek translation—meant something specific within first-century Judea. It meant the anointed king of Israel, the descendant of David who would ascend the throne, bring in a new covenant with God, and defeat Israel’s enemies once and for all. The Messiah would draw the nations to the God of Israel and bring an era of peace and prosperity.
That Peter calls Jesus “the Christ” places Jesus within a specific historical context: the context of God’s people, Israel, as interpreted and understood through Israel’s Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament).
Again, it’s critically important to understand that Jesus is who he is within actual history. Christianity has always been a religion rooted in history and in Scripture, because Jesus’s identity is revealed in history and in Scripture.
From the very beginning, heretical movements tried to detach Jesus from the history of Israel, the Jewish people; or from any human history at all. They tried to jettison the Old Testament Scriptures and in the process make Jesus un-Jewish.
But also from the beginning, the church founded on Jesus’s confession refused to accept any such move as legitimate.
Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, whose life, death, and resurrection are “in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3, ESV).
The Son of God
The second part of Peter’s confession is more startling: Jesus is “the Son of the living God.”
In the Old Testament, “Son of God” is typically a divine term. It most often applies to angels, “holy ones,” which are divinities in a little-d sense.
The term was also sometimes applied to sons of David, whom God promised to adopt as his own—so you could perhaps argue that it’s just an honorific, although even in the case of David’s sons I don’t think that’s the case.
And it was sometimes used of Israel as a whole, whom God had adopted in a special relationship with himself.
But Peter’s usage indicates something greater than any of these. He does not call Jesus “a Son of God,” but the Son of God. The disciples understood Jesus to be God’s Son in a way that was different. As John would later put it, he was God’s “mono-gene,” his unique Son, the only one of a kind.
The King James famously translates this “only begotten,” which is important in other ways, but it might obscure what’s literally being said—that Jesus is the Son of God in a way that no one else is, that no one else has ever been, that no one else will ever be.
We too are gifted to become “sons of God” (Luke 20:36), but not in the way that Jesus is.
The importance of this to historical Christianity should be blazingly obvious. What makes Christianity Christian is its confession that Jesus is not just a man, he is God; and he is not just God, he is a man.
Peter’s confession incorporates both dimensions: Jesus is the Christ, a son of David, a man. And he is the only, unique Son of God.
In saying all of this, I am not writing as an academic. I’m aware that texts should be read on their own, so that I shouldn’t read Luke into Matthew or John into Peter; and that many academics think the different gospels represent different early proto-Christian communities that believed different (and opposing) things. I’m aware that many streams of academia think that no one believed Jesus was God until Paul started preaching it.
But I don’t believe that.
I am speaking as a daughter of the church, the same church that was founded on Peter’s confession. I believe what Christians have always believed, as is clear in our Scriptures, Old and New: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. (John 1:1, 14, NKJV).
Peter believed this too. It’s what he confessed in Caesarea Philippi, at the gates of hell.
It’s the hinge of the gospel, the hinge of our faith, and the hinge, it turns out, of reality itself.
The Self-Revelation of God
Jesus’s response to Peter is illuminating. “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah,” he exulted.
I love the mirrored language here. “Bar-Jonah” is Aramaic for “Son of Jonah.” Jesus doesn’t usually address his disciples with their patronyms. He does it here, I believe, because he is reflecting back and affirming what Peter just said to him: Jesus is Son of God in the same sense that Peter is Son of Jonah.
Father and son share the same essence, the same nature. Peter’s use of the term “living God” seems to me to indicate the same thing; he sees that in his sonship, Jesus participates in the life of God in the same way we participate in the common life of humanity.
Jesus delighted in Peter’s understanding of this. In his resonant “blessed are you” is the sound of pure joy.
But why so blessed?
“Because man has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”
Here it is, the crux of this whole matter: Jesus’s identity defines reality, and Jesus’s identity is revealed to us by the Father.
We did not find him out by our own cleverness. The Father came toward us. He disclosed his Son as Jesus; he disclosed himself in the Son who is his perfect image. The Father has revealed, not just a set of facts, but his very self in Christ.
And this revelation is not private revelation. It isn’t something only Peter had access to. It is a revelation given to the whole church and to the whole world: God can be seen in Jesus, walking in history, speaking human words, doing real actions, set forth for us in a set of real Scriptures.
The Jesus of the Christian faith is rooted in history and in Scripture, because he is the self-revelation of God in history and in Scripture.
We’ll talk more about Jesus’s promise to build his church in the next post, but for now, brothers and sisters, I offer you this impassioned plea:
Let us not trade the image of God in Christ for any lesser thing. Jesus is God and man, a real man rooted in real history, mediating the presence of the Father to us. He is who he is and no one else. He is not invented by us, not pretended into existence, not conformable to our whims.
And he calls us to grapple with the truth of himself. To confess not just “beliefs,” but him.
Peter did. All the disciples after him did. And Christians have done so for thousands of years.
When we got to defining our faith officially in the fourth century, we wrote creeds that do not begin with a “belief that” but a “belief who”:
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his Only-Begotten Son, our Lord.”
In our world today, many voices are trying to pull us away from this rock. Many, sadly, come from within.
But let us not give up this confession lightly. In it is all the world.
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This is Part 242 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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