He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter … ” (Matthew 16:15–18a)
In the midst of Matthew 16’s great themes is a personal note with deep relevance for people living in our day and time. I’m not sure there has ever been an age more given to identity confusion than ours—a culture where people feel more lost and disconnected. Young and old, many deal with a heavy, sometimes crippling burden of anxiety over who and even what they are.
The great sin of our culture can be expressed in the words “I will define myself,” and so the great wound of our culture can be found there as well. In many ways, we have pulled the ground out from people’s feet and asked them to structure reality for themselves. No human was ever meant to carry such a burden.
The people of Jesus’s day did not share this burden of ours, but they were human too, and like every human being since Adam they were afflicted with a measure of blindness about their own nature and a need to know themselves more deeply. This is common to all of us—we need to know who are so that we know how we fit in this universe, what it means for us to be known and loved. We want to know what and who we are, and what and who we mean.
Knowing Ourselves for the First Time
So I find something profound in this exchange. Jesus asks “Who do you say I am,” and when Peter answers truly, when he confesses the great Christian confession of Jesus’s identity, Jesus looks back at him and gives him a gift—“Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah … and I say to you, you are Peter.”
We’ve already talked about the name change and what it might point to on an historical scale. But on a more personal level, Peter is experiencing what many of us experience when we come to know God. In knowing Christ better, we come to know ourselves, some of us for the first time.
Christian spiritual writers for thousands of years have linked self-knowledge and the knowledge of God. Our view of God is distorted and smeared by sin, but God’s view of us is absolutely clear. He knows who we are; he made us. He alone can define us, not only in our fundamental humanity but also in the holiness he is working in us. He knows who we are now and who we are becoming. He looks at each one of us and sees the seed, the potential, and the full-grown tree. Simon is Peter; Peter is Simon; it is Jesus who shows Peter to himself.
Identity in Community
Although the discussion is bigger than we have room for here, human identity is not ultimately found within ourselves—much less in what makes us different or distinct from each other—but within our shared human nature and the network of relationships in which we exist. We find out who we are in how we relate to others. Our distinctions (what we might call our personhood, or person-ality) are important too—exceedingly so—but they don’t help us locate us ourselves on the map of the universe and really know who we are. In the final analysis, identity is found in relationship.
And if identity is found in relationship, the primary relationship in which it is found is our relationship with our Creator. We know ourselves in God because God is ultimately our source, our origin. We are incarnate thoughts of God, dreams of his made flesh and given life.
Psalm 137 tells us that every human being is individually fashioned by God (though not, as the original creation was, ex nihilo or out of nothing—we are fashioned from existing DNA that connects us to all other human beings; we always exist within a chain of relationships not only with God but with our fellow humans).
If a work of art (having suddenly become conscious) wishes to understand itself, it should look not to itself but to the artist, whose design and desires and skill gave it being. The artist knows what the painting means and what it exists for. Parents, who certainly participate in the generation of their children—again, God creates every human being individually, but not without reference to anyone else—cannot define their children, they can only marvel at the mystery of them.
Our real identity, and our real personhood too, comes from beyond humanity. It comes from God.
The Journey of Becoming
So here we are in this scene in Matthew 16, where Peter declares the revelation he has received about Christ and is then given a new revelation about himself. This is roughly three years into Peter’s journey of discipleship, which fact encourages me.
For three years Peter had been following Jesus, growing in grace and faith, witnessing miracles, hearing the teachings of God from God’s own mouth. He had been growing into a leader and living as a disciple, and now he gets a glimpse into God’s vision for him—Peter, a rock, a foundation stone in the temple of God.
The name gave shape to his future but also meaning to his past; it told him something of who he had always been and what his life had always been about. But certainly he only got a glimpse, and not of something he could somehow make happen in his own strength. Spoiler alert: Peter’s actions in the rest of the gospel of Matthew are anything but solid and rock-like; he seems, if anything, to fit the description given to the patriarch Reuben in the book of Deuteronomy—unstable as water.
But Peter was not the source of his own identity and transformation any more than he was the source of his own life. The hand of the Maker would continue shaping him. Peter’s responsibility was to show up and allow himself to be made.
Finding Out Who We Are
Against the great sin of our generation, we do not define ourselves. We do not make ourselves. We discover ourselves in the eyes of God, in his revelation of ourselves to ourselves. We do play a role in our own transformation, however: that of yielding, giving way to the Spirit, and of following, of walking out the obedience of discipleship so that God’s transforming will can be done.
When this seems fearful, as it sometimes will, I think it helps to remember that the God who is making and transforming us is the same God who fashioned us in the womb of our mothers. God does not eradicate or negate our personhood, our personality, our being. Rather he continues to shape it in the mold it was always made for.
We are not born finished, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever spent two minutes with a newborn. This is true spiritually as much as it is physically. We are born to grow, to become, though the pattern of our becoming is there from the beginning.
When Jesus invites us to come and die in discipleship to him, it is not so that we will be lost. It is precisely so that we will be found.
You Are Known
Jesus could call Peter the rock because he knew him. Jesus knows you too. He knows me. He knows not only who we truly are in this moment, he also knows who we were meant to be, who we will become. He alone can call us by our names.
From our side, the way to know ourselves is not, counterintuitively, to fixate on ourselves, and especially to fixate on those things that we perceive as separating us from others (that is, as making us special). Rather, we find ourselves in relationship with the One who knows us. In finding him, in receiving the revelation of who he is, in speaking his name, we will at last hear our own names spoken back to us.
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This is Part 244 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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