Adult Bible Study Online

Getting to know a person

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Lesson text: Matthew 16:13-23
By: Omar Eby
Email: ebyo@emu.edu

Here in Caesarea Philippi, in this Gentile setting north of Galilee, among monuments to Roman imperialists who thought themselves gods, among the caves of old, Greek, pagan pantheists, away from the heartland of Jewish orthodoxy, away from the crowds who want a Jewish political king, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say I am” (v. 15)? How do ecumenical dialogues sharpen or blunt this question for us today?

Ann and Barry Ulanov combine their observation of Christ with image, our motif for this quarter. They write, “The mirror of truth is the brightness of the human Jesus in which God beholds himself and in which we behold God... God becomes a real human person in history; a person who speaks to us by using images” (John Knox Press, 1982). Jesus not only mirrors God, he also mirrors our new humanity. Is that refreshing or scandalous?

Peter’s confession invokes the power of speech, which must be acknowledged. With friends I make sacred our private conversations, “speaking ourselves into existence,” the idea borrowed from Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992). He writes: “It was by speaking his creative word into the primordial darkness that God on the first day brought forth light, and it is by speaking and listening to each other that out of the darkness of our separate mysteries is brought to light the truth of who we are.” So Peter speaks the Christ into existence, with his confession, which is fresh... and sobering?

And will we risk some of John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans, 1972) on the class? Yoder speaks many words about Jesus as a social critic and an agitator, a dropout from the social climb, a spokesman of a counterculture; about an argument that makes the radical Jesus and his teachings a relevant and normative model for contemporary Christian social ethics; about a leader who calls into being a new community made up by voluntary commitment, a visible sociopolitical, economic restructuring of human relationships; and much, much more that I embrace.

In these months of American presidential arguments, is Yoder’s bracing propositions of a political Jesus a much-needed rejoinder for Christians? Or are his words too radical, too scholarly, to be of use outside of the seminary classroom?

This message relates to the Adult Bible Study. For additional information on Adult Bible Study or Adult Bible Study Teacher, send email to info@mpn.net. To order either publication call Mennonite Publishing Network at 1 800 245-7894.