Who Do You Say That I Am?
The question Jesus poses to his closest followers in this Sunday’s Gospel is one of the most essential in all of Scripture: “Who do you say that I am?” For many of us today, this question has lost some of its power to surprise and intrigue us. After all, wasn’t all that settled centuries ago? Icon of Christ, the Divine Bridegroom If we only want to approach the question of who (or even what) Jesus is from the perspective of orthodox, historical theology, then the answer is yes—ecumenical councils and some of the greatest minds of the Early Church worked to understand and explain Jesus’ relationship to the Father/Creator, his place within in the Trinity, and the interplay of his human and divine natures. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§423) sums it up in this way: We believe and confess that Jesus of Nazareth, born a Jew of a daughter of Israel at Bethlehem at the time of King Herod the Great and the emperor Caesar Augustus, a carpenter by t...