In the same year that the Village Church was founded, a new television game show hit the airwaves and it quickly became so popular that it ran until 1968. The format of the show was simple: A group of three people were placed in front of a panel of players. Of the three people, two were imposters and one was a “real” person, a fireman, perhaps, or an author. The challenge was for the players to ask questions and try to discover just who was fibbing and who was not. At the end of the game, the master of ceremonies would say, “Will the real so-and-so please stand up?” The name of the show was To Tell the Truth.

Two weeks ago we started a journey together to discover the truth about the Christian faith that has been so creatively and so badly distorted by the book and now the movie, The Da Vinci Codeⁱ. The book is a runaway best-seller. The movie is getting only average marks as a movie but is still selling lots of tickets. And I don’t know if many people’s opinions or beliefs will be swayed much one way or the other, but all the buzz and hype does give us a great “teachable moment” to look once again at some of the foundational truths of our faith. On Mother’s Day we looked at the general topic of women and God and the Bible, noting that many of the “revelations” of The Da Vinci Code were just plain wrong, for many different reasons. Today we will take a look at what the book says about Jesus and we’ll compare that with what Christians have always believed about him. There is no more important question for you and for me and for the whole world than the question of just who Jesus really is. Today we’re going to ask: Will the real Jesus please stand up?

In The Da Vinci Code, the British scholar who “reveals” so many startling and controversial “facts” about Jesus and the church and Mary Magdalene is Lee Teabing. In one pivotal conversation, Teabing says to Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist who is central in the storyline, “My dear…until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.” Neveu answered, “Not the Son of God?” “Right,” Teabing said. “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”ⁱⁱ Teabing goes on to admit that Jesus was a great and powerful man, and that Jesus’ original plan was to have Mary Magdalene, his wife, and their child carry on his work of spreading his wisdom. For Lee Teabing, Jesus is nothing more than a great man whose central message of love and peace is a good thing, but his message and persona were transformed by later generations of church leaders out to consolidate and maintain their own power, in the process hiding the “truth” about Jesus and his life.

Who is Jesus? The whole Christian enterprise rises or falls on the answer to that question. Before Jesus died on the cross, people were asking that question. After he died, they kept asking. And the debate goes on and I suppose will go on forever. The answers to the question have followed these lines: Jesus never really existed but was made up by shadowy figures of history who were interested in creating a new religion; Jesus existed but was nothing more than a popular Jewish rabbi whose life and message were vastly distorted and enlarged by later followers; Jesus was a great prophet in the tradition of Isaiah or Jeremiah who deserves careful attention because of his wisdom and impact; Jesus was a popular but sadly misguided spiritual mystic whose tragic end was turned into a great story that then fueled a new religion that is itself sadly misguided; or, Jesus was and is the very Son of God, the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior, God in Human Form whose life and death and resurrection are the pivotal event in human history.

Many of the claims in The Da Vinci Code are based on interpretations of documents and events that themselves are badly distorted. The traditional claims of Christian faith are based on human experience as recorded in a series of documents that evolved in the first centuries of the life of the church and that were finally collected into what you and I know as the New Testament. Of these documents, four were chosen as the best witnesses to the historical Jesus, the books we know as the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In Matthew we have a story that asks and answers the pivotal question of who is Jesus. From the earliest days of the church—not from the days of Constantine three centuries later, as Da Vinci claims—the story that Matthew tells has been understood as a true story about the truth of Jesus. Let’s see what it says.

Matthew says that Jesus and the disciples went into the district of Caesarea Philippi. This district is about 25 miles north and east of the Sea of Galilee, on the northern outskirts of Palestine. Perhaps Jesus had gone into this mostly non-Jewish area to escape the crowds for a while. The place itself was a poignant location for the conversation that was to follow. Scattered around were ancient temples of the Syrian religion of Baal worship. In that region there was a hill that contained a cavern which was said to be the birthplace of Pan, the Greek god of nature. The original name of the place was Panias, after Pan, and is still called Banias. The cave was said to be the origin of the Jordan River, which figures so prominently in Jewish history. The region was also home to a great temple to Caesar, to which the regional ruler Philip had added his own name in homage to them both. And so here you have a setting that almost literally cries out the dominant beliefs of the day of the dominant empires that have occupied the region, the Syrian, the Greek, the Hebrew, and now the Roman. Against the backdrop of these imposing religious ideas comes an unknown carpenter’s son from an unknown town, and in a conversation with his little band of followers, he claims to be the Son of the Living God. What an amazing proposition!

Let’s look at how that belief had come into the minds of Jesus’ followers. Notwithstanding the stories about how Jesus was born, it is certainly the case that the men and women whom Jesus assembled in his entourage really had no clear picture of his identity, certainly not at the outset. But they have been with him for quite some time now. They have heard his stories, his teaching, his arguments with the scribes and Pharisees. They have watched him heal people of physical and spiritual disease. They have lived his life with him and gotten to know him in the most intimate ways. And they are beginning to understand at least something of who he is. People on the outer circles, the crowds who have come to hear him or to be healed, are saying that he might be John the Baptist raised from the dead, or perhaps one of the great historic prophets like Elijah or Jeremiah come back into history. There is an important dynamic here that we need not to miss: it is when people are with Jesus for a while that they begin to know Jesus for who he is. That is the way it always is. You cannot come to Jesus cold and simply recognize him as God’s Son. You have to get to know him first, and for most generations of Christians, that has meant getting to know him by getting to know his followers, the people of the church. When it is at its best, the church is a place where people who are looking for God can ask their questions and reveal their doubts and try out a new relationship with God by getting to know Jesus. Jesus didn’t walk up to Peter and say, “Do you think I’m the Messiah?” He said, “Come along with me and get to know me, and then we’ll see what you find out.”

The masses of people have a general idea that Jesus is someone special, but it is only those closest to him who are now beginning to realize just how special. Jesus confronts his disciples with the ultimate question. It is not the question of what other people say about him. It is the question of what you yourself say about him. It is a question that leaps off the pages of Matthew and smacks each of us in the face: “Who do I say that you are, Jesus?” You cannot hide behind your parents’ belief, or the general consensus of your culture. You and I have to answer the question for ourselves: Who is Jesus?

Peter rises to the challenge. And he becomes the first person in history to confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. At the end of Matthew’s story of Jesus he will record Jesus’ Great Commission to the disciples to go and make other disciples in all the world. Here is the Great Confession, the first proclamation of the gospel itself, that Jesus is the Lord. And notice that Peter does not say that Jesus is his Christ or a Christ. Peter does not say that Jesus is one of many Christs. In Jewish belief, there is only one Messiah, one Christ. And Jesus is it. Jesus is the Christ. There are no others. Many people in that day and in our day want to believe that you can have your version of God and I can have mine. You can have your version of the truth and I can have mine. Jesus may be your Lord, but I’ll pick another. Even some who call themselves Christian today have a hard time going so far as to say that Jesus is the exclusive, only, unique Savior of all people. But that is what the scriptures proclaim. That is what the disciples believed. That is what the historic church has always upheld. There is only one Savior, one Christ, one true Son of the one true God, and his name is Jesus. Dale Bruner reminds us that, “The Christian Church is well when she is as decisive and emphatic as Peter; she is sick when she equivocates (like the notorious politician who told his audience: ‘Those are my convictions; if you don’t like them, I have others.’”iii Either Jesus is the Savior or he is not: you cannot have it both ways.

When Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, just what did he mean? The Jews had always looked for a person to come into their history who would be God’s King, the ultimate leader, the person above whom there is no other who would restore and maintain God’s rule forever. This anointed leader would be God’s answer to the big questions, the one who would reveal the meaning of all things, the intersection point between the heavens and the earth. He would be the prophets’ prophet and more. He would be the embodiment of God on earth.

Apparently Jesus feared that the masses of people would begin to know who he was and they would expect him to lead a revolt against the Romans and a reformation of the Jewish faith, as had been done by previous kings. Jesus was not the sort of Messiah that the people were expecting. Their vision of his power and scope and plan was far too limited, and so Jesus told the disciples to keep his identity a secret. Only the resurrection would begin to prove to the people what the Christ of God was truly all about. But to the extent that Peter and the others were beginning to understand who Jesus was, they were also beginning to find themselves being shaped and formed into different people and a different community of people. Once you have met the Messiah, you cannot remain the same person. And once you have a group of friends who have met the Messiah, you cannot stay in the same patterns of life that you once followed. The Messiah ushers in a new reality of existence that sweeps up those who know him and forges them into a new force in the world.

Jesus notes that Peter’s dramatic new insight into his identity has come as a gift of God. Peter believes because God wants him to believe. And in giving Peter this faith, God is building his church. God is creating a new community of people who will proclaim and practice the reality of the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom based on love and forgiveness and grace and the practice of a new way of life that is based on the Kingdom’s principles and values. The kind of belief that Peter exhibits is, Jesus says, the rock of the church, the foundation of a new body, what we will later learn is Christ’s body, offering a relationship with God to all who will receive the same gift of faith. Peter is only the first of many believers whose conviction that Jesus is the Christ and whose knowledge of the ways of the Kingdom will begin to actually create the reality of that Kingdom in the world. Peter and all others like him have the keys of the kingdom, meaning that they have the key to unlock the reality of God’s rule in the hearts and minds of other people. If Jesus’ followers do not share this knowledge then it cannot be known. When they do, the Kingdom grows. That is the church’s mission then, to tell and show others the presence of the Messiah.

All of these concepts and truths are far too large to fully explore in just one little sermon. But we can summarize them in this way. Was Jesus just a very great man or was he God’s Son? Some people insist on believing the former, but the church has always believed the latter. I cannot believe that even a very great man could begin a movement that would affect the world so deeply, a movement that still is growing and still is moving toward its full potential to revolutionize the world. Is it all that vital to decide once and for all about Jesus? I can only believe that the decision you and I make about Jesus is the most important decision we will ever make. If he is not God’s final answer, then we have to keep looking for another one and we have to dismiss Jesus as a well-meaning but misguided anomaly of history. If he is God’s final answer, then we must spend the rest of our lives getting to know him and getting our lives aligned with what he taught us. That is who I say he is. Who do you say he is? Amen. Matthew: A Commentary, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1990, p. 121.

Amen.

ⁱDan Brown, Doubleday, New York, 2003.
ⁱⁱIbid, p. 233.
ⁱⁱⁱ Matthew: A Commentary, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1990, p. 121.