My mother was born on the West End of Bere Island in 1916. She left for England at the age of eighteen, married an Englishman and did not return to her place of birth for half a century when I took her back shortly before her death. Yet the relatively small proportion of her life that she and her ten brothers and sisters lived on Bere Island had an enormous and enduring influence. It coloured their imaginations and shaped their characters. It was the womb, or cauldron, of the myths, legends, histories and symbols which helped them, and later their children, articulate the meaning of their lives. I was proud to learn I was related to the kings of Ireland until I later discovered how many kings there were. The stories and legends of the island, of Irish history and particularly of the O’Sullivan Bere clan enlivened our family gatherings on five continents.
Personally, I constructed a wonderful fantasy about Bere Island and about Ireland in general as I grew up in London. It became a personal myth that did not need facts or even much sense of history. I longed to go there and at the age of eleven made a disastrous visit. My first disillusionment was to see electric light on the streets of Dublin as the plane landed. I had expected gaslight and horse-drawn carriages. The problem with Bere Island, when I got there a few days later, was different. It was too primitive and I felt a very self-conscious and adolescent Englishman.
Years later, in my thirties and as a monk, I was drawn back there again for periods of prayer and solitude. Its meaning had changed for me. Seeing Bere Island more clearly was not easy with so many layers of cultural myth and personal fantasy to clear away. But asking what Bere Island was for me helped me in the long hard work of self-knowledge. Valuing the power of my roots there, but learning to grow up in my relation to it and to shed my fantasies and false expectations changed me too.
‘And you, who do you say I am?’1
Who is he? This simple, timeless question rolls down the centuries. The answer is simple, too, but not easy. If we choose to listen and to respond to this question of Jesus, the way we live, think and feel is transformed. The transformation happens because the question brings us to self-knowledge and self-knowledge changes us. We can answer such a question only when we have been simplified by long and deep listening.
Every culture has its own images of Jesus and so no response can ever be the final answer. In a fourth-century Roman villa in Dorset there is a beautiful mosaic showing what seems at first glance to be a typical portrait of the young god Apollo. When you look closer you notice the chi-ro Christian symbol2 which identifies it as one of the earliest pictures of Jesus. For many British empire-builders of the nineteenth-century God, and therefore His Son, were quintessentially British. Baptism and British citizenship were closely related. In 1988 the American Senate was debating a proposal to spend more money on teaching foreign languages in state schools. A senator opposed it. The whole world was learning English now, he said, so why should Americans waste time learning other languages? To clinch his case he concluded, ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, he said, it’s good enough for me.’3 Our thinking about Jesus, the way we respond to his question, is culturally conditioned.
We can only imagine Jesus with the means provided by our cultural and personal imagination. Most of us are not scholars with in depth knowledge of the cultural norms of the ancient Middle East two millennia ago. And even if we were, we would still be constricted by our personal and cultural point of view. Once we have pictured Jesus in our imagination, it is tempting to enrol him in support of our opinions and prejudices. The Jesus Christ we call to life in our imagination today, in our post-Christian and post-modern world, is a very different reality from the Galilean Jew of humble origins who was born when the emperor Augustus ruled in Rome and who was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate on a small hill near an abandoned quarry outside the walls of Jerusalem. Innumerable images through the history of Christianity, the world’s largest and materially most successful religion, have been developed to describe who Jesus is and what he means.4 Because of the distance between the historical and the imagined Jesus, Christians often seem more concerned about promoting their Jesus in support of their moral or social opinions than in discovering who he really is.
Who he really is is far more than who he historically was.
According to the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.5
How can this timeless identity be described? From the gospels it is clear that Jesus avoided titles that defined himself too narrowly. When he called himself Son of Man he was sometimes saying only ‘I, a man’ as when he remarked that the ‘Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’6 But even this single title has a wide range of meanings: from a circumlocution for the first person pronoun to the One who will come in glory to judge all people. On other occasions, the ‘Son of Man’ is associated with the authority that bestows forgiveness of sin and power over the sabbat7 This simple title sounds many chords. It evokes the figure of the prophet of Ezechiel, the fragile humanity of all the prophets and the vision of Daniel where one like a (or the) Son of Man appeared as a figure in celestial glory. In the passion and resurrection predictions in Mark’s gospel (Chapters eight-ten) this ancient title is used to show just how directly and compassionately Jesus relates to his fellow human beings. It also explains why he suffered the prophet’s fate. But neither ‘Son of Man’ nor the many other titles by which Jesus has been known can adequately express the response that his simple question invites.
Jesus clearly seems to have wanted people to think about who he was: not merely in received biblical or theological terms but in terms of their personal relationship to him. To ask who Jesus is implies who is he for me, to me, in relation to me? This is true, of course, of all human relationships. How else can I say who you are except in relation to me? Who am I in your eyes except in relation to you and who you see yourself to be?
When Jesus says he is the Son of Man he is stressing the simply but profoundly human way that he relates to us and we to him. This one expression, drawn from the idiom of his time and region, also shows how anyone listening to his question must first see him in his cultural context if we are to read the gospels intelligently. Christians, too, need this informed intelligence for their faith to grow. Their understanding of Jesus leads them to a deeper understanding of God precisely because their relationship to Jesus is grounded in his humanness. To emphasise the human nature of this relationship is not to say it is mundane or superficial. It leads to an extraordinary discovery of the full meaning of humanness. One consequence of this is that when we ask who he is we will always be led to ask who we are as well. It is always a specific person who knows Jesus. He can no more be reduced to an abstract definition than any human being. It is primarily as a human being that Jesus wants to be known by other human beings.
This is how Jesus puts the question in the gospel of Luke:
One day when he was praying alone in the presence of his disciples, he asked them, ‘Who do the people say I am?’ They answered, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, others that one of the prophets has come back to life. And you, he said, ‘who do you say I am?’ Peter answered, ‘God’s Messiah’.8
Before leaping in with an answer, as Peter did, using a term charged with meaning for him, we might wish to stay silent a moment. In that silence we could reflect on the nature–and the power–of the question Jesus poses, just as a question. We should make sure we have truly heard the question before trying to get the answer right.
Important questions create silence.
Early in his
