human person. In the heart my self-knowledge and my knowledge of God are in harmony, the peace found beyond ego consciousness.
Discovering Jesus’ identity for us is not achieved through intellectual or historical enquiry. It happens in the process of opening to our intuitive depths, to deeper and more subtle ways of knowing and seeing than we are accustomed to. This is prayer and the experience quickly makes it clear that prayer is more than thought. It is an entry into an inner space of silence, where we are content to be without answers, judgements and images. Later in this book I will turn to meditation16 as a way, time-honoured and universal, of entering this inner space of the heart and developing the state of silence. For many, meditation, a way of faith-filled silence, has transformed religious belief, whether Christian or non-Christian from arid theory to vital personal experience. The silence of prayer that is deeper than thought and image enhances our knowledge of Jesus because it leads into the reality of pure presence. Our response to the redemptive question is not, however, a matter of either intellectual or spiritual techniques. Meditation is not a trick for answering the question of who Jesus is. It is, in my experience, a way of listening to the question more deeply and clearly.
The redemptive question requires selfless attention. To listen is to be truly ‘obedient’ as the Latin root (ob-audire, to listen) suggests. To grasp for an answer is symptomatic of distraction. The sign of scattered, superficial or intermittent attention during meditation, for example, reflects our repeated tendency to get lost in thought and fantasy. Similarly, a sign that we have stopped paying attention to his question or have filtered it through our own preconceptions is that we do not even answer the actual question he put. Overconfident answers usually address the question that no one has asked. Or they are the answers we were taught years before but which have remained untested in the light of experience. A further danger signal is when the redemptive question becomes boring. This is often the result of having lost respect for the religious authority associated with the question. The answer to this question is not a solution but an insight. Through the struggle of faith, and with the balm of grace, insight dawns. As science, art and religion can all testify, the actual source of insight remains forever mysterious.
Jesus asks Who do you say I am, not What am I or even Who do you think I say I am? It is an intimately personal question. If we do not feel its intimacy as disturbing–even intrusive–we have not listened to it. It is not twisting our arm however. Its authority is not violent but vulnerable, not forceful but humble. To ask a person who they really think you are is a declaration of love.
Redemptive questions illustrate what redemption means. This is important for all humanity, not just for Christians. If we can understand what Jesus, as one of humanity’s great teachers, is getting at in his question, we will see where he is trying to get us to. We will be the wiser for it. And wisdom is the principal value that human beings need to develop today. According to the Book of Wisdom, the ‘hope for the salvation of the world lies in the greatest number of wise people’.17
The meaning of any question depends on its context. ‘Are they off?’ means something different when you are at a racetrack, ordering in a fish and chip shop, or smelling a bag of old fruit.
Considering the context of Jesus’ question leads us to look at the gospels themselves and their tradition. We are alerted about how to read the gospels prayerfully. For the early Christians reading and interpreting the gospels was not an essentially academic and certainly not a journalistic undertaking. It was a means of entering contemplation and an integral element of salvation and enlightenment.18 It was both prayer and a preparation for deeper prayer.
As described in Luke’s gospel Jesus was ‘praying alone in the presence of his disciples’ when he put his disturbing question to them. The apparent contradiction is illuminating: how can one be alone and in the presence of others? We can be alone on a crowded subway train or at a party where everyone is a stranger. This is loneliness, knowing no one and feeling known by no one. But there is another kind of aloneness which is solitude. For example, when we meditate or engage in creative work we are solitary but not isolated. Alone, not lonely. All spiritual growth leads from loneliness into solitude. The recognition and acceptance of our eternal uniqueness is solitude. At first it can be more terrifying than loneliness because it dissolves the crowd around us and reveals instead the mutual presence of other solitudes, other unique persons. Solitude is the basis of all relationship. In solitude we run the supreme risk of paying attention to a reality other than our own. Whoever wants to find his life must lose it.
Jesus poses his most intimate question from his vast solitude. He turns to his disciples, his friends and companions, from the self-knowledge in which he has recognized and accepted himself in prayer. He is baptized in self-knowledge. He knows where he comes from and where he is going. The self-knowledge of Jesus, like all human self-appropriation, arises from the creativity of prayer. Prayer means growing in self-knowledge rather than merely performing or mouthing a set ritual. It is about paying attention rather than listing needs, making statements, articulating our intentions or even obsequiously saying please and thank you to God. Prayer underpins religion more essentially than religion legislates about prayer.
You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. 19
Jesus’ piercing question highlights the intimacy which is discovered by sharing a spiritual path. This intimacy is the community of the True Self in which the many know they are one. Prayer is the expansion of consciousness within this communion of self-knowledge. It is light years beyond what our individual egos know about ourselves. When Jesus uses the first person pronoun (who I am) he claims the rare right to say I authentically. It is no longer the little me of the ego at which most of us are stuck.
All relationship is to some degree about sharing in self-knowledge. This does not mean merely what we know about ourselves and what can be verbalised or conceptualised. It is pure consciousness, simplified of self-reflection and free of anxiety. Childlikeness rather than philosophical cleverness comes closer to showing us what this means. ‘Unless you become like a little child . . . ,’ Jesus teaches. His question expresses his desire to share his self-knowledge. Behind this desire is divine ‘love–longing’–as the Upanishads call it.20 It is found deep in Jesus, in God and in the human being, and it unites God and humanity in their common thirst for each other. Behind the question of Jesus is the longing to be loved by those he loves. The selfless passion at work is the consuming longing to transmit the whole of one’s self to another. This is the ‘eros’ aspect of all love. But when this longing expands to embrace all others it has become ‘agape’. The meaning of the universal, selfless agape of the Trinity is that this passion for self-communication is at the very heart of reality. In the minutest atomic force, in the expansion of the universe and in every human relationship. Behind his question, therefore, is his personal insight into the nature of God as a communion of love.
The authority of Jesus, which his contemporaries felt both positively and negatively, flows from the well of his self-knowledge. He knows his life’s source and destination.21 Self-knowledge of this depth consists of more than information about ourselves. It is richer than the most perceptive psychological insight. To know who one is and where one has come from is a knowledge which can only be enjoyed in the ‘community of the True Self’, that is, in the knowledge of God which is love. It is known not by trying to possess it but by self-transcendence.
Self-knowledge is also humility. By putting
