so I attempted a conversation. After trying the weather I asked if she lived on the island. She shot me a frightened look as if I was probing her most intimate secrets. After mumbling an incoherent answer she looked resolutely out of the window. Wondering if she was just shy I launched on a number of friendly questions which I soon realised were merely compounding my error, whatever that was. The psychological temperature fell lower than the weather. Eventually we retreated into a neutral silence until the melancholic captain tottered on board. The crossing took fifteen minutes. As we climbed off the boat onto the island my fellow passenger turned suddenly to me and with a softly knowing smile, as if we had been chatting easily all along, asked if the weather was as bad as this in London. Had she read my mind, looked into my soul with psychic powers? I had given her no information about myself. I guessed that the island grapevine had informed her that one of the O’Sullivan Bere’s girls’ children was coming from England to visit his cousins. She probably knew before I did.
I had learned an important lesson about island silence and privacy. The truth is a sensitive creature around which you have to tread very gently. Too many questions scare the truth away. When we want to find out about others too directly we often forget that we ourselves are also known.
What are we trying to find out about Jesus by listening to his question?
Luke tells us that the people considered Jesus to be a kind of reincarnation of John the Baptist, a second coming of Elijah or one of the other prophets.
. . . he asked them, ‘Who do the people say I am?’ They answered, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, others that one of the old prophets has come back to life.’1
This was what the people were saying about him2. Neither Jesus nor the gospel writers discuss these as literal answers, although Jesus once indicated that John the Baptist was the Elijah who was expected to be the forerunner of the messiah.
The New Testament uses about one hundred and thirty titles to describe Jesus: Christ, Lord, King, Lamb of God, rabbi, Son of Man, Son of David, Son of God, being the most frequent. ‘Teacher’ is used about 50 times in the gospels (‘Rabbi’ is found only in John’s gospel, and there nine times.) ‘Son of David’ is found about seventeen times and so less often than ‘King’ or ‘Lamb of God’. The characteristic title ‘Son of Man’ is found eighty-five times and has a rich fabric of meanings which Jesus found useful. The prophet Ezekiel uses the title often to mean a weak or mortal human being (the prophet himself). The book of Daniel (Chapter seven) uses the phrase in a heavenly sense and it is found in some psalms where it means, simply, a human being. Jesus thus knew the title from scripture and used it of himself. The uses of ambiguity in the phrase are revelatory. It does not only mean ‘an ordinary human being’ because it is the Son of Man who will come to judge the world, a work associated with God. And the Son of Man, like God, forgives sins. Sometimes, indeed, Son of Man is a circumlocution for Jesus the speaker as, for example, when he says the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. The interpenetration of divine and human connotations of identity in this simple phrase is highly subtle.3
In addition to ‘Son of Man’ the New Testament uses ‘Christ’ over 500 times, ‘Lord’ 485 times, ‘Son of God’ seventy-five times, ‘Son of David’ seventeen times. These titles were attributed to a man who, to all appearances a politician and religious failure, had died the most shameful death possible under the Roman Empire as a common criminal.
In the encounter with his disciples which is our starting-point here, Jesus neither approves nor rejects what people were saying about him. Instead he speaks about the suffering that lies ahead both for himself and his disciples. Soon after his public ministry began, Jesus probably guessed that he would become a victim of a power-play by the authorities. He was too popular to be ignored and he had no power base of his own to protect him. His family and friends were deeply frightened for his safety4. The gospels agree that he was well aware of the ordeals lying ahead. His socially radical, religiously revolutionary teaching and his preference for silence over self-definition all point to a deep sense of his destiny.
He exposes the high cost by which self-knowledge is achieved. As a teacher more than as a political radical he describes the path by which his disciples will come to know him and themselves. He does not trivialise the cost of discipleship. To know oneself requires unknowing one’s self. Finding involves loss. Seeds grow only through death. To find the light of the true Self there is no way except through the dark tunnel of the way of the cross. Finding demands losing. Life is gained only through death: sometimes even physical death but every day demands the death of the ego’s old illusions, habits, values and beliefs.
And to all he said, ‘If anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, he must leave self behind; day after day he must take up his cross and come with me. Whoever cares for his own safety is lost; but if a man will let himself be lost for my sake, that man is safe. What will a man gain, by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self?’5
To listen is not mere passivity. To listen is to turn towards another, to leave self behind; and that is to love. St. Augustine said that whoever loves Jesus believes in Jesus. The question Jesus asks, and which is so central to Christian faith and identity, does not throw up denominational barriers between Christians and non-Christians as answers can do. Indeed by leading to the universal question, who am I?, his question positions him as one of the universal teachers of humanity and therefore as one in whom human beings can best find their unity with each other.
All religions, it has been said, share three basic elements: a liberating experience of truth, enlightenment or awakening; a tradition that interprets this formative experience; and a set of rituals or systematic symbolism that derive from this.
Christianity like all religions can be understood in this way. But behind and before (and within) Christianity is Jesus. And at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with our humanity is his relational question. Jesus asks us who we say he is. What he tells us about himself does not replace the relationship opened up by the humility of his question. It is essential to Christian faith that we listen to Jesus with such unclouded attention that we lose ourselves. His question, if we listen to it, rather than only answering it, hooks our mind like a koan–a thought that stops thought. It is thus that he becomes, as he called himself, a ‘door’ that leads to self-knowledge.
The gospel of John says that the words of Jesus are ‘spirit and they are life’. His question bears a primal power to awaken the dormant, unrealised part of us and to guide it towards the knowledge of the Self. Through contact with the power of his self-knowledge his question persuades us to ask ‘Who am I?’ Immediately it alerts us to who we are not and who we cannot possibly be. Asking Who am I? demands that we face the uneasy question of Who I am not?
I am not my moods and thoughts, my beliefs or my social roles and status. All of these are powerful aspects of myself. They possess a temporary, partial reality. But they are too arbitrary, too conditioned and too ephemeral to constitute Selfhood. Nor can I identify myself with my sensations, my desires, my fears, my pleasures and my pains. Passing emotional states, however intense, are uncertain foundations for a true sense of identity. This simple truth is the universal truth in the Buddha’s assertion of anatta: the no-selfhood of all things, including the human thing. I may say I am victim, ruler, lover, judge, hunter, artist, priest, father, mother, child, clown or trickster–there are many archetypal roles and combinations. But they don’t answer the important question. Until knowledge of the Self has dawned their impermanence will always lead me back to the same question Who am I?–the essentially religious question.
Self-knowledge, as
