"Who is This?"

     Dear Friends in Christ,  

I’m sure that many of you can relate to a problem that my wife and I run into every now and then. Whenever you are somewhat of a public figure, whether it’s a pastor, a teacher, a waitress, an employer, or whatever, you end up meeting a lot of people. Just take myself, for instance. I have served 4 congregations over 28+ years of ministry. During that time I have also served a number of vacancy congregations. Plus I’ve preached in numerous other Lutheran churches during Lenten rotations and for other special occasions. And in each of those congregations I have met some very wonderful Christian people, many of whom I would know by name, others by face. Well, once in a while my wife and I will be shopping or out at a restaurant or in some other public place and a person will come up to us and start talking to us like they’ve known us for years, even calling us by name. The whole time they’re doing it though, neither one of us may have any clue as to who this person is. While there might be face recognition, though that’s not always the case, there is simply no name recognition. In fact, my very perceptive wife has even gotten to the point where she can read me pretty well and she can tell just by my reaction and behavior whether I know who it is. And if I don’t, the first words out of my mouth once it’s safe to say them are: Who was that?

Well, that is a question that I’m sure was asked many times in some form or another when Jesus walked the face of this earth. Surely the disciples must have asked it that day they were passing through the town of Nain. Remember that story? Jesus and the twelve, along with a great crowd of people, were just entering this tiny village when they encountered a funeral procession led by a widow who was about to lay her only son to rest. Imagine that. She’d already buried her husband. Now she was grieving the loss of her son and no doubt wondering what would become of her in a society that was not always kind to a woman who had no man in her life.

Well, when most of us encounter a funeral procession, what do we do? We pull off to the side of the road if we’re in our car. We may bow our heads out of respect or simply stand quietly as the procession passes. But Jesus wasn’t like that. He had a problem with funerals and his problem was that he couldn’t stay put and he couldn’t stay quiet. So in this situation, he approaches the mother and tells her to stop crying, a rather odd command to give under the circumstances, don’t you think? But then he does something even stranger. He walks up to the coffin, touches it, and speaks to the corpse. “Young man,” he says, “I say to you, get up!” Now if I did that at a funeral, I suspect Larry Rogers or Ed Rankin would call the church and suggest that I be hauled off to the loony farm. But that’s what Jesus did. With the tone of a teacher telling her students to sit down or the authority of a mother telling her kids to come in out of the rain, Jesus commands this dead man to stop being dead. And guess what? The boy obeyed. All of a sudden cold skin warmed, stiff limbs moved, pale cheeks flushed. And Luke makes this incredible statement: “The dead man sat up and began to talk.”

Now don’t you think that after witnessing something like that at least a few if not all of the disciples either said or thought the question we alluded to earlier: “Who is this?”

If they didn’t ask it then, we know they asked it the day of the storm. Remember that bone-crushing, teeth-shattering, gut-wrenching, boat-tossing cyclone that swept down onto the Sea of Galilee like the wind sometimes sweeps through our overhang at the front entrance to our church, turning it into a virtual wind tunnel? Picture the scene for a moment. Can’t you just see Matthew, face white as a sheet, yet with a tinge of green? After all, he was a tax collector, a land lover if there ever was one. He was used to having solid ground beneath his feet. But even Peter and Andrew, James and John, who were seasoned fishermen and veterans of the sea were terrified as they maintained a death grip on the sides of the boat. All this fear in spite of the fact that Jesus was with them. “But wait a minute. Where’s Jesus? What’s that sound I hear? Is that the wind blowing or is that someone snoring?” Sure enough, it was the latter. For there lay Jesus in the bottom of the boat, back against the bow, head drooped forward, chin flopping on his chest as the boat bounced on the waves. Though the disciples knew under ordinary circumstances not to interrupt Jesus’ rare periods of rest, these were no ordinary circumstances. This was one time they needed him more than he needed his rest. So above the noise of the storm they scream at the sleeping Christ, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

I wonder what they really expected him to do at that point because what he does do apparently isn’t what they thought he would do. In fact, Mark tells us in his account that after Jesus did what he did they were terrified. And who wouldn’t be? For he stood up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” And before you could even say the phrase “glassy sea” the wind died down and the sea became…well, it became like glass. And the disciples asked the question that serves as our theme for today, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

In our text for today though it’s not the disciples who are asking that question about Jesus. Rather, it’s Jesus who is posing that question to his disciples. In v.13 he says, "Who do people say the Son of Man is?" And after hearing a variety of answers from them, none of which is correct, Jesus tosses the question out to them. He says, "But what about you? Who do you say I am?" Not surprisingly, Peter is the only one to speak up and venture a guess. And though he may very well have done so in the tone of a Walter Cronkite, “I believe you are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” I kind of doubt it. Rather I picture Peter kind of pawing at the dirt with his foot, head bowed, clearing his throat. “I, uh, I, uh…I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Now, if Peter was hesitant to spit out that confession, who could really blame him? I mean, think about it. Did Jesus, this callous-handed carpenter from that one-horse town called Nazareth, really look like the Son of the living God? There was a disconnect here, wasn’t there? There was something wrong with the picture.

Kind of like those pictures you used to see in kids’ magazines. They’d show a scene of some sort and ask, “What’s wrong with this picture?” And your job was to examine it and look for something that was out of place. Maybe it was a farm scene with a piano near the water trough that the cows drink out of. Or an astronaut on the moon with a phone booth in the background. Or a swimming pool with a car in it. We all know that pianos don’t belong in farmyards. Phone booths aren’t found on the moon. Cars don’t show up in swimming pools. And God doesn’t chum around with common folk or fall asleep in fishing boats, right? Wrong!

Because according to the Bible he does. Col. 2:9 says: “For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body.” And Heb. 1:3 tells us: “The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being.” Please understand, my friends. Jesus was not just a man. Nor was he just God. He was both man and God, both human and divine at the same time. Sometimes we have trouble grasping that, don’t we? We have difficulty picturing the Creator of all things being born, especially under the humble circumstances of Bethlehem. We have trouble envisioning the sustainer of all life having his life sustained at the breast of a Jewish peasant girl, or the author of the Bible being taught the Bible. Yet if you believe the Bible, then you know it’s true. Jesus was indeed heaven’s child. He was the God-man as we sometimes refer to him in theological circles. And because he was, we are left with head-scratching, eye-popping, mind-numbing, what’s-wrong-with-this-picture moments like these in the Gospels: Mere water becoming the finest of wine…a former cripple kicking up his heels and dancing his way down the street…a little boy’s sack lunch satisfying thousands of hungry tummies…and many, many others. The most important of which is that grave – not the grave of the widow’s son from Nain, not the grave of Lazarus, but Jesus’ very own grave; guarded by soldiers, sealed with a stone, yet vacated by the One who had been placed there as a corpse just a few days before.

What do we do with such moments, my friends? Or better yet, what do we do with such a person? We can’t ignore him. In fact, why would we want to? If he is who he claimed to be, God in human flesh, then don’t you think he deserves our attention?

We also don’t want to dismiss him and we especially don’t want to resist him because again, if he truly is the Christ, the Son of the living God, as Peter confessed him to be, then surely he can offer us more than anyone or anything else in this world can. And he can do for us more than anyone or anything else in this world can, including redeeming our sin-stained souls from hell and securing for us an eternal spot in his heavenly kingdom.

So starting today on this first Sunday of a brand new year and a brand new decade, we’re going to be spending our Sunday mornings getting to know this Jesus better under the theme “The One and Only.” My prayer is that this sermon series will help to develop in us the same attitude the Apostle Paul had in Phil. 3:8 when he said: “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Throughout this series of messages we’re going to be visiting some familiar and maybe not-so-familiar stories in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life. And we’re going to do so for a couple of different reasons.

First, to increase your sense of awe that this One who once occupied the throne of heaven and was worshiped and attended by angels thought enough of you to give it all up and become one of us so that he could do for us what we are totally incapable of doing for ourselves. We want to reclaim that sense of amazement that can be so easily lost in the hectic pace and routine of our everyday lives.

But even more than that, my hope for this sermon series is that it will also change you more than you’ve ever been changed before, that as we behold this One and Only week after week, we will be moved by the power of the Holy Spirit to become more like him. Like Paul says in 2 Cor. 3:18: “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, (which is precisely what we’re going to be doing in this series) are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.”

We’ve got some wonderful weeks ahead of us, my friends, and I am really looking forward to them. May I be so bold as to encourage you to make every effort to be here for these services, not so that you can hear an old broken clay pot like me speak each week, but so that you can meet in a new and fresh way the one who alone deserves the title we’re giving him in this series of messages: the One and Only.

      Amen.