In response to Peter’s answer Jesus ‘gave them strict orders not to tell this to anyone.’ He did not reject Peter’s confession of faith. His reason for strictly instructing them to keep silent becomes clear in what follows immediately in the next section of the gospel. Jesus links his question to the personal cost of discipleship. The cost is nothing less than everything: to leave self behind and to imitate the self-transcendence of his Cross and Resurrection. By binding his disciples to silence about the answer to his question he was doing what he did when he ordered them not to publicise his miracles. His messiah-ship, like his powers, could easily divert people from the real challenge he was presenting. Everything else was a side-show beside the central challenge of listening to his question with a depth of attention that would awaken self-knowledge. His question summons a response from a silent depth within the heart itself.
Silence harmonizes the many different answers that are possible and will test their authenticity. We can only validly say who he is when we know who we are. Silence is the source of both insight and tolerance. For example, in Matthew’s account of the scene Peter’s answer is more elaborate and is commended by Jesus. But the same injunction to silence follows:
Simon Peter answered: ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God’ Then Jesus said: ‘Simon son of Jonah, you are favoured indeed! You did not learn that from mortal man; it was revealed to you by my heavenly Father. And I say this to you: You are Peter, the Rock; and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall never conquer it.’ He then gave his disciples strict orders not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.14
Some scholars think that Jesus’ response to Peter’s answer suggests a later addition to an original text or story. For his readership Matthew wanted to emphasise Peter’s preeminence among the apostles. Luke’s version does not mean we should never give a thoughtfully worded answer to the question. Matthew’s account does not say there is only one possible formula. These differences between the two gospels illustrate how all the gospels must be read, not that they are contradicting each other. Matthew and Luke both show Jesus emphasising silence. He did not seem to believe that his mission would be helped by his being popularly acclaimed as the ‘messiah’. The same injunction to silence is found in the ‘secrecy motif’ of Mark’s gospel, the earliest of the four gospels, concerning miracles. Mark also reports Peter’s response but without Jesus’ comment.
The identity of Jesus can be validly expressed in diverse and even divergent ways. The most eloquent and universal expressions are at home in silence. The main purpose of this book is to stress the often neglected value of silence in responding to the question of Jesus that, more than any other question, defines our relationship to him. It is the indefinable silence at the heart of the mystery of Jesus which ultimately communicates his true identity to those who encounter it. And it is a universal identity. He belongs to the Jewish tradition messianically. But he has come to belong no less to the rest of humanity. Every religious tradition will employ its own terms to describe him. If there is a unity in all these responses it will not be linguistic or theological but a mystical unity beyond words, concepts and images. We know the highest truth by love not thought: the Christian mystical tradition, together with its sister traditions, is sure of this. The silence of love, not logic, is the sharing of one’s self-knowledge with another.
Jesus’ question welled up from the silence of his own self-knowledge. He posed it while he was ‘praying alone in the presence of his disciples’. This context of prayer is all-important for understanding his question. It is the context of discipleship and spiritual awakening: community, friendship and shared consciousness. Let us look at what this context of prayer, in which the defining question of Christian identity is first raised, means for us today. By understanding prayer we learn how to read the gospels, the essential texts of Christian faith. We also learn what discipleship means and how to see prayer as a journey of the soul into the boundlessness of God.
Who do you say I am? The answer is to listen.
Jesus is not there in history just to be looked at, examined, and judged. He is not here only to be observed, to be seen with the eyes of the body or the mind. He is to be known in relationship–known with the eye of the heart. When he is seen just as an object of scholarship or historical analysis, the perceptive faculty of faith is lost. Faith is the bonding-power of all relationships because it allows inter-subjective knowledge to develop. It disintegrates and degenerates into scepticism as soon as the person we relate to becomes an object. When we coldly objectify Jesus we miss our appointment with him. His power as spiritual teacher, liberator, healer and redeemer, the same today, yesterday and tomorrow, passes us by. He could work no miracles there because of their lack of faith.15
Of course, historical and critical faculties should be employed in reading the gospel and in investigating Jesus as a historical figure. To repress this kind of inquiry merely blocks the deeper understanding that resists rational analysis. We need to ask who the historical Jesus was and what he actually said. And what people said he was and what they say he said. But the ‘pursuit of the historical Jesus’ is the beginning not the end of the quest we embark on by listening to his question.
It all depends on how deeply we listen, how much time and attention we give to it. The quality of our attention enhances the way we ask all questions about him. It affects the way we encounter him as a personal reality because it moves the place of meeting from the mind to the heart. By heart I do not mean an emotional or physical centre. Heart is a universal term used by spiritual traditions to designate that centre of integrated consciousness where all ways of knowing are focussed. It is where sense becomes spiritual, where imagination may become insight. It is the centre and the wholeness of the 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