Editorial – Who is this?

The staggering answer to this two-millennia-old question is even more breathtaking today – so is the question…

These seasoned fishermen were all too familiar with the wicked mood swings of Galilee’s volatile nature. They were not dabbling in theology. Their question was not born of academic curiosity, but of entirely rational terror. It was an exclamation before it was a question – ripped from their throats in the wake of high drama. The fear of only moments earlier, when it seemed the boiling sea would soon be their grave, had been replaced with a new and unfamiliar terror. The exhausted man these fishermen knew only as ‘Teacher’ had – right before their eyes – spoken to the weather and taken command of the wind and the waves (Mark 4:35-41). Suddenly, the sea was flat calm…  but not their minds. With hurricane force a new and terrifying question assaulted their thoughts: “Who is this?” Only one answer was possible…

Just at that moment, they clearly needed something more than a ‘teacher’! Had Jesus been no more than a great educator, He could probably have expounded Archimedes’ principle of volume displacement to explain why their boat would soon sink and they would be ‘displaced’. But their awestruck question was not generated by His great learning…

Who is this? The electrifying question, asked today, 2000 years later, generates even more electricity… No ‘surge protection’ provides adequate defense against the little word ‘is’ – because, in the natural order of things, we do not expect to apply a present tense to any historical person.

I was asked recently to speak to this very question and the request contained the throwaway comment: “Of course, we’re asking you to speak about Jesus”. Of course! Caesar Augustus, Pontius Pilate, the Herods and Caiaphas the Jewish High Priest were all major players in the biography of Jesus Christ – but the confining word is ‘were’. Each of these ancient contemporaries is today bound by the past tense. They have a ‘was’ or a ‘were’, but they can never again have an ‘is’ in this life. Only one historical figure of two millennia ago can still answer to the question:‘who IS he?’ Only Jesus Christ has de-fanged death and “brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10) Who is this? To answer the disciples’ question for our day, we need also to reckon with the inspired flow of Mark’s thought. Under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, there is a purposeful order to his writing. Just before his account of the storm, Mark records two of Jesus’ ‘kingdom’ parables which humble us for the awesome revelations on the lake…

Our proper size…

Firstly, kingdom growth is as much a mystery as the growth of a harvest from seed. Even today, with our superior botanical knowledge, we can optimize conditions for growth, but we can’t explain how a seed planted upside down still knows to send its roots downwards and its shoots upwards. We still can’t ‘create from nothing’… “God gives the growth”. We can evangelize (sow the seed) and welcome saved sinners into the Church (bring in the harvest), but we can’t ‘grow’ the kingdom. Submission to the rule (kingdom) of God in the human heart happens by God’s mercy, not human political prowess. We have no mandate to ‘take the nations for Jesus’– if His kingdom was not of this world (not political) in the first century, this is still true.

Mark also records the parable of the tiny mustard seed. The spread of God’s kingdom and its blessing is not hindered by the unpromising insignificance of its beginnings. He invades Satan’s belligerent domain as a baby, mobilizes the foolish to shame the wise and the weak to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27), submits to death in order to conquer it and successfully commissions and empowers the most unlikely of evangelists to obey God rather than men and take His liberating gospel to all nations – and, 2000 years later, He still is with us to the end of the age…

These two parables have the effect of reducing proud mortals to their proper size and thus the scene is set for the discovery of… God incarnate – in the boat, in the storm and in control!

Very soon, Jesus would steer his disciples to Caesarea Philippi,a town steeped in pagan history where one shrine preserved the fiction that the Greek god Pan had appeared as a man, and another honoured the Roman emperor as a god. But, by the time the disciples reached the spot – via the storm – Jesus was able to turn the question back upon His companions: “Who do you say that I am?” – and Peter was ready with the definitive answer: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. This confession is the rock upon which Jesus continues to build His church today.

We should not be fooled by the economical, fast pace of Mark’s biography of Jesus Christ. Although his account is the shortest, more concerned with the significance rather than the order of events, there’s plenty of detail to arrest our attention at key moments – descriptions which, applied to anyone else, would raise no eyebrows, but which are great shafts of light upon the fishermen’s astonished question.  Details like: “He awoke…”. Only the Creator could command the natural order. The fishermen had no choice but to conclude that God was in the same boat – though clearly not in the same predicament! Imagine the shock of that discovery – but they also had to reckon with a bigger shock (if that were possible) – they had had to waken their rescuer! This man was so exhausted that he was able to sleep through a raging hurricane and the violent tossing of a boat that was rapidly filling with water. What clearer evidence of Jesus’ real humanity could there be? 

If they had just seen the Creator exercising His authority over creation, they had also witnessed the Creator AS A MAN, calling the storm to heel, as if it were a puppy dog in an obedience class. Far more easily, in fact… Some 700 years earlier, Isaiah the prophet had predicted that God’s Messiah would not “shout or cry out or raise his voice in the streets”. Shouting is the first resort of those whose decibels are proportionate to their panic, who need to take control to compensate for their lack of authority. Mark could have found perfectly suitable Greek vocabulary had he wished to describe Jesus’ yelling against the roar of the storm, but he tells us that Jesus merely “said” to the sea “Hush now, be still”.

The Prototype

It’s important to remember that Mark is essentially re-telling Peter’s eyewitness record of events. Famous for engaging his mouth and his feet long before his brain, impulsive Peter could not have failed to be impressed by the calm, restrained, perfectly confident authority with which Jesus took charge, not of the helm but of the storm. No panic, no yelling, just the word spoken by the One without whom nothing was made that has been made – including the sea. This One who was “in the beginning with God” merely spoke with confidence that these terrifying, out-of-control waves would not resist His authority. “The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring. Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty!” (Psalms 93:3-4)  Who is this? One infinitely greater than the mighty powers of nature… But the question also generates another question: ‘Who is this MAN?’

Why did He rebuke the wind? Simplest answer: BECAUSE HE COULD. A rebuke is a claim to superior authority – and if the rebuke has the desired effect, it is evidence that the authority is authentic rather than assumed.

What we are seeing here must not be separated from the massive context of all of history established by the events of Genesis chapter 3.  Sin was the refusal of God’s authority. Satan, the rebel, had successfully enticed man to join his cause against God. No longer under authority, man lost authority, and this was reflected in the created order which would thereafter work against man rather than with him.

What we see in the calming of the storm is not merely God asserting His authority over creation (which we would expect) but a NEW MAN (See Ephesians 2:11-22) demonstrating His dominion over creation (which we would not expect). The Last Adam is infinitely more than the First. He is fully under the authority of the Father and therefore the created order is fully under HIS authority. It’s important to see this miracle not only as a revelation of Jesus’ divinity but also of His PROTOTYPICAL HUMANITY. He is the prototype, the “firstborn of many brothers” – Jew and Gentile. Everything Jesus is in His humanity (Note: not His divinity), believers are destined to become by the grace of God. (Rom 8:29).

The One New Man is simply the completion stage of God’s call to holy living – Jew and Gentile. The ‘called out’ are the ‘called to’. Before God calls to a task, He calls to Himself. This answers the great universal deficit of humanity: congenital estrangement from God. This is why ‘eternal life’ is defined as the intimate knowledge of God; the New Covenant, inaugurated with Messiah’s blood reverses the estrangement. “They shall all know me” (Jeremiah 31:34) equates to “shall have eternal life” (John 3:16 and John 17:3). Separation from the world – Jew and Gentile – was always for the sake of the world, that God’s re-born children might be “for the praise of His glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:4-6). This equates to being a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 60:3), a “city which cannot be hidden”, a “lamp on a stand”, (Matthew 5:14-15) and “shining like stars in the universe” (Philippians 2:15). Peter understood the function of the one new humanity: “… you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:9)

There is no denying the humanity of Jesus, but neither is it possible to deny that his humanity is of an altogether different order from ours. The authoritative humanity we see in Jesus, the Last Adam, is the Fall undone – and this sets up a contrast that demands exploration…

What exactly happened in the Fall? Human-kind, as a species, fell into deficit. Man became less manly. Enticed to take her husband’s headship, Woman became ‘pseudo-manly’. Adam, diminished by rebellion, became unfit to rule and Satan, the Deceiver, snatched his crown. Adam became the progenitor of a sub-species, a much lower variant of the original, inherently estranged from the Creator, defaulting to self-reliance and self-interest, unsuited to stewardship of God’s creation, governed by entropy, so that decay and death are universally inevitable.

Who is Jesus? He is nature’s Commander, the Devil’s Nemesis, death’s Conqueror, the Last Adam, the One New Man at the head of one new humanity – called to shine with God’s love and mercy for their enemies. He is the Fall reversed. He’s the ‘Last’ because we are not to expect another. The reversal is… irreversible!