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Jesus’ identity   

“When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Phil­ippi he asked his dis­ciples, ‘who do people say that the Son of Man is?’” (Matt 16:13). Not­with­stand­ing Jesus knew he is in the Fath­er and the Fath­er in him (cf. John 14:10), he still deemed it neces­sary to safe­guard his iden­tity. To avoid con­fu­sion, he inquired from the Apostles what and who they and oth­ers take him to be. Dur­ing the course of his mis­sion, in the region of Caesarea Phil­ippi, he inter­rog­ated them thus: “who do people say that the Son of Man is? His Apostles answered and informed him that people see him dif­fer­ently. They see you as John the Baptist, Eli­jah, Jeremi­ah or one of the proph­ets (Matt 16:13–14). Jesus must have seen how dif­fer­ently people reacted to his teach­ings that he wanted to know why. As seen from the Apostles’ reply, there are at least four per­son­al­it­ies. That is four iden­tit­ies. And Jesus was taken to be one of them. Still not sat­is­fied with extern­al iden­ti­fic­a­tion, Jesus furthered his inter­rog­a­tion and deman­ded an answer from the inner caucus. That is, from the Apostles them­selves (Matt 16:15). On behalf of the Twelve, Peter iden­ti­fied Jesus as the “Chris­tos, the Son of the liv­ing God” (Matt 16:16). Jesus was sat­is­fied that at least, his intim­ate fol­low­ers have finally recog­nized his identity.

Consequence of identity loss

Had Jesus lived accord­ing to the indic­a­tions of the people, he would have lost his iden­tity. This fun­da­ment­al. Today, things are not going well in the world. There are wars at almost every corner of the uni­verse. There are series of unre­solved con­flicts between indi­vidu­als, com­munit­ies, nations, reli­gions and fam­il­ies. In some nations (like Niger­ia), cor­rup­tion has ris­en to the highest decim­al point and people are cor­rupt bey­ond cor­rup­tion. A world cre­ated in love and filled with love by God has unfor­tu­nately been stained by and with hatred by the same Man cre­ated in God’s image and like­ness. Though we pro­fess strong faith in God, our beha­viour and inter­ac­tion with one anoth­er do not por­tray such profession.…

FOR DETAILS, GET YOUR OWN COPY OF THE BOOK “THE WORD OF LIFE: SUNDAY REFLECTIONS” (vol. I)!! The reflec­tion for the 21^st Sunday is found on pages 415–421. Happy reading!

For details on how to get it, con­tact the author on this link: https://m.me/uchennabiblia?fbclid=IwAR2yeg4a6sDGBp9QGkIvKj6FSADumMokN6lshdE0zuo-JHs6qOmlhA7jyHo or email me at: postmaster@uchennabiblia.com or simply send an SMS on 08116100926, and I will get back to you.

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