“The Christ of God”

Read Luke 9:18-22

.

The disciples’ recognition of Jesus as the Christ (i.e. the Messiah) is a key moment in all the gospels (Mt.16:13-23; Mk.8:27-33; Jn.6:66-68). Luke comes to it sooner than in Matthew and Mark because of the connection with Herod's question about his identity: “Who then is this?” (9:7-9). That incident was then followed by the feeding of the five thousand which provided compelling evidence of the answer to it (9:10-17).

.

The crowds saw Jesus as one of the prophets (18-19) but Jesus wanted to know if the disciples had realised the truth of who he really is – Peter’s declaration that he is “the Christ of God”, showed that they had (20). This is the climax of the first part of Jesus’s ministry and the beginning of a new phase in which he mainly taught his disciples rather than the crowds.

.

But it was not enough for them to know that Jesus was the Messiah; they also needed to understand the nature of his Messiahship. So “from that time on” (Mt.16:21) the cross becomes the focal point of the story (22; 9:44-45; 18:31-34). The idea of a suffering Messiah was still incomprehensible to them (Mt.16:22), but they needed to learn that this was why he had come (Is.53:3-12; Mk.10:45).