January 5, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Who Do You Say That I Am?

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 138
Mark 8:27–29a
John 1:1–18

“The true light, which enlightens all things, was coming into the world.”
John 1:9 (NRSV)

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
Plato

In one version or another, the passage read from Mark this morning appears in all four Gospels of the New Testament. In all four Gospels, Jesus asks his disciples the question “Who do people say that I am?” From beginning to end, the Gospels occupy themselves with this most consequential question. They recount episode after episode in which Jesus’ identity is questioned, suspected, misunderstood, and finally put on trial. Each Gospel makes clear that Jesus’ identity is shrouded with danger and is tied up with serious political ramifications. Each Gospel is a testimony aiming to correct the tragedy surrounding Jesus’ identity, intending for the church to champion the true identity of Jesus.

The Gospel of John is no exception. Although John’s Gospel does not begin with the story of the virgin birth or with shepherds on earth and angels in the heavens proclaiming the birth of Christ, although John doesn’t speak of Jesus’ parentage or mention Jesus’ place of birth, John is no less concerned with revealing Jesus’ true identity. From its very first verses, making up the prologue to his Gospel, the author John frames the story as one in which the greatest danger for Jesus is not misunderstood identity but anonymity.

You might think that anonymity provides protection, that it provides coverage, but the Gospel of John would argue that anonymity ultimately puts a person at greater risk. When a person is unknown, even insignificant mistakes or mishaps can have more severe consequences.

The summer after I graduated from college, when I was twenty-two years old, I moved to Germany to begin a year of study in theology and ethics at the University of Tübingen. I arrived a month earlier than the start of the semester so that I could take intensive German language courses at the Goethe Institute in the city of Frankfurt. During my stay, I lived on the outskirts of the city and traveled daily by bus to the city center. Before moving to Germany, I had heard that you had to purchase a bus pass and that from time to time a bus controller would come onto the bus and ask you to show your bus pass. Not ever having ridden a public bus by myself before, I was a little anxious about doing everything right. But my anxiety was soon put to rest, because on my first full day in Germany, standing at the bus stop awaiting a bus, I met a young girl, who, though seeming shy, was obviously kind. She kindly showed me what to do. In fact, I simply did what she did. Getting onto the bus with her, I watched her buy a bus pass from the bus driver, and I followed suit. After we each received a pink bus pass from the driver, we took our seats and smiled at each other. For nearly a month, at the same time every morning, at the same bus stop, I met this young girl, and together we got onto the bus into town.

Then one day I noticed that a uniformed bus controller had stepped onto the bus and was asking to see peoples’ passes. When he approached me, I was prepared with my pink pass in hand. He looked at the pass; he looked at me; then he looked again at the pass. “This is a Kinderpass,” he said. “How old are you?” he asked. “Twenty-two,” I answered. I had to follow him to the front of the bus, where I overheard the bus driver say to him, “Well, you know those Asians: it’s hard to evaluate their age.” And then it dawned on me that on that first day of riding the bus, the bus driver had sold me a bus card at a discounted price for children twelve years and under!

Perhaps if I had just not bought a card yet, I would have been fined a fee and forced on the spot to pay up, but since I had a card in hand that identified me inaccurately, I was taken by the bus controller to the police station. Nothing overly dramatic took place, but I did get the sense that I was being treated as an impostor. Besides showing them my passport, an additional photo ID, and my signature for comparison, I had to get a written letter from my instructor at the Goethe Language Institute confirming who I was and what I was doing there. It was all very serious. Frankly I was very glad a few days later when I left the city of Frankfurt to be on my way to Tübingen, where I would spend the rest of my year. I was glad to put Frankfurt behind me. Nine months later, however, just a few days before I would return to the United States, a very official-looking letter arrived for me at my dormitory in Tübingen. It was a letter from the city of Frankfurt, billing me for the processing fee of clearing up my mistaken identity. I had to chuckle at the painstaking process by which my identity and whereabouts were tracked down. But more than that, I realized how seriously identity is taken. (Now don’t ask me if I paid that little processing fine.)

More than just a little can go wrong when your identity is unknown. To be sure, the misunderstandings around Jesus’ identity led to his unjust and tragic death, which all of the Gospels recount, but for John, more tragic than the death Jesus already suffered would be for the world to continue in its ignorance about who he was. For Jesus to fade into anonymity would be the greatest tragedy of all.

In the prologue of his Gospel, John sets the stage for such a tragedy by telling of a plan already gone wrong. He sets the coming of Christ into the world against the backdrop of an ancient myth—better known in John’s day than in our own—about Lady Wisdom. According to the ancient myth, in the beginning when God created the world, Lady Wisdom was at God’s side, serving as God’s premier architect. When Wisdom, however, came into the world that she had helped to create, she was utterly rejected. No one anywhere recognized her for who she was and no one received her. Thus, after wandering the earth, in the end she returned to her home in heaven, leaving the world none the wiser.

We see in John’s prologue that, like Lady Wisdom, Christ too was “sent from God.” Christ too was with God before the creation of the world. And when he came into the world, “the world did not know him.” “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” In John’s telling of the story for us, the same question hangs in the air: Will Christ continue to face the same fate as did Wisdom? Will the world ultimately reject or receive him? Will anyone ever recognize him?

John’s story of Christ coming into the world, however, is more hopeful than the ancient myth of Wisdom ever was. The world that was left dark when Wisdom could not find a home has been illuminated in the coming of Christ. Christ, John says, “is the light of the world,” the light that shines in the darkness, which darkness does not overcome. The theme of light reverberates throughout John’s Gospel. Darkness is always threatening to cast its shadow, but light has a way of pushing it back.

We all probably have a story we can tell about light and darkness, a story about how something we thought was good or bad or beautiful or ugly turned out to be entirely something else, once we saw it in the light. I can tell you such a story.

For our honeymoon, my husband and I traveled for the first time to Turkey. Our first stay would be in Cappadocia. We were really looking forward to seeing its eerie, otherworldly desert landscape. Having just landed in Istanbul, we immediately took an overnight bus to our destination. At some point in our nighttime journey, the bus attendant woke us up to notify us that we had reached Cappadocia. Well, as I looked out the window of the bus, I saw nothing but dark. There were no street lights; no town lights; no bus station. How could we know where we were? Though the bus attendant looked sympathetic, the bus driver insisted that we be dropped off here. The bus stopped; we were ushered off with our luggage; and we were left standing by the side of the road.

Saying reassuring things to one another, we picked up our luggage and decided it would be a good idea not to stand too close to the road. Taking care with our footing, we felt our way approximately ten paces away from the road, put our suitcases down, and sat on them. Not long after we got situated on our suitcases, we heard the howls of animals not too far off in the distance. In a matter of moments, I could hear the rapid steps of animals approaching us. I thought to myself, this is a honeymoon gone terribly wrong. As the wild dogs began growling ferociously, our only defense was to pretend to ignore them and to pray.

And just then I heard the sounds of a call to prayer, and the sun most mercifully began to rise. What we had been straining to see, our surroundings, became visible. We found ourselves sitting on our suitcases, atop a slightly raised platform, with the patio of a small shop behind our backs. Our hotel turned out to be just around the bend, and the wild dogs turned out to be wild town dogs that scrounged up their food here and there. In the light, all that we needed to know in that moment was revealed, and the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly—none of it was as it had seemed just a dark moment before.

In the dark we do not see things as they truly are. We see things neither up close nor in context. We lack both insight and perspective. We fail to see things in themselves and things in relation. And the worst thing is that, when we are in the dark, we do not even know what we do not know.

That Christ is the light of the world is a powerful claim. It is a claim about Christ’s revelatory power. It is not simply a claim that Christ illuminates the whole world, as does the sun, but it is more powerfully the claim that Christ makes sense of the world. In any revelatory experience, there is an aha moment when something makes sense that hadn’t made sense before, when a connection is made that we hadn’t comprehended before or a relationship is recognized that we couldn’t recognize before. Christ is the light of the world not because Christ illuminates each and every individual thing on its own, but rather because Christ reveals all things in their interconnectedness, in their complex interrelatedness. He makes sense of all things, because in him all things, even the things that we thought could never be reconciled, are reconciled. Therein lies his revelatory power.

George Herbert Mead, best known as the founder of American pragmatism, was a pioneer in our understanding of the social nature of the self. He helped philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists to understand that if we want to know a person’s true identity, we have to inquire into the person’s many relationships, because interpersonal, social relationships are what shape a person’s sense of self.

This may seem like common sense to us today. Of course, our identity is formed by our interpersonal, social relationships. And yet, although we know how critically important relationships are to our sense of self, don’t we still struggle, at least sometimes, with the desire to be anonymous? Don’t we still feel tempted to be on our own, free of the responsibilities that inevitably accompany relationships?

In a fascinating book called Enigmas of Identity, author Peter Brooks draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to show how the search for personal identity became an obsessive preoccupation for Western culture beginning with the Enlightenment and has gained greater intensity in our own time. He writes that especially because of social dislocation, immigration, and urban growth, ours is a culture in which personal identity seems ever more important while at the same time ever more threatened by the anonymity made possible by the sheer number of other people among whom we live (Peter Brooks, Enigmas of Identity, p. 5).

Living in a large city, we know how easy it is to be anonymous, to be unknown by name and personality, to mind our own business and not be minded by others. The danger in anonymity, Peter Brooks and George Herbert Mead would say, is that we risk impoverishing our selves. We prevent ourselves from becoming our full selves by narrowing the sphere of our social relationships and their consequent responsibilities.

Anonymity, however, puts more at risk than just our personal selves. As congregants of a large urban church, we know the challenge that anonymity can pose for communities that want to foster relationships and cultivate a sense of social responsibility. When I first began my call here as Associate Pastor for Congregational Life, I knew that the challenge was to find ways for our large congregation to feel like a small church family. More than a few people told me that some people may like to come to Fourth Presbyterian Church because here they can be anonymous. It’s true that at a large church, such as ours, it is possible to remain anonymous. It’s easy to slip in and out of worship without notice. And yet, John’s Gospel challenges us when we are so inclined. John saw anonymity as the very thing the world has to work against. For the most tragic outcome, even more tragic than Jesus’ death, would be for the world to be none the wiser by Christ’s coming into the world. Christ came into the world as light. He came to show us the interconnectedness of creation, the interrelatedness of peoples, the myriad ways in which the world hangs together and goes around. Christ came to reveal the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly—what is, what could be, and what is meant to be. Because of him, we can come to know ourselves—not by ourselves and for ourselves, but with one another and for so many others. Living in the light, may we so become more the wiser. Amen.