Peter's Confession

Hear now the word of the true and living God, Mark 8, starting in verse 27.

And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, Who do people say that I am?

And they told him, John the Baptist, and others say Elijah, and others one of the prophets.

And he asked them, But who do you say that I am?

Peter answered him, You are the Christ, and he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

All right.

Let's pray and we'll move into our text for today.

Holy Father, we thank you for the gathering of our church.

We thank you for the worship, uh, that churches can come together and support one another in in worship, Lord.

Father, we thank you for this confession of Peter that we'll look at today.

Lord, I pray that you might show us what it means that you are the Christ, that that word which we pass around might gain some meaning.

And we might grow in a in a depth of understanding of who you are and who you've shown yourself to be.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Uh all right, a quick poll so I can figure out where we're at.

Who enjoyed the extra hour and had a nicer morning because of it?

Okay.

Whose morning was like somehow more catastrophic, even with an extra hour.

Yeah.

Same.

That was that was mine.

Yeah.

More catastrophic morning.

If we if we added two, I think the building would have burned down and that would have been the only thing.

But um, yeah, it makes me think maybe all those times I just asked for more time.

Maybe that wasn't it.

In today's passage, Jesus asks the question, Who do you say that I am?

Now, this is the turning point of Mark's gospel.

And it's actually this same passage is the turning point in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.

It's the turning point in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

They all hinge on this moment of Peter's confession.

And from here on, after Peter's confession, the Gospels take a shape of a clear march towards Jerusalem, towards the crucifixion.

So here at this center, at this turning point, we face this question: who do you say that I am?

Now, particularly in Mark's gospel, this question is interesting.

The way that he uses this question of Jesus' identity is central to the project of Mark's gospel.

Mark begins his gospel introducing it, saying, This is the beginning, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

So his whole claim throughout this book is to say, if you understand what I am writing here, then you will become compelled to confess that Jesus Christ, this man, is the Son of God, that he is truly the Christ.

Now, what could you hear that could make you confess that?

What stories would you need to hear of a man's life in order to confess that he is the Messiah, the Savior, the Christ, the Son of God?

That's Mark's project.

And so since Mark has been doing this project the whole time, finally he brings it into sharp relief when Jesus asks bluntly, Who do you say that I am?

Consider Jesus had a lot of famous contemporaries whose lives overlapped.

Caesar Augustus, who do you say that he is?

Tiberius, less famous, but you know.

Who do you say that he is?

Vespasian?

Who do you say that he is?

You see, the stakes of answering the identity of those great men of history are so much lower two thousand years later.

And yet, if you were to walk into just any coffee shop down Tennyson and ask who do you say that Jesus is, it would immediately just suck the air out of the conversation.

And people would start saying, This is great, I'm here for a biscuit, you know.

Who do you say that Caesar Augustus is?

That doesn't change the temperature at all.

Two thousand years later, this question, who do you say that this man was?

It carries this unthinkable weight still.

So how is that question answered?

Today Jesus will ask his disciples just two questions.

Who do people say that I am, and who do you say that I am?

And then we'll see Peter's glorious confession.

This identity of Jesus will be named explicitly among the disciples.

Okay, so let's look at this first question, the general perception of Jesus.

Mark 8, verse 27.

Mark 8:27

And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi.

And on the way, he asked his disciples, Who do people say that I am?

We can add a bit more context.

Caesarea Philippi.

It's actually a beautiful location, especially this time of year.

It's at the base of these 8,000, 9,000-foot mountain peaks that are almost year-round covered in snow.

And so it would be a wonderful place to go in prayer and retreat at the base of these mountains.

And in fact, Luke's gospel in relaying this says that this question comes right after a time of prayer, where Jesus was off praying and the disciples were with him.

That seems to be it's this beautiful private space that comes out of a time of prayer.

That's the context of this question.

And that sort of clues us in that something important is about to happen.

Because in Jesus' times of prayer, that always seems to be what preempts these important moments.

When Jesus retreats in prayer, he comes back and he selects the twelve disciples.

When he retreats in prayer, he sets out on his first journey around Galilee to be proclaiming the kingdom of God.

When Jesus retreats in prayer, of course, we see this same pattern right before his crucifixion in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Here, something important is going to happen because we see Jesus' pattern of coming into the Father's presence, even privately, before these important events.

The important event this time, from this place of communion with the Father, Jesus asks the disciples, Who do people say that I am?

Now, we should notice that that first question does not have a lot of weight.

This is just a simple reporting question.

If you're waiting outside the Cozy Cottage or Denver Biscuit Company later today, and you're talking to the people in line, and you say, Who do people say that Jesus is?

It would be weird.

But it wouldn't, it wouldn't be a high-pressure question, because it's just reporting.

And the answer would be varied.

Because they would say, Well, some people say that he's the Son of God, some people say that he is just a great teacher or prophet, some people say that he didn't even exist, some people say that, you know, and it would just be a reporting question.

That's what this is here.

It's a reporting question.

And what it shows us in the answers that the disciples give are that the question of who Jesus is, who people say that Jesus is, does not have to do so much with who Jesus is as it does with revealing the categories and presuppositions that were available to the people of the time.

And you know, this is the way that names often work in our culture now.

You know, if you were to stand outside that same Denver Biscuit Company and, you know, this week say, Who do people say that Elon Musk is?

You've basically given a Rohr Shack test.

And you've held up the name Elon Musk, and then people will filter themselves into different, you know, political categories or social agendas or different categories of understanding, and they'll they'll describe to you the where they get their think pieces from in that sort of answer.

And so, in the answer to that question, what have we learned about Elon Musk?

Basically nothing.

We've learned a lot about the categories of society that we filter ourselves by in these particular names.

But as far as like Elon Musk, the the man, uh we we haven't really learned anything and we haven't gotten much closer.

By the way, this is just a tip.

Um next week there'll be another name.

And the week after that, there'll be another name.

And the week after that, there'll be another name.

Just I don't know if you guys have noticed the pattern.

So I just wanted to bring that to the front.

Uh in each case, I it I promise you there will be no great insights.

Uh, and they will serve only to be a Rorschach test for the things that our culture already thinks.

So if I were to ask you to pay attention, I I would say pay attention to the things our culture already thinks.

That's where the magic is.

Paying attention to the cycle of names and what the particulars anybody's saying is probably a waste of time.

That's just a little pastoral encouragement.

Here are their answers.

And they told him, and John the in and they told him the this summarization.

John the Baptist.

So some say John the Baptist.

That's who Jesus is.

Others say Elijah, and others one of the prophets.

All right, this is the take of the crowd.

Let's look at the categories that they have.

First is John the Baptist.

Now, this is strange because at this point John the Baptist has is dead.

He was murdered by King Herod after a very strange birthday party.

And but there's there's something here where they're seeing look, there's there's this connection between Jesus' ministry and John the Baptist's ministry, and they're intuiting that correctly.

And John the Baptist fit this category of a prophet who came in and called the nation to repentance and called the nation back to obedience.

This is a pattern that we've seen throughout all of Scripture, throughout the judges and kings, we've seen this constant pattern of the nation of Israel falling away, moving into exile, prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah, who you saw up here this morning, getting going out into these exiled peoples and saying, repent, repent.

The Lord calls you to repent out of this disobedience and live up to the name of the covenant people that he has given you.

And so John the Baptist ministry fits that, and people intuit.

This does seem to dovetail so clearly with Jesus' ministry.

Perhaps it's just the same.

The category that we have available is John the Baptist's ministry.

And so here's this strange new per person who is different from John the Baptist in all of these, all these unique ways.

He he drinks, he hangs out with sinners, he I don't want to do like cool Jesus thing.

You know, don't hear that.

But, you know, he was pretty cool.

And the uh um uh he doesn't fast while John the Baptist disciples fast, and so there's these strange things, but the category that we have available is John the Baptist.

Okay.

Next, perhaps this is Elijah.

Now in Malachi chapter four, there is a prophecy that says uh Elijah will come back, and that the ministry of Elijah will take place again.

Now, the the reason that they think, okay, Elijah's going to come back is uh Elijah, as you may remember, never died.

Uh there's no death of Elijah.

He just comes down and he is taken up in chariots of fire.

You know the song.

Exactly.

So they thought, okay, the Elijah's going to be coming back.

Now Jesus clarifies this to his disciples later.

And he explains that the ministry of Elijah is fulfilled in the ministry of John the Baptist.

Now, we shouldn't think of this as John the Baptist being the resurrection of Elijah.

That's not what takes place.

We actually have a proper analogy for thinking of this in the story of Elijah and Elisha.

Elisha continues the ministry of Elijah in the spirit of, or in the pattern of Elijah.

And so in the same way, we see Jesus, or excuse me, I'm making the same mistake that the crowd is making.

We see John the Baptist fulfilling the ministry of Elijah, and that he's operating in this same spirit, the same prophetic spirit, which calls down the idols of his people and calls them back to a full repentance towards their covenant God.

And others, uh others, they just say you're one of the prophets.

You know, they they aren't willing to get as specific.

This is just, this must have been what it was like to have a prophet around in those, in the days that we saw the prophets.

Now, what's interesting about all of these categories is that they're these are all things that are that are really close.

You know, they're even plausible.

The ministries of, the ministry of John the Baptist is about Jesus.

The ministry of Elijah is about Jesus.

The ministry of all the prophets are about this coming Messiah.

They are about the Christ.

And yet they aren't the Christ.

They're pointers towards who He is.

But all the categories that they have to draw on, that the whole culture of the Jewish people, that all the categories that they have to draw on, are just the pointers.

And so when you're taking a survey of who do you say that Jesus is, it's it doesn't have much to do with who Jesus is.

It's just an expression of the categories that the culture already had available to itself.

And those same categories express themselves now through the name of Jesus.

Perhaps later they expected another zealot to arise, and the culture of their categories would express themselves through those names.

The presence of Jesus in their lives had not revealed itself in their hearts that they might see that this is the thing itself.

This is not like John the Baptist's ministry, which is a pointer to the way.

What we're seeing here is the way.

This is not like the prophet's ministry, which is saying, one day this suffering servant will come, one day this Messiah will come.

This is not like Moses saying, one day you will raise up a prophet like me.

This is that prophet.

That is who is here.

You see, that's a new category.

One that does not exist in the culture, one that instead has to be put there by an act of the Spirit and by the work of God Himself in the hearts, so that their eyes might be enlightened to see that Jesus is not one of these other pointers, but he is the very thing being pointed to throughout all of Scripture.

Now, the question becomes pointed.

I said pointed a lot.

Mark 8, 29, and he asked them, but who do you say that I am?

This is the question.

This is the high stakes question of our faith.

Who do you say that Jesus is?

Nobody can answer this for you.

There's no one in the world that can stand in your place and answer the question, who do you say that Jesus is?

This is a question that you must come to terms with.

Likewise, it's impossible to answer this question without skin in the game.

You know, I can answer who do I think Caesar Augustus is, and I can offer something that is that is perhaps completely wrong, you know, a wrong, misinformed take on history.

Something like that.

That was the only take I could think of.

And I can say that in a disinterested way.

Because the nature of his kingdom does not affect me.

But in answering the question of Jesus' identity, I am either aligning myself with him or I am aligning myself against him.

These are my only two options, even to this day.

Because what's at stake in who Jesus is is whether or not he is the Christ.

Now, if we say that he is not, then we are aligned against him.

And if we say that he is, then we do well to align ourselves to him.

You know, if somebody were to come to Switzerland and Dr.

Switzerland were to present themselves, let's say it's the you know middle part of the last century, say like 1939, and the uh we were to say, hey, uh what do you what's your take on this Austrian guy?

He seems to be pretty successful in German politics.

If they say nothing, and they say, look, I'm not gonna pick a side, then they remain out of the war.

But the second they give any answer to this question, the second that they actually answer the question, they're in the war.

If they say, Well, you know what?

I I actually think that he's the last great hope for the best culture on earth, they're in the war.

And all of a sudden the allies are their enemies.

If they say that he's crazed and mad and one of the most evil leaders of any nation we've ever seen, then they're in the war and the Axis are their enemies.

There is no middle ground when we're talking about kingdoms.

You know, in the Lion King, when Scar sings, we're talking kings and successions, even you can't be caught unawares.

That was about this.

When you're talking kings and present rules, the present ruling of real kings, there is no middle ground.

There's no middle ground.

You're either at peace with them or you're in a war with them.

Now we're approaching here this.

Oh well, I'll also say this about I really want to try and compel you to understand that there is no middle ground with Jesus.

There is either a confession of him as the Christ, or there is a denial of him.

And what you think of him falls in one of those two categories.

It is absolutely binary.

You know how we're trying to invert binaries and deconstruct the world?

You can't here.

There is no such process with the question of who is Jesus.

We can figure this out in one way.

And you know, the person who really put his finger on this uh really well was C.S.

Lewis.

And in mere Christianity, He talks about sort of the middle path that culture tries to take in understanding who Jesus is.

And you many of you know where I'm going because we're going to dust off the old liar, lunatic, or lord argument.

And it still works.

I checked it this week.

This argument, it works.

Now, what C.S.

Lewis was trying to speak against was people who would say that Jesus is a great moral teacher, but he wasn't the Lord.

Now, that's an absurd claim, and we'll see why Lewis exposes that that's an absurd claim.

But I think that you would be less likely to hear people say that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but he wasn't the Lord today, because there's a new version of saying that.

And the new version of saying that sounds something like this Jesus was a great moral teacher for his time.

And he set us on a trajectory where we need to now interpret his moral teachings in a new and updated way, which makes sense in our time.

Does that sound more familiar?

So that's the so I want to, you know, just kind of let you know for all of the like progressive wonder of that uh story that I just told, of there's somebody back here, and then we can see his great moral statements that move through time, it amounts to the same argument of saying Jesus is a great moral teacher.

And it it will C.S.

Lewis will show us that it's it's it fails on those grounds because that's not a claim that you can make of Jesus.

But the reason that we've modified the argument is because we want to be even more middle of a road about Jesus than the people in C.

S.

Lewis's day.

Because we clearly want to say Jesus was a great moral teacher, and we also want to say we don't have to follow any of his moral teachings.

So because he was a great moral teacher for his time and we're able to develop his ideas further off into the future to meet our present time, that means we're able to say both things.

This is so jellyfishy.

We're able to say that Jesus is a great moral teacher, but anything that he said, which is a bit traditional for our cosmopolitan sensibilities, we don't have to listen to those.

Yeah, that's pretty middle-roady.

Lewis says, we cannot claim that he was a great moral teacher.

The options available to us are that he was a liar.

Now, people lie.

I grew up in we sold Chevrolets.

Why are you laughing?

Okay, this point needs no more exposition.

People lie.

Point point two.

He could have been a lunatic.

Now that means that he a lie, he could have been a he could have been a lunatic such that he believed that he was the Lord.

He believed in his own heart that he was the son of God, so that when he was saying that he was the son of God, he wasn't consciously deceiving himself, but he was in alignment with himself.

It was just out of alignment with reality.

He really believed it, but he wasn't.

Now, we would not call a lunatic a great moral teacher, and we would not call a liar a great moral teacher.

We would say the only option available for Jesus to be considered a great moral teacher is that he is the Lord.

Now, this is Peter's confession.

Mark 8, 29.

In Mark's gospel, this is said so succinctly, four words.

Even in Greek, it's just four words.

You are the Christ.

You are the Christ.

The wonder of Peter's confession.

In Matthew's gospel, he says, You are the Christ, the Son of God.

And in Matthew's gospel as well, Jesus goes on and says, Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for it is not flesh and blood that has revealed this to you, but it is our Father who's in heaven who's revealed this to you.

Jesus is saying, This is not something you could have known on your own, because look at the answer of the crowd.

You couldn't have drawn this from your own experience because you're the crowd.

Did you know that?

Like when you're stuck in traffic, did you know that you're traffic?

Isn't that what a twist?

It's like the perfect crime.

It was you all along.

So this has to be revealed to you from the outside.

And Jesus says this very confession that you are the Christ is shown to you by God.

It's something to give praise to God for.

But what does it mean?

What does the Christ mean?

What is the weight of this confession?

We use Jesus Christ like it's his last name.

Yeah.

But this is a title, and it's a clear identifier that Peter is saying your ministry is not about something that is to come.

Your ministry is the thing itself.

That's what the confession means, that Jesus is the Christ.

Christ carries with it this connotation of three categories of people that are all melded into the one.

Three things in one.

An internet communication device, an iPod music player.

You remember that?

The first iPhone release?

Never mind.

Three things in one prophet, priest, and king.

All of these offices that we see developed throughout the history of Israel are made one and completed in the Christ who is to come.

So to confess that Jesus is the Christ is to say that he is the true prophet.

In Deuteronomy 18, 18, God speaking to Moses says, I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.

God says to Moses, He'll be like you, this prophet that I will raise up, and he'll be from among the brothers, like you are from among these brothers.

And I will put my words into his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.

This means that for the true prophet who is Christ, for this true prophet, his words are the words of God.

His words are the words of God.

Now, the Lord does not speak in such a way where he tells us something 2,000 years ago and then says, I hope they develop it correctly.

Because I imagine a sexual ethic that's nothing like I've described in the rest of the book that I've that I've written.

I hope they develop this.

No, that is not the way that God speaks.

When God speaks, he makes things, he absolutizes things.

When he spoke and said, Let there be light, there was light.

That is what the word of God is like.

When he said to the seas, there and no further, they continue to listen to him to this day.

The word of God upholds, sustains, and supports all of reality that we engage with.

The word of God is absolute for all time.

The Lord does not change.

So when we confess that Jesus is the Christ, we are saying that his words are the words of God.

No matter how traditional they might seem for our modern sensibilities, they are absolute and true.

This is our confession that Jesus is the Christ.

Jesus is our true high priest.

Psalm 110, 4 says, The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind.

You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.

There is this eternal order of priesthood, which is, you have you noticed that I'm not a priest, you know, this is just a white shirt.

And the uh the reason that that we don't have priests in Protestantism is because our true high priest, a priest is a mediator.

That's what the word means.

It's a mediator between you and God.

It stands in your place to represent you before God.

That is the purpose of the office of the priest.

Our high priest is Jesus, who lives forever to intercede for us.

The reason I stand dressed like the rest of us is because uh we celebrate this reality that in Christ you have immediate access to the Father, immediate, unmediated.

Christ receives it.

Hebrews 9 24, describing this priesthood of Jesus, it says, For Christ has entered not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.

Who is our true high priest?

Who is this Christ?

He is the one who goes before us to the Father, the one who offers the evidence of his sacrifice to God eternally.

John Owen writes about this so beautifully that when you sin and Satan accuses you before the Father, it is Jesus who shows his hands and says, Look at my wounds.

Whatever you would count against them has been paid for by me.

And it is the it is Jesus' joy and the Father's joy to receive this intercession on our behalf.

So we now have a great high priest, the one who stands before God, not not uh not dealing with things made by human hands.

Those were just copies of the thing itself, which is Christ's intercession in the heavens on your behalf.

This is what it means.

This is what it means to say Jesus is the Christ.

It is to say, we have the advocate.

We have the intercessor, we have the sacrifice.

The righteousness that we have is given to us by him.

This is what it means to confess that Jesus is the Christ.

It is to say, He is our true Savior.

And finally, Jesus is our King.

In Zechariah 9, verse 9, it says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem, behold, your king is coming to you.

Zechariah 9:9

Righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

If only Peter knew that this very event is only months away, that he would witness Jesus riding on a donkey, riding into Jerusalem to take his kingdom.

Oh, but how does this king take the kingdom?

It is the strangest way you could ever imagine.

He is condemned by the greatest authority, two of them, in fact, covorting together, the religious authority and the political authority, unite together to kill Jesus.

And they think that they have snuffed out whatever it is that he might have been.

But the light of the world does not get snuffed out, no matter how much darkness surrounds it.

It shines ever more brightly.

This Christ, who is our King, rose three days later, is seated at the right hand of God, and he will later, he comes back later and tells his disciples, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

He is the king of all creation, the one whom all other levels of authority merely participate in the absoluteness of his authority.

And his kingdom is radically imperialistic.

He is here to gain the whole of creation, to bring it into his kingdom and his pattern of redemption.

This is the glory of Christ our King.

So you have skin in the game.

To say that Jesus is the Christ is to say that he is the true prophet.

His words are true.

And there's a terror in that, but there's a wonder in that.

Because he says things like anyone who comes to me, I shall in no ways cast out.

Now the true prophet says that.

The words of God say that.

He is our high priest, the one who intercedes for us eternally before the Father, the one who is the sacrifice, sacrificed once for all time.

The only place that your guilty that your guilty conscience can actually be cleansed is in the priesthood of Jesus.

He offers himself, your one true intercessor.

This is what it means to say Jesus is the Christ.

He is the king.

And to say that someone is the king is to describe yourself as a subject.

And so we come to him as our king, who has our salvation and our righteousness.

He desires and loves to give them out freely, that we might participate in his kingdom.

This is the center of this gospel.

It's the turning point because it is the it is the watershed confession of our lives that Jesus is the Christ.

The center of reality turns on this.

The center of our calendar turns on it.

The center of your life as well.

Here is this crazy fact that we proclaim.

Jesus is the Christ.

I'll just confess it along with Peter.

All right, Tim, are there any questions?

How do you separate the political from God's actual law, especially when at times political leaders try to mix them together?

Well, why don't I describe an ideal?

And then we'll use that to try and imagine something.

So the ideal situation would be that the law of God is uh clearly understood by all of us, by the body politic and by our political leaders.

And if we understood the law of God then so so clearly, then we would think, okay, what is this law designed for?

This law is designed for the flourishing of humankind.

So these are the best principles for human flourishing.

It's perhaps one available definition of the law of God.

Best principles for human flourishing.

So then our hope would be that the law of man would be derivative from or nested in in some way the law of God.

So there would be some sort of logic to the law of man.

Because here are our two alternatives.

One says, goodness is whatever we happen to be able to intuit at any given moment.

And the law of man should match whatever we happen to intuit as goodness at any given moment.

That's one option.

The other option is goodness is described to us in the revelation of God to us.

Because God isn't good, he is goodness.

And so we should try and derive the goodness of our laws from the standard of goodness itself, rather than trying to outsmart it over here by saying, I've discovered something that's a bit more good.

Now, the so I'm trying to think if there's something else to say.

I think there's something more behind the question that I'm not exactly getting at.

But I can't tell exactly what it is.

The point that I want to make is I I don't think it's possible to intuit what a good law would be in some sort of way which doesn't consider the law of God.

How what why why would we call it good?

Like by what standard to use you know Cornelius Van Till's line, by what standard would we call the law good if it were not somehow derivative from or nested within what scripture describes to us as goodness?

Is it just I I don't know what that goodness would be.

Do we mean it's on trend?

You know?

Is it um in vogue?

Is that what we mean by goodness?

Oh I'll put it more bluntly.

If if it's not a goodness that's tied to the goodness of God or somehow nested in the goodness of God, then all that we mean is that it's on trend or in vogue.

Um the way that Jesus describes those sorts of things are um it's like seeds that fall on rocky soil and it sprouts up so quickly, and then it withers away just as quickly.

That's trends.

That's a picture of trends or trendiness.

Oh man, you can't tell when you're in them.

Because is there any question that feels more pressing this week than what should I think about Kanye West?

There's not.

And then next week there'll be another one, and you'll actually get into like heated conversations with friends, as though these things are at stake in some way.

Because we can't tell the difference between trends and the absolute goodness of God.

So so uh so can consider that.

Consider that.

Am I participating in a trend when I'm when I'm voting?

And look, when you're voting this week, uh you're you're playing a game and and you're playing a game of trade-offs, of course.

Um there's no like Jesus isn't on the ballot, even if you write him in.

I don't think he'll be like, oh well, I will it's the will of the people.

Their will be done.

Yeah.

He doesn't say that.

So you're making trade-offs.

Uh but can consider that you're to call Jesus the Christ is to say what he describes as good is what is good.

And if you're thinking outside of those terms, then you're dealing with a trend.

But you can't tell it's a trend right now.

All right.

Let's take communion and pray.

Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Part of our participating in just communion today is a proclamation that Jesus is the Christ, particularly even proclaiming his death, that he is our high priest, that his death is sufficient.

Let's remember that today.

Let's make this our confession.

Jesus is the Christ.

All the wonder that that entails, this is the center of our faith.

Jesus is the Christ.

Holy Father, I pray that that phrase, Jesus is the Christ, you are the Christ, that although it's something that we so commonly say and we use it just like a title, Lord, like a coin that's lost its embossment, we forget what it means.

Lord, might we remember again?

We hear that phrase afresh with all its weight coming out of Peter's mouth.

And when we say it, let us feel the gravity of it and the wonder of the goodness that you are the Christ.

We are not.

You are.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.