Matthew 16:16
“Who do you say that I am?” That is the question that Jesus poses to Peter. Peter responds, confidently, “you are the Christ, the son of the living God.” While I could write pages about the insight that statement gives us into Peter’s heart, today, I want to focus on what it says about Jesus. You see, it is significant that Peter calls him “the Christ.”
I hate to say it, but I think sometimes we believe that Christ was Jesus’ last name. It isn’t. Nor is Christ an important title. Christ is an attribute of God. Its who he is. It describes his essence. This is what the ancient Jews were looking for. They were looking for a messiah. A savior. Someone to rescue them from their poverty. Not their physical poverty, mind you, the poverty that lived within their souls. It’s the hurt that they struggle with every day. The feeling that their lives are not exactly the way that God planned them and the guilt of failure. Failing to do what God wants and knowing that their best can never be good enough. We struggle with the same things. Truth is, we need a savior that can point us back to who we were created to be. A messiah that can make us whole no matter what we have done. We need a new beginning. A fresh start. Born again.
Of course, not everyone believed this. Many of the ancient Jews did not recognize Jesus as the Christ. It holds true today too. Why not? Because they are looking for the wrong thing. The Pharisees, for example, were looking for a Christ that would promote them. They wanted more wealth and more power. Maybe they just wanted happiness. The savior they were looking for would serve their own needs and fulfill their own dreams. When they realized that Jesus would not do that, the rejected him. Sound familiar?
Jesus didn’t come to serve our wants or dreams. He came to give us life. This is what Peter recognized and Jesus delivered. He rescued him from is poverty, he rescued him from himself. Christ gave him a new life. A new way. He saved him. He was the messiah. He is the Christ.