I say I am? It is an intimately personal question. If we do not feel its intimacy as disturbing–even intrusive–we have not listened to it. It is not twisting our arm however. Its authority is not violent but vulnerable, not forceful but humble. To ask a person who they really think you are is a declaration of love.
Redemptive questions illustrate what redemption means. This is important for all humanity, not just for Christians. If we can understand what Jesus, as one of humanity’s great teachers, is getting at in his question, we will see where he is trying to get us to. We will be the wiser for it. And wisdom is the principal value that human beings need to develop today. According to the Book of Wisdom, the ‘hope for the salvation of the world lies in the greatest number of wise people’.17
The meaning of any question depends on its context. ‘Are they off?’ means something different when you are at a racetrack, ordering in a fish and chip shop, or smelling a bag of old fruit.
Considering the context of Jesus’ question leads us to look at the gospels themselves and their tradition. We are alerted about how to read the gospels prayerfully. For the early Christians reading and interpreting the gospels was not an essentially academic and certainly not a journalistic undertaking. It was a means of entering contemplation and an integral element of salvation and enlightenment.18 It was both prayer and a preparation for deeper prayer.
As described in Luke’s gospel Jesus was ‘praying alone in the presence of his disciples’ when he put his disturbing question to them. The apparent contradiction is illuminating: how can one be alone and in the presence of others? We can be alone on a crowded subway train or at a party where everyone is a stranger. This is loneliness, knowing no one and feeling known by no one. But there is another kind of aloneness which is solitude. For example, when we meditate or engage in creative work we are solitary but not isolated. Alone, not lonely. All spiritual growth leads from loneliness into solitude. The recognition and acceptance of our eternal uniqueness is solitude. At first it can be more terrifying than loneliness because it dissolves the crowd around us and reveals instead the mutual presence of other solitudes, other unique persons. Solitude is the basis of all relationship. In solitude we run the supreme risk of paying attention to a reality other than our own. Whoever wants to find his life must lose it.
Jesus poses his most intimate question from his vast solitude. He turns to his disciples, his friends and companions, from the self-knowledge in which he has recognized and accepted himself in prayer. He is baptized in self-knowledge. He knows where he comes from and where he is going. The self-knowledge of Jesus, like all human self-appropriation, arises from the creativity of prayer. Prayer means growing in self-knowledge rather than merely performing or mouthing a set ritual. It is about paying attention rather than listing needs, making statements, articulating our intentions or even obsequiously saying please and thank you to God. Prayer underpins religion more essentially than religion legislates about prayer.
You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. 19
Jesus’ piercing question highlights the intimacy which is discovered by sharing a spiritual path. This intimacy is the community of the True Self in which the many know they are one. Prayer is the expansion of consciousness within this communion of self-knowledge. It is light years beyond what our individual egos know about ourselves. When Jesus uses the first person pronoun (who I am) he claims the rare right to say I authentically. It is no longer the little me of the ego at which most of us are stuck.
All relationship is to some degree about sharing in self-knowledge. This does not mean merely what we know about ourselves and what can be verbalised or conceptualised. It is pure consciousness, simplified of self-reflection and free of anxiety. Childlikeness rather than philosophical cleverness comes closer to showing us what this means. ‘Unless you become like a little child . . . ,’ Jesus teaches. His question expresses his desire to share his self-knowledge. Behind this desire is divine ‘love–longing’–as the Upanishads call it.20 It is found deep in Jesus, in God and in the human being, and it unites God and humanity in their common thirst for each other. Behind the question of Jesus is the longing to be loved by those he loves. The selfless passion at work is the consuming longing to transmit the whole of one’s self to another. This is the ‘eros’ aspect of all love. But when this longing expands to embrace all others it has become ‘agape’. The meaning of the universal, selfless agape of the Trinity is that this passion for self-communication is at the very heart of reality. In the minutest atomic force, in the expansion of the universe and in every human relationship. Behind his question, therefore, is his personal insight into the nature of God as a communion of love.
The authority of Jesus, which his contemporaries felt both positively and negatively, flows from the well of his self-knowledge. He knows his life’s source and destination.21 Self-knowledge of this depth consists of more than information about ourselves. It is richer than the most perceptive psychological insight. To know who one is and where one has come from is a knowledge which can only be enjoyed in the ‘community of the True Self’, that is, in the knowledge of God which is love. It is known not by trying to possess it but by self-transcendence.
Self-knowledge is also humility. By putting his question in the way he does Jesus humbles himself and proves the authenticity of his authority. What authenticates it is partly the fact that it can be so easily misinterpreted. True humility is easily mistaken for pride. Some religious people are particularly skilled at masking pride as humility. When they encounter real humility they mistake it for an exceptionally good mask and enviously want to expose it. It is not so surprising that to many of his contemporaries Jesus appeared as a manifest egomaniac claiming, as they said, to be equal to God.
Perhaps this is why Jesus said the first will be last and the last first. His humility is the authority which turns the tables of the ego’s power.
It is never those hungering for power who recognise him. Humility of this intensity is revolutionary and dangerous. It upsets the balance of power constructed by egotism. The ego plays its power-game at every level: individual, relational, social and political. It must find the question of Jesus disconcerting because the question threatens to expose the ego’s need for total control. Jesus was playing with fire when he provoked the ego’s reaction to the true self. We can see it in ourselves daily. Hearing his question the ego rushes to dismiss both question and questioner. This simple question has all the revolutionary humility of a guru, a teacher, a rabbi and a prophet. Whoever truly knows himself can help others to know themselves simply by asking them who they think he is. There is no playacting in this. He communicates himself simply by being himself. Such humility allows the community of the true self to unfold towards us and to enfold us.
Redemption is knowing with our whole being who we are and where we have come from. It is the grace of the spiritual guide or guru to awaken this knowledge. By communicating himself through a gentle question Jesus invites our attention. This has the potential to become a relationship with him as our teacher.
The word guru is not a common term in Christian vocabulary. But that does not mean Christianity lacks a rich tradition of spiritual friendship and union with the guides we need for the inner journey–from the didaskaloi–, or teachers of the New Testament, to the monastic abbas and ammas of the Desert Tradition to the staretz of Eastern Christianity or the anamkara, the soul-friend of Celtic Christianity. The modern idea of a spiritual director can be a somewhat psychologised version of this ancient wisdom of spiritual friendship. In the gospels Jesus is called rabbi, or teacher, more often than by any other title. Yet it can seem strange to Christians to think of themselves as his students or disciples. This