“While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them,

Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?”

(Matthew 22:41-42)

The most important question that can ever enter the mind of man is this, “What think ye of Christ?” More fundamental than to ask, “Who am I,” More packed with passionate concern than to ponder, “Whom shall I marry?” More determinative of the course of one’s destiny than to ask, “What shall I do with my life?” More comprehensive even than to ask “Whom or what shall I worship?” is this question, “What think ye of Christ?”

The Christian church through the centuries has insisted that every person must be confronted with this question, “What think ye of Christ?” And the Church has proclaimed that an adequate answer must be found, or one cannot enter into the fullness of life here or hereafter. Salvation or damnation, beauty or ugliness, social order or chaos, all turn on one’s answer to this question, “What think ye of Christ?”

Why has Christianity staked so much on what people think about Christ? Why has the Christian religion insisted that the crucial question for all human history is now and ever shall be, “What think ye of Christ?”

Because, first of all, the answer we give to this question determines our theology — how we visualize God. Jesus said to his disciple Philip, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” The seeing that Jesus referred to here, of course, was not the glimpse of God in Jesus’ physical form, but rather Jesus’ revelation of God’s moral and spiritual nature.

One of those early Christians writing to his Christian friends put it, to paraphrase Heb. 1:1-3, this way: God, in times past, spoke to our fathers in a fragmentary and imperfect way through the prophets, but in the fullness of time, there came the clear and full revelation of God in Jesus Christ. “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9).

So complete and full was this revealing of God in Jesus Christ that Bishop James A. Pike writes in A Time for Christian Candor, “Whenever since [in human experience] we have observed examples of the revelation of God and of human goodness the most we can say is that this revelation is something like that which we have found in Jesus Christ.” Pike continues, “Yet, while Jesus Christ is `for us men and for our salvation’ the Word made flesh, there is no reason for us to assume that — given the right historical context and given the right man responding aright — there could not be another such Incarnation.”

But I must demur from the good bishop’s suggestion that since there has been one Incarnation there could be another such Incarnation. Bishop Pike reasons thus: “Were there not the possibility of further incarnations, the Incarnation we know in Jesus Christ would be increasingly implausible as growing knowledge of the expanding universe continually reduces our sense of the uniqueness and relative importance of this particular planet.”

For me this is a glaring non sequitur. Why must our awareness of an expanding universe diminish in any sense the uniqueness of any creation of the Almighty in his cosmos? Why should we assume that the possible existence of intelligent life on other planets should have to be a repetition of human life in the forms and problems we know here to exist? C.S. Lewis, in his science fiction stories about interplanetary travel by way of rocket ship written years ago, pictured life on Mars as untouched by human sin, so needing an entirely different method of revealing the presence and power and love of the creator of the cosmos.

No, I cannot agree that the expanding universe and the dawn of the space era make it necessary for us to consider the possibility of other Incarnations. For us men and women and for our particular need, Jesus Christ was and is and ever remains the unique and all-sufficient revelation of God.

The blind eyes of the five Rotolo brothers in Sicily were opened to behold the wonders of sight. These boys, born with cataracts, had all their lives groped about in darkness until modern surgery gave them vision. But with sight there came also heart-breaking disillusionment. The country home where they lived with their unemployed father and work-worn mother seemed huge and wonderful when they groped in darkness from one corner to another. With sight there came the realization that their home was only one room with smoke-stained walls and rickety furnishings.

But the revelation of the moral and spiritual grandeur of God as revealed in Jesus Christ has never led people to disillusionment in twenty centuries, no matter what their progress, but from glory to glory after one’s spiritual eyes are opened to behold the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

What think ye of Christ is a crucial question for every person, for the answer one gives to this determines one’s theology — one’s vision and knowledge of God.

There is a second reason for the crucial importance of the question, “What think ye of Christ?” It is determinative not only for our theology, but also for our soteriology. Our answer to this question determines the quarter to which we look for deliverance.

The nature of the human situation has always been such that man is looking for salvation or deliverance from something that is threatening him. Once it was dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers; now it is the guided missile. Once it was the bubonic plague; now it is global war.

When Jesus in the temple courts turned to those Pharisees who had been trying for hours to trap him with catch questions and asked them, “What think ye of Christ?” he was asking primarily a soteriological question: “Where are you expecting your deliverer to come from?” The Jewish name for deliverer was Messiah. The Greek word was Christ. Long had Jewish hopes centered on a coming Messiah who would deliver God’s people from their troubles. But people could not agree on the nature and the work of the deliverer. Some looked for a Messiah who would be a great general to lead Israel’s armies in victory over her oppressors. Some expected God, himself, to appear with legions of angels to put evil to flight and to establish his righteous, heavenly kingdom on earth.

But when Jesus came, people’s thoughts about the Christ did not coincide with what they saw in him. They were disappointed and disillusioned. “Instead of threatening Rome, he had warned Israel. Instead of rallying the leaders of Judaism, he had sternly denounced them. Instead of encouraging to action, he had talked of forgiveness and love,” writes O. Sydney Barr in From the Apostles’ Faith to the Apostles’ Creed.

Jesus Christ saw the ultimate enemy of man as sin and addressed himself to effecting deliverance for man from that destroyer. With that concept of the Messiah’s mission, he lived and died. For his trouble many despised and rejected him; some scorned him as inconsequential, but some adored and trusted in him.

What think ye of Christ, the Messiah? Where do you look for your salvation? To science? Henry Roth, author of the bestseller Call It Sleep said in the January 8, 1965, issue of Life magazine, “I think that automation and atomic science and technology will give us some new moral framework to replace religion.”

Or do you look to the state as the most substantial quarter whence your salvation may come? Many have, in times ancient and modern, in cultures primitive and sophisticated. The cult of emperor worship in the long ago of Rome’s heyday and the thriving of the omnicompetent state in twentieth century Russia and China are one and the same thing soteriologically — man’s search for deliverance in his own social creations. So we see the rising tide of trust in the state to solve all our problems and to save us from all that threatens. For education, it is federal funds that will do it; for health and welfare, it is Medicare and eldercare; for city slums, it is urban renewal.

Or do you put your trust in your own initiative? An article in Nation’s Business, “The Ultimate Weapon in War on Poverty,” featured the stories of three men: one, a young black man from the Bronx slums; another, a former West Virginia coal miner; a third, a tenant farmer from Maryland. Each one fought his own battle against poverty with his own initiative, his own energy, and his own wisdom, and won out.

But it can never be the state or one’s own initiative or science to which man can look for deliverance with complete confidence. For man and his political states and his sciences are all corrupted with the congenital human disease of sin. Something needs to be done to create within man a spirit in which he can believe in God and himself again and so strive, not trusting in self or his state as the ultimate source of all meaning, but as a favored and blessed child of God. He sees himself not as the castoff and deserted, but as the beloved and ransomed child of God.

George Buttrick, commenting on this text (Matt. 22:42) in The Interpreter’s Bible, writes:

When we probe to the depth of our desire, we find there a longing for genuine renewal. We crave a Messiah who will walk the road with us as companion, and yet carry a lantern that is far better than our human lamps. We crave a Messiah who will not shrink from the shame of our sins, but who yet in his purity can cleanse us of our sins. We crave a Messiah who can grant us power to rise above our dead selves to very life. We crave a deliverer who is willing to taste death, and who yet conquers death to give assurance of eternity. In the depth of our desire the Messiah is — Christ.”

Finally, “What think ye of Christ?” is crucial for everyone, not only because our answer determines the theological framework of our minds and the soteriological trust of our hearts, but also because it sets up the ethical framework of our daily lives.

Some of us who profess a staunch loyalty to a high credal statement about the deity of Jesus Christ sometimes look down our doctrinal noses on the low Christology of Unitarians and such, and sometimes we are shamed by the ethical integrity of those who, though professing to believe less than we about the deity of Christ, nevertheless prove themselves more loyal in obedience to some commands of that Christ than we.

It was Thomas, the doubter, who, when his Lord proposed to go up to Jerusalem where danger threatened, said to his comrade, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

The late Justice Felix Frankfurter, who early left Orthodox Judaism and lived his life presumably as an agnostic, was nevertheless characterized by legal scholar Alexander Bickel on Frankfurter’s seventy-fifth birthday as having an “utter inability to so much as modulate moral and intellectual integrity.” Frankfurter once said to his Christian friend Reinhold Niebuhr, after hearing Niebuhr preach, “Reinie, may a believing unbeliever thank you for your sermon?” To which Niebuhr replied, “May an unbelieving believer thank you for appreciating it?”

Of course, the point is not that we should believe less that we may obey more, but rather the contrary — that what we profess to believe should find clear and courageous expression in what we do.

Unless Jesus Christ is our existential Lord — Lord and Master now in this moment of our existence — influencing what we do and are, neither is he our Savior from that which he calls sin in our hearts and our social order, nor is he the revelation of the God whom we really worship in the sanctuary of our souls. As Richard Watson Gilder’s poem “The Song of a Heathen” says:

If Jesus Christ is a man —

And only a man — I say

That of all mankind 1 will cleave to him,

And to him will I cleave always.

If Jesus Christ is a god — And the only God — I swear

1 will follow him through heaven and hell,

And earth, the sea, and the air.

“What think ye of Christ?”