Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus asks this question, was a pagan city built at the base of a massive rock cliff, thick with temples to the god Pan and a marble shrine to Caesar. Against that backdrop — stone, empire, and competing gods — Jesus asks his disciples the question on which everything turns: who do you say I am? Peter's confession is not the conclusion of an argument. Jesus says it was given to him from the Father. The city of rock becomes the setting for a confession that will outlast every empire built on any other rock.

From the writers we read together

C.S. Lewis

Oxford and Cambridge literary scholar, author of Mere Christianity (1898-1963)

Lewis's famous trilemma — Lord, Liar, or Lunatic — was his way of pressing the question Jesus asks at Caesarea Philippi into every comfortable avoidance. He argued that you cannot park Jesus in the category of “inspiring spiritual teacher” and call it a day. A man who claims to be the Son of the living God and to build his church on the gates of hell is either exactly who he says he is, or he is profoundly broken, or he is a liar of the first order. What he is not, Lewis insists, is simply wise.

Peter's confession is the hinge of Matthew's Gospel — everything before it leads to this question, and everything after flows from it. Lewis's point is that it must also be the hinge of every life that encounters Jesus. The question was asked at Caesarea Philippi once. It is asked in every human heart that reads this text. “But who do you say that I am?” is not a historical question about a first-century Galilean. It is the present-tense question of the Son of the living God addressed to you, today.