"WHOM do men say that I the Son of man am?" is perhaps the most pregnant question ever propounded to a human being, and the Master evidently so regarded it. There is something to be gained by considering the exact structure of the question. It is not, What do men say about me? or, What do they say my doctrine is? It is not even, What do men say the Father whom I came to reveal is? It is not. Whom do men say that I the Son of God am? Although the question may not have been such in its immediate intendment, it is manifestly ontological in its implication. The use of the words "I am" raises all the questions of ultimate being and invites an excursion into the widest field of metaphysical investigation. Upon an understanding answer to this momentous question Christ Jesus founded the true and invisible church of God.
The expression "Son of man" seems to have been Jesus' favorite designation of himself, and the fact that he used it on this occasion, rather than his scarcely less favored designation of himself as "Son of God," would seem to imply that in some measure he deemed it more pertinent that he should be understood and known by them as Son of man rather than as Son of God. He did not originate this expression,—it frequently appears among the Old Testament writers,—but he appropriated it in a peculiar manner, and is supposed to have had in mind its use in the book of Daniel. Indeed, it seems not to have been his custom to invent new expressions; he rather chose to employ those with which his auditors were already more or less familiar, and he quoted frequently and literally from other writers, but he gave to them a richer, deeper, and more intensified meaning, until they became, as it were, living things, and he could say of them, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."
Under his inspirational thought and as vehicles for its expression these familiar words took on new meaning and became pregnant with truth, not relative merely, but ultimate and absolute. For it is not to be supposed that Christ Jesus was dealing with any mere superficial or relative phase of truth, or that there were any depths to the meaning of life or being, its laws or its science, which he did not mean to fathom and substantially exhaust. It is evident that he did not expect his immediate disciples fully to understand him. He knew that they did not understand him in many of his simplest utterances. For the mental and spiritual limitations of his disciples and others he displayed the most compassionate thought fulness, in the use he made of the homely scenes from which he selected his illustrations, in the striking paradoxes by means of which he sought to break the hypnotic lethargy that bound them and to startle thought into new activities; and, if it was necessary to veil the starlight of revealed truth as it glinted about the peaks of Sinai and shone in the face of Moses, how much more needful thus to veil in paradox and parable the sunburst of revelation as it shone with full-orbed splendor in the thoughts and deeds of Christ Jesus.
