Who Is Jesus?
“When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
This week at the library, my son found a children's biography among dozens of books on the shelf: Who Was Jesus?
It was part of one of those biography series for kids. Nothing particularly unusual about it. I started flipping through it, looking at the timeline and how it presented the life of Christ.
Then my son asked a very reasonable question:
“Shouldn't it say, Who IS Jesus? He's still alive.”
And I stopped.
Yes.
He is.
It was one of those little moments when something comes out of a child's mouth and you realize that formation is happening—even when you cannot see it happening.
Something Is Sinking In
I've had some hesitation lately when thinking about religious education. Sometimes I wonder whether we spend enough time giving children the great truths of the Faith plainly and directly.
There are crafts. Activities. Projects. Coloring pages. All of those can have their place.
But do they know who Jesus Christ is?
Do they know that He isn't merely an important man who lived two thousand years ago? Do they understand that the Resurrection isn't simply the final chapter of the Jesus story?
Apparently, at least one little seed had been watered.
My son saw Who Was Jesus? and immediately recognized something wrong with the tense.
Jesus is.
That made me proud—not because he gave some sophisticated theological answer, but because the simplest truth had taken root.
Jesus is alive.
A Strange Biography
The book itself wasn't necessarily doing anything wrong. A historian can reasonably ask, “Who was Jesus of Nazareth?” A biography naturally talks about someone in the past tense.
The timeline even reflected modern historical estimates, placing Christ's birth several years before AD 1, since our later calendar calculation probably missed the actual year of His birth by a few years.
Then comes His public ministry.
His Crucifixion.
His death.
His Resurrection.
And eventually the timeline moves into the history of Christianity and the Church.
But Christianity makes Jesus a strange person to place inside an ordinary biographical timeline.
Most biographies follow a familiar pattern:
Birth → Life → Death → Legacy
Jesus does not.
Birth → Life → Crucifixion → Resurrection → Ascension → Reigning → Coming Again
His disciples didn't simply preserve the memory of a dead teacher.
They encountered the risen Lord.
“When I caught sight of him, I fell down at his feet as though dead. He touched me with his right hand and said, “Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld.”
The Church does not confess that Jesus was Lord.
Jesus Christ is Lord.
“Who Do You Say That I Am?”
That little library moment also connected beautifully with the recent liturgy.
Jesus asks His disciples:
“Who do you say that I am?”
Peter answers:
“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus tells him something remarkable: Peter did not arrive at this merely through human reasoning.
“Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.”
Then comes the Church:
“He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter said in reply, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. And so, I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”
There is something important in that order.
First comes the question:
Who is Jesus?
Then comes the confession:
You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And then Christ speaks of His Church.
Christianity isn't ultimately founded upon our ability to figure everything out. Peter himself certainly didn't understand everything yet. The Gospel will make that painfully obvious almost immediately.
But he had been given the essential truth.
He knew who Jesus is.
And Christ begins building from there.
Water the Seed
That helped settle something in me as a father.
Formation isn't about seeing immediate results from every lesson. It isn't about producing a child who can perfectly explain every doctrine on command.
We teach.
We pray.
We bring them to Mass.
We explain the Sacraments.
We read Scripture.
We answer questions.
We correct misunderstandings.
We keep bringing them into the life of the Church.
And we water the seed.
Then occasionally, standing in a library of all places, a child picks up a book and says:
“Shouldn't it say Who IS Jesus? He's still alive.”
And you get a tiny glimpse that something has been growing beneath the surface all along.
Maybe that is one of the quieter joys of formation.
We aren't merely teaching our children facts about someone who was.
We are introducing them to Someone who is.