Just like the great prophets of God, the Son of Man must also suffer greatly, be rejected, and killed. Unlike in the Gospels according to Mark and Matthew, in Luke, the two passages dealing with the identity of Jesus (Herod asking about Jesus [9:7-9] and Jesus wanting to know what the people think of him [9:18-21]) is presented almost as a continuous narrative (the narration is only disrupted by the section on the return of the apostles from mission [9:10-17]). Jesus must have become aware of what the people were saying about him, but just to make sure, he asked those who were with him to fill him in. And what they told him was nothing of a shocker: the people were seeing in him the great prophets of God come back to life. It is important to note that Jesus did not confirm or deny the crowd’s assertions. Instead, he turned the question over to those who had been with him since the inception of his movement. What did they think of him? Who was he to them? As had become the custom, Peter, hopefully speaking on behalf of the twelve, did a little better than the crowd: “ We have come to see in you the anointed one of God. You are the Christ, the Messiah.” Peter’s confession of Jesus as the anointed one of God was followed by a strict warning by Jesus that others should not be told about his identity, “ For the Son of Man must first suffer greatly before he is accepted as the Messiah…” Could this be the reason why Jesus warned the disciples not to reveal his identity? Was he afraid that a premature revelation of his identity would come between him and his following into the steps of the great prophets?
Jesus did not deny the crowd’s assertion that they saw in him a re-incarnation of the great prophets of old because they were right. Jesus did not come of his own accord (cf. John 6:38). His mission was to be a culmination of the mission of the prophets of God who had come before him. The fate that was going to befall him was the very fate that had befallen the great prophets of old (cf. Acts 7:51-52: which prophet of God did your ancestors not persecute?) Jesus follows Peter’s confession of him as the Christ of God with the first prophecy of the passion because the one cannot be conceived without the other. It is in Jesus’ passion that his messiahship comes to full circle (cf. Mark 15:39: “truly this man was God’s son”). Jesus’ mission is the taking away of the rejections, sufferings, and persecutions of his brothers and sisters. He accomplished this by his own rejection, suffering, and persecution. “It is finished,” he declared when it was all done.