“Who Are You, Lord?”

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is our creator, sustainer and redeemer. Amen

What does it mean to meet the risen Christ — and be forever undone? For this morning we are being offered two seismic encounters with the risen Jesus: Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road and Simon Peter on the shores of Galilee. In both, we find a single terrifying truth: to meet the risen Christ is not to be affirmed but to be utterly undone and remade.

Saul’s first words when flattened by the blinding light are raw and trembling: “Who are you, Lord?”. Peter, meanwhile, when he realizes that the stranger on the beach is Jesus, throws himself into the sea – a reckless and almost desperate act. Both men, giants of faith, respond not with polished prayers but with confusion, fear, and vulnerability. Why? Because the risen Christ comes not to decorate our old lives, but to dismantle and rebuild them afresh.

When Saul is confronted on the road, he is, by his own standards, a success: “as to righteousness under the law, blameless”. His entire identity – religious, political, cultural – is founded on zeal for God as he understands Him. Yet Jesus says, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting”, and in that moment Saul’s world utterly collapses. All his knowledge of God,  all his mission, all his certainty  –  all of it exposed as enmity against the very God he thought he served.

Likewise, Peter, after his threefold denial, is confronted with a threefold question: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”. The questions burn; each time Peter must relive his failure. The risen Christ does not offer Peter a private absolution and a pat on the back. He insists Peter walk through the fire of truth before he can be entrusted again: “Feed my sheep.”

Karl Barth writes in Church Dogmatics, “Man must lose himself in order to find himself”. In both Peter and Saul, we see that exact pattern in action: the necessary disintegration of the old self to make room for the new. Resurrection is not the polishing of our existing lives but the beginning of something wholly other.

Paul would later write, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”. And yet we so often imagine conversion as a gentle invitation, a soft whisper. But not for Saul and Peter. Meeting Christ is a violent dislocation. It is a kind of death.

In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it with grim clarity: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” . Saul dies on the Damascus Road. Peter dies on the beach. But both rise again into new lives not their own: Saul as Paul, apostle to the Gentiles; Peter as shepherd of the broken body of Christ.

But we must not romanticise this death. Let us not forget that Saul is blinded. Peter is humiliated. Resurrection life demands first a profound unmaking. Jesus does not meet them in triumph; he meets them in collapse.

Even after their conversions, Saul – now Paul, and Peter would wrestle with the radicality of Christ’s call. Peter must learn to eat with Gentiles; Paul must learn that God’s power is made perfect in weakness. Their lives will be shaped by constant confrontation with the risen Christ, ever larger and more unsettling than they expected.

Fleming Rutledge, the American episcopal priest and author in her book The Crucifixion notes, “The living Christ is not a tame deity but the Lord of the cosmos who meets us always as one we do not know, and yet who knows us infinitely better than we know ourselves.” To meet him is to have every safe and manageable idea of God shattered.

“Who are you, Lord?” is not a question we will ask once. Its asking is the lifelong posture of the disciple. It is the humility that realises Christ is always more than we have yet seen. Peter’s restoration and Paul’s commissioning are not moments of closure but openings into ever deeper journeys of being undone and remade.

It therefore matters deeply that Jesus entrusts the care of his flock not to the unbroken, but to the broken — Peter, who failed; Paul, who persecuted. As Rowan Williams reminds us, in his book Tokens of Trust,  “The Church is what happens when people are overwhelmed by the act of God and have nothing left to be proud of.”

The Church is not a fellowship of the adequate. It is the living testimony that the risen Christ meets failures and zealots, cowards and persecutors, and transforms them into witnesses. This is our hope, our calling, and our peril.

And so we return to the beginning: What does it mean to meet the risen Christ? It means to be forever undone, and, in that undoing, to be remade for his glory.

This morning, Christ asks us:

“Do you love me?”

“Who are you, Lord?”

Our answers will not be tidy. They may be soaked in tears or faltered with doubt. But Christ does not seek perfection. He seeks those who are willing to be unmade, that he may fashion them anew and make them his own.

Amen.