Who Is Jesus Christ
The short answer
Ask ten people who Jesus Christ is and you may get ten different answers: a wise teacher, a distant historical figure, a personal friend, a myth. The New Testament writers were already aware of this problem, and two passages in particular refuse to let us settle for a Jesus of our own making.
The first is Revelation 1, where John — a man who had known Jesus personally — sees the risen Christ and falls at his feet "like a dead man." This is not the reaction of someone greeting an old companion. The vision shows Jesus with blazing eyes, a voice like rushing water, and a face shining like the sun. Whoever Jesus is, he is not small, and he is not tame. John's collapse tells us that seeing Jesus clearly produces awe before it produces comfort.
The second passage is the poem in Philippians 2, one of the earliest statements of Christian belief we possess. It says that Jesus, "existing in the form of God," did not cling to that status but emptied himself, became human, and died on a cross — and that God has therefore exalted him above every name. This is the theological ground beneath John's vision. The earliest Christians were not gradually promoting a good man into a god; from the beginning they confessed that in Jesus, God himself had taken human flesh.
Put the two passages together and an answer emerges. Who is Jesus Christ? He is genuinely human, genuinely knowable, and the New Testament insists that a real relationship with him is possible. But he is also the one in whom God became incarnate — which means intimacy with Jesus is never casual. It is closeness to the living God, and it rightly begins on our knees.
What scholars say
In these two passages, N. T. Wright takes up the question of who Jesus really is: the first warns that genuine intimacy with Jesus cannot mean treating him as a merely comforting figure, and the second points to the Philippians poem as a very early statement of Christian faith that later theology recognized as the classic doctrine of the incarnation.
“For some, Jesus is just a faraway figure of first-century fantasy. For others, including some of today’s enthusiastic Christians, Jesus is the one with whom we can establish a personal relationship of loving intimacy. John would agree with the second of these, but he would warn against imagining that Jesus is therefore a cosy figure, one who merely makes us feel happy inside. To see Jesus as he is would drive us not to snuggle up to him, but to fall at his feet as though we were dead.”
“There are some things that can, perhaps, only be said in poetry, and maybe this is one of them. The poem Paul places here, at the heart of his letter, answers this question and many, many more – all in order to give the deep groundwork for the challenge to self-sacrificing unity within the church. People still debate whether Paul wrote the poem himself, or was quoting an even earlier Christian writer. What is quite apparent is that here we have a very, very early statement of Christian faith in who Jesus was and what he accomplished, at which subsequent theology has gazed in awe for its remarkably full and rich statement of what was later seen as the classic doctrine of the incarnation of God in Jesus the Messiah.”
What it means for you
It is easy to carry around a version of Jesus shaped by our preferences — a Jesus who agrees with us, soothes us, and never unsettles us. These passages invite an honest question: is the Jesus I relate to the Jesus the New Testament actually describes? The good news is that the correction runs in a hopeful direction. The one before whom John fell as though dead is the same one who, in Philippians, emptied himself for our sake. Letting Jesus be bigger than our picture of him does not push him further away; it makes the intimacy he offers weightier and more real.
In context
Revelation 1 opens John's vision on the island of Patmos, where he is worshiping on the Lord's day when he hears a voice and turns to see the glorified Christ standing among seven golden lampstands — a scene that sets the tone for the letters and visions that follow. Philippians 2 sits at the heart of Paul's letter to the church in Philippi: he urges believers toward humility and unity, then grounds that appeal in a poetic account of Christ's self-emptying, incarnation, death, and exaltation.