This week on Things Unseen, we've been thinking about the question, who is Jesus, really?

Yesterday we turned to Simon Peter's answer to Jesus' question to him,

Who do you say I am? When he replied, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Near the beginning of his own gospel, John tells us that when Peter's brother Andrew first

brought him to meet Jesus, he said to him, Peter, we have found the Messiah, we found

the Christ. So although we often think of Peter's confession

as a kind of sudden moment of revelation, it looks much more likely that it was the flowering

of a seed that had been planted in his mind by his brother. But now for the very first time,

he was saying it out loud, and he was saying it to Jesus.

That was a big moment.

But what did he mean?

Well, Christ, or its Hebrew equivalent, Messiah, means anointed one.

And we know that certain individuals and objects in the Old Testament were anointed with

oil to set them apart for God's use.

So for example, Exodus 28 tells us how Aaron and his sons were anointed with oil.

Actually, the ritual was so sacred that a unique recipe was used to make the oil, never used

for any other person or for any other

purpose, actually under penalty of excommunication.

Now, all these people who were anointed were intended to point beyond themselves to the

one who was still to come, the one who would accomplish what they could only do in a symbolic way.

The one whose heel would shed blood as he crushed the head of the serpent. The one who would be

the final prophet, like Moses, but far greater. The priest who would come who would be after the

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