Reading: Mark 8:27-38 I spent last week away in Sydney listening to John Dominic Crossan, a highly regarded New Testament scholar and theologian, talk about the parables of Jesus. Apart from coming home to find the dog needing an operation and a stint in the animal hospital after swallowing a sock, it was a challenging and inspiring week.

The message from Crossan was profoundly simple, but at the same time profoundly scary. It means getting back to the Jesus who lived and breathed and died 2000 years ago.

Problem is, Jesus has over the centuries been depicted by many in the church rather differently - as a perfect sacrifice, a redeemer of an evil and lost humanity, rather than a fully human being. One not sent to fix this world but to point to the next.

This is so far from the truth it is laughable. But it is often how Christianity and Jesus are presented. You only have to read the letters to the Editor in the paper to see that. When people read them they may well ask, `What has the church got to do with modern life? It is so unreal and out of touch.` And who is Jesus for them? `Oh, he`s probably just someone who did magical things and then went to heaven, nothing to do with me.` Or worse, he is seen as meek and mild with no possible relevance to our world today.

But is this the Jesus of the gospel? Is this the historical Jesus? Just as the disciples were asked all those years ago, who do we say Jesus is?

Crossan, a historian as well as a Catholic priest and member of a Catholic religious order, has dispensed with much of the baggage that is attached to the stories in the bible. Pared down, the whole bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is about justice, about establishing justice. Jesus came at a time and a place that needed justice and came from a Jewish tradition steeped in it. He came at a time and a place offering an alternative vision of living, not elsewhere, not in another life, but in this life. He presented a stark choice to people, a choice between the Roman Empire and God`s kingdom - a kingdom of violence and hate or a kingdom of love, compassion and justice. But more importantly he challenged the Emperor himself, Caesar Augustus, who claimed to be Son of God and Lord of all. It was Jesus who revealed God, not Caesar, and that was treason. In the end it was inevitable that he was crucified, just as those who cry out for justice often are.

Crossan describes Jesus as a non-violent revolutionary who practised non-violent resistance to the powers of injustice unto death. And in doing so he revealed most fully the creative and life giving presence of God in this world. It was a Kairos moment, a moment when things break in to change direction and to highlight new possibilities. This is the Jesus who stands before us today, who challenges us not to reinvent him as some mysterious figure belonging to another world, but to follow him in this world. We hear him saying, `The kingdom is already present awaiting our participation. The future is here. Don`t you see, you have been waiting for God, but God has been waiting for you.` His parables challenge us to turn things upside down, and to join him.

Crossan announced boldly, `We are people of a person, not of a book`. We are people called to follow Jesus. Until we really acknowledge what this means, there is a temptation to water down his message or change it into something more palatable. Worse still we may find ourselves engaging in endless debate over theological words and statements that divert us from the challenge of faith.

The Church is at a crossroads today. We are at another Kairos moment, a crisis hour, when new possibilities need to emerge out of the old. It marks a time to take back the voice and way of Jesus, and gather together as one for the sake of the world. This means standing for those without resources, standing for those without justice, standing for those without hope and security. This means standing for all of creation which is groaning under the weight of our greed and hypocrisy. No matter how hard it seems or how challenging it gets.

Only then we will be able to live as servant leaders, and carry the cross of Jesus into the future.

Only then can we really answer when Jesus asks `Who do you say that I am?`