Who do you say that I am? The answer, though different throughout the ages, tells us not only about Jesus, but about ourselves. (testaments).

IN A SIMPLER TIME, THE Jesus People of the 1970s had it all figured out: "Christ is the answer!" A more cynical older generation would reply, "Yeah, but what's the question?"

Each generation has a similar initial enthusiasm for the person of Jesus. "Jesus is the best trip," the high-on-life Jesus Freaks of the '60s would insist. Charismatic Catholics, emerging in the same era, got positively Pauline in claiming: "Jesus is Lord!" In the '80s, youth groups declared, "Jesus rocks!" The word on the street in the '90s was: "Jesus rules." I'm not sure what the precise lingo is for the new millennium, but I'm sure they'll come up with something before 2010.

Does any of this matter? Pope Paul VI thought it might. He once pondered the situation aloud by saying, "Is it perhaps the time for Jesus slogans? ... Jesus is always in fashion because he is always real." Declaring what Jesus means for us doesn't make him more real, but it helps to crystallize our experience. The stewardship of naming things was first given to Adam, and naming remains the way we establish relationship and a sense of belonging. Are we Americans, Christians, Catholics, and in what order? When we say who Jesus is, we also say who we are.

Pop culture attempts to fill in the picture and presents us with the highly conflicted Jesus Christ Superstar, the clown Christ of Godspell, the black Christ of The Gospel According to the Angel Julian, the urbane Jesus of Nazareth, the likeable local boy of The Cotton Patch Gospel, and the saccharine Jesuses of countless made-for-TV movies. Each generation struggles with naming, claiming, and proclaiming the Christ who is most real for them. Each one of us, too, goes through the same process more personally.

The original disciples were no different. They had to answer the inquiry Jesus put to them the same as we do: "Who do you say that I am?" It was a thought-provoking question, and they were never very good at answering more than yes or no in the best of circumstances. They had already followed him all around Galilee, not knowing who they were following or why. They knew the usual responses people were proposing: Jesus was John the Baptist, or the prophet Elijah, or was it Jeremiah, or one of the others?

But nobody knew for sure who Jesus was or what he intended to do with the movement gathering around him. While 11 of them were conferring in mutual confusion, Peter blurted out a reply: "You are the Messiah, the son of the living God!" Jesus calls his answer inspired. But Peter, unhappily, makes the same mistake we all do. He pays lip service to the right answer and promptly shows his true colors when he rejects how Jesus interprets what will happen to God's son when he gets to Jerusalem.

THE QUEST TO NAME JESUS ACCURATELY AND HONESTLY encompasses the rest of history and its inhabitants, believers and nonbelievers alike. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the great architect of Catholic theology, called Jesus the perfect mediator between God and humanity. Nineteenth-century Protestant theologian Horace Bushnell named Jesus the "poor man's philosopher, the first and only one that has appeared."

But before we relegate the matter to the theologians, we should also note who else has weighed in with an answer. Jesus is "a great revolutionary" (Fidel Castro); "a first-rate political economist" (George

Bernard Shaw); "the foundation of my life and my strength" (Johnny Cash); "God's challenge and invitation" (author and storyteller John Shea). Shea also insists that Jesus not be relegated to the role of "divine hero," which would merely evoke our thanks and not our earnest response in action. Yet Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins thought differently: "Our Lord Jesus Christ ... is our hero, a hero all the world wants."

Mary Baker Eddy saw Jesus as the "most scientific man that ever trod the globe" and not surprisingly went on to found the Christian Science movement. American lawyer and diplomat Lewis Wallace professed, "I have come to the deliberate conclusion that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of the Jews, the Savior of the world, and my personal Savior." He went on to write the popular novel Ben Hur. What we say about Jesus has a profound influence on what we do and who we might become.

But we can't speak arbitrarily. Shea notes that in an age when nobody seems to know who Jesus is, "anybody can call him anything." It is reminiscent of the awful religious merchandising of a generation ago, like the Jesus watch that bore a popular likeness of Christ with an ever-revolving heart and could be purchased in the race of your choice. Is this piety or just plain junk?

Certainly the impulse to define Jesus from within culture has to be separated out from our decision to name and proclaim him. During the Enlightenment, Jesus was seen as the ultimate wise teacher. To the Romantics, he was a religious genius. In the Third World, he is declared a champion of social reform, and in the First World, he is the soul of social stability and foundation of patriotism. If anybody can call him anything, does that make anything we want to think about Jesus true?

The influence of the age has a great deal to do with how we relate to Jesus. Benjamin Franklin believed the system of morals that Jesus presented was the "best the world ever saw or is likely to see." But he regretted that he shared the opinion of many in England who had grave doubts as to Jesus' divinity. Mark Twain, who had some bitter experiences in church, announced that "If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be--a Christian."

Others who were not necessarily followers of Jesus admitted to being his admirers. Mahatma Gandhi exhorted his Hindu disciples that their lives would be imperfect if they did not also study reverently the teachings of Jesus. The playwright Shaw said he was no more of a Christian than Pontius Pilate was ("or you are, gentle hearer," he lightly accused his readers), but he still preferred Jesus to Caiaphas. Napoleon Bonaparte was frankly jealous of Jesus. "I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him."

MEANWHILE, CHRISTIANS OF EVERY DENOMINATION HAVE listened earnestly to Jesus question and made their reply. Phillips Brooks, Episcopal bishop and composer of the serene carol O Little Town of Bethlehem, declared that Jesus was a radical. "His religion has been so long identified with conservatism ... that it is almost startling for us sometimes to remember that all of the conservatism of his own times was against him." Brooks' contemporary, Presbyterian minister Kenneth Foreman, agreed that "Jesus did not spend his time guarding the customs; he was sent to his death by the men who did." Lutheran bishop Gustav Aulen of the same era was of the opinion that two words described everything Jesus says and does: He reveals and he liberates.

Jesus was not only proposing something radical. He was in himself someone entirely remarkable. Thomas Wright, a 19th-century dean of Litchfield Cathedral, heard the Sermon on the Mount as Christ's biography. "The sermon merely translated his life into language." Walter Kasper, cardinal and president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has pointed out that Jesus did not have a royal education like Moses, nor was he a prince like Buddha; neither a scholar like Confucius nor rich like Muhammad. His humble origins make his lasting importance almost inconceivable. Aquinas marveled that Jesus alone "chose his time, his birthplace, and his mother." Second-century church father Tertullian noted wryly, "They should have known that he was God. His patience should have proved that to them." And contemporary radio evangelist Josh McDowell may sum up the sentiment modernly when he says, "If Jesus were not God, then he deserved an Oscar."

YET NO LESS AN AUTHORITY THAN THE HOLY OFFICE OF THE Vatican cautioned us in a 1907 decree that it is unlawful "to believe that the Christ of history is far inferior to the Christ who is the object of faith." In plain language, we can't abandon the human Jesus in favor of the divine Lord without entering into an unreal relationship. God became flesh precisely because humanity had trouble relating to the cosmic Lord of All. Perhaps Emily Dickinson was thinking along the same lines when she noted, "When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his home, we turn away, but when he confides in us that he is `acquainted with Grief,' we listen, for that is also acquaintance of our own."

This isn't to say we should be overly anxious for details of the historical Jesus that are not helpful to our faith. Once I read a newspaper report of an analysis of the Shroud of Turin that mentioned that the man represented by the shroud would have been 5 feet, 10 inches tall, weighed about 175 pounds, and had a "Danny Thomas" nose. Is this something we need to know? A too literal attachment to the incidentals of Jesus' historical life has, in the opinion of some Catholics, muddied the waters surrounding who--men or women--might bear the image of Christ in ordination. "The Vatican should be reminded that they are not casting the part of Jesus in a play when they select candidates for ordination," author and activist Yvonne Goulet has gone on record as saying.

If Jesus cannot be properly imaged by a woman, someone neglected to tell English mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who in the 14th century called Jesus "our Mother in kind, in our substantial making--in whom we are grounded and rooted; and he is our Mother of mercy, in taking our sensuality.... For in our Mother Christ, we have profit and increase; and in mercy, he reformeth and restoreth us." If that sounds too far out there, remember that Jesus himself compared his love for Jerusalem to the love of a hen for her chicks.

Saint Teresa of Avila, who was favored with visions of Jesus from time to time, tells us he almost always appeared to her as risen--except when she was suffering and needed the assurance of seeing him likewise wounded. Is this the real Christ, the one she saw, more real than the one who exists for us and in our time?

For me, the German theologian Martin Kahler speaks close to the heart of the matter: "The real Christ is the preached Christ." The Jesus who lives today is the one we hear proclaimed in our churches and to whom we give witness in our lives. This makes the Sunday experience the most critical responsibility of church leaders. Christ must be communicated urgently to us, and through us, to all the world.

Dorothy Sayers, more famous for her detective novels than her theology, held the most dreadful crime of Christianity to be that Jesus had somehow been rendered dull by the churches. "The people who hanged Jesus never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore--on the contrary; they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium." Let it not be so with us.

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of Invitation to Catholicism (ACTA Publications) and a collaborator on the homily series "This Sunday's Scripture," available through Twenty-Third Publications.