Whenever we meet someone new there are a number of questions that we begin to ask to help us determine their identity, that help us to answer the question, “Who are you?” Some of these questions concern a person’s personal history. “Where are you from?” Who are your parents? What part of the country do you come from? The answers to these questions can frequently give us a better sense of who this person actually is, of the environment that shaped him and made him who he is. And these are the questions we have been asking of our Lord Jesus in the last four weeks – “Where are you from?”
But asking “Where are you from?” is not the only question we ask others when we are endeavoring to get to know them. We also ask them about their vocation, their calling, “What do you do?” For just as the place from which someone has come tells us a bit about him, a person’s calling tells us something as well. For the next two weeks I want to ask this question of our Lord Jesus. “What do you do? What is your calling?”
As we ask that question, we are immediately confronted with the title that Jesus uses most frequently to identify Himself, his favorite self-identifier. Jesus routinely calls Himself “the Son of Man.” Why is this and how does it help us to understand Jesus’ calling, His vocation?