Who Am I, asked Jesus?

'WHO AM I?'

Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and James Cone found themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Who should come along but Jesus, and he asked the four the same Christological question, "Who do you say that I, the Son of Man, am?"

Karl Barth stands up and says: "You are the totaliter aliter, the vestigious trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christo-monism."

Not prepared for Barth's brevity, Paul Tillich stumbles out: "You are he who heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and existential estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities."

Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: "You are the impossible possibility who brings to us children of light and children of darkness, the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contiguity and existential anxieties of our ontological relationships."

Finally James Cone gets up, and raises his voice: "You are my Oppressed One, my soul's shalom, the One who was, who is, and who shall be, who has never left us alone in the struggle, the event of liberation in the lives of the oppressed struggling for freedom, and whose blackness is both literal and symbolic."

Then Jesus stooped down and wrote in the sand, "Huh?"

[original source unknown]