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The Marginalized and Oppressed: Who Do You Say That I Am?

The Marginalized and Oppressed: Who Do You Say That I Am?

Last updated on: August 23, 2026 at 2:00 pm by Jeff Hood

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The Marginalized and Oppressed: Who Do You Say That I Am? 2026-08-23T14:00:06-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Who do you say that I am?

Who Do You Say That I Am? – Matthew 16:13-20

Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is. Then he turns the question toward them: “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answers that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus tells Peter that this recognition has been revealed by God. Upon this confession, Jesus says he will build his church, and the powers of death will not overcome it. He gives Peter the keys of the kingdom, declaring that what is bound on earth will be bound in heaven and what is released on earth will be released in heaven.

Jesus does not begin with doctrine. He begins with a question that exposes the distance between public rumor and personal confession: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” After the safe answers are offered, he presses further: “But who do you say that I am?” Peter’s reply, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” is not the product of clever analysis. It is revelation. And upon that confession Jesus builds a church that the powers of death will not overcome.

Any proper reading refuses to leave that question safely in the past or permanently in the mouths of the already-powerful. It hears the same question rising again from below. The marginalized and oppressed, those whose lives are daily shaped by economic exclusion, racial violence, gender-based harm, colonial residue, and the slow death of being treated as disposable, turn toward the church and the privileged and ask, with the same force Jesus once used: Who do you say that I am?

When the Question Comes From Below

When the poor, the racialized, the displaced, the incarcerated, the undocumented, the queer, the disabled, and the economically crushed ask this question, they are not requesting a theological abstraction. They are demanding to know whether the confession of Jesus as Christ still has content. They are testing whether the church that claims to be built on the rock of Peter’s words actually recognizes the living Christ where he said he would be found: among the least of these.

I have sat with people who know that the state has decided the date and hour when their lives will end. I have listened to men on death row talk about their mothers, their children, their fears, their regrets, their faith, and sometimes their complete lack of faith. I have watched people whom society has reduced to a crime become, in the course of a conversation, simply human again. Not symbols. Not cases. Not headlines. Human beings.

That experience has changed the way I hear this passage.

To answer, “You are the Christ,” while remaining indifferent to those whose bodies bear the marks of crucifixion is to empty the confession of its power. The question from the margins forces a reckoning. Do we see the image of God in those the world discards? Do we recognize the Son of the living God in the faces that empire tries to render invisible? Or do we still answer with the safer categories of our time: charity case, threat, statistic, political problem, cultural controversy, problem to be managed?

A Black mother whose son was killed by the state stands before a church that preaches, “Jesus is Lord,” and asks, “If Jesus is Lord, why is your silence louder than your solidarity?” At the border, a migrant family hears you singing of the God who brings down the powerful and lifts up the lowly, and they ask, “Who do you say that I am? Neighbor, or invader?” An Indigenous community whose land is still being extracted looks at those who proclaim that the earth belongs to the Lord and asks, “Steward of creation, or obstacle to progress?”

A woman surviving domestic violence does not need your doctrine. She needs to know whether her pain is too inconvenient to name. The worker whose labor is stolen by systems that worship profit, the worker who is told that rest is a luxury, asks the congregation that speaks of justice, “Human being made for dignity, or disposable input?”

And the prisoner asks another question that Christians should find almost impossible to escape: If Christ is present among the condemned, what does it mean when we decide that some people are no longer worthy of our attention, our mercy, or even their lives?

In each case, the question is the same. Does your confession of Jesus as the Christ actually reconfigure how you see me, stand with me, and risk something for my freedom? Or is the confession still a private spiritual possession that leaves the structures of death untouched?

This is where the church comes under interrogation.

When the oppressed ask, “Who do you say that I am?” they are doing something remarkably close to what Jesus did at Caesarea Philippi. They are refusing the comfortable distance of second-hand answers. They are demanding a personal and costly response. Public opinion will offer its usual replies: social problem, political issue, cultural controversy, individual failure. The deeper demand remains: Who do you say that we are?

I have learned that there is a profound difference between talking about human dignity and sitting across from someone whose dignity the state has already declared negotiable. Theology sounds different when the person in front of you knows that an execution chamber is waiting for him. The words we use in churches suddenly acquire weight. “Image of God” is no longer a phrase in a sermon. It becomes a question of whether you can look directly at another human being and refuse to let the worst thing they have ever done become the entirety of who they are.

Who Do You Say that I Am? : When Theology Has to Become Flesh

The answer cannot remain at the level of sentiment. It must become concrete. To answer that the oppressed are bearers of the image of God, that Christ is encountered among the crucified peoples of history, is to accept that the church’s fidelity is measured by its proximity to their struggle. The “rock” is not only Peter’s words but the lived solidarity those words require. The keys of the kingdom are not ornamental symbols. They are meant to unlock chains: debt, incarceration, exclusion from healthcare, denial of land, criminalization of existence, and the economic systems that turn human beings into commodities.

The promise that the gates of the netherworld will not prevail is not merely a guarantee of institutional survival. It is a promise that communities built on the recognition of Christ among the crucified peoples of history will endure. When the marginalized ask the question, they are inviting the church into that promise. They are also exposing its absence.

And there is a cost to answering.

Jesus ordered silence after Peter’s confession because the title “Christ,” separated from the way of the cross, can become propaganda. The same danger remains. Easy answers to the question posed by the oppressed, “Of course you are beloved,” “Of course Jesus is with you,” cost nothing if they are not followed by rearranged priorities, redistributed resources, risked reputation, and concrete resistance.

A true answer looks like churches that open their buildings as sanctuary. It looks like institutions willing to move money from institutional maintenance toward mutual aid. It looks like Christians who refuse to baptize the language of empire or dress domination in the vocabulary of righteousness. It looks like communities willing to allow the voices of the poor to interrogate their theology rather than insisting that theology interrogate the poor.

It also means being willing to sit with the person everyone else has already abandoned.

That may be one of the simplest tests of Christian faith. Who are we willing to sit beside when there is nothing to gain from doing so? Whose story are we willing to hear when hearing it makes us uncomfortable? Whose humanity are we willing to defend when defending it costs us something?

I have found that the condemned can teach the church something about this. Not because suffering automatically makes someone holy. It does not. Not because every person on death row is innocent. They are not. But because when you sit long enough with someone whom society has reduced to a single word, you begin to understand how easily all of us can participate in the reduction of human beings into categories.

Murderer.

Illegal.

Addict.

Criminal.

Poor.

Dangerous.

Unwanted.

And eventually those categories become permission not to see.

Who Do You Say that I Am? : The Question That Builds or Unmasks the Church

“Who do you say that I am?” remains the hinge of the passage. When the marginalized ask it of us, the church is either built more firmly on the rock or revealed as sand. The answer cannot be borrowed from tradition. It cannot be borrowed from public consensus. It must be given in the present tense and in the presence of those whose lives are at stake.

Only then does the confession retain its power to liberate, both the oppressed from the structures that crush them and the rest of us from the captivity of indifference.

The living God still reveals the identity of the Son. That revelation continues to arrive through the questions of those the world has decided do not matter. Their question is the same as Jesus’: Who do you say that I am? Everything that follows, the church, the keys, the resistance to the gates of death, depends upon how we answer.

The question, then, is no longer safely contained in the pages of Matthew. It has escaped the page. It is standing in front of us.

A woman whose body has been violated is asking it.

A prisoner facing execution is asking it.

A migrant sleeping beneath a bridge is asking it.

A child whose neighborhood has been abandoned is asking it.

A family whose loved one was taken by violence is asking it.

A person whose poverty has been treated as a moral failure is asking it.

They are not asking whether we know the right theology.

They are asking whether our theology has made us capable of seeing them.

“Who do you say that I am?”

If we answer, “You are beloved,” but leave them alone in their suffering, what have we confessed?

If we answer, “You bear the image of God,” but tolerate the systems that crush that image, what have we confessed?

If we answer, “Christ is present among you,” but refuse to follow Christ into the places where suffering is happening, what have we confessed?

Perhaps the most frightening possibility is that the church can say the right words about Jesus while failing to recognize Jesus when Jesus appears among the people we have been taught to fear, ignore, criminalize, or discard.

Peter recognized Jesus and still misunderstood the cross.

We can make the same mistake.

We can confess Christ with our lips while rejecting Christ with our lives.

That is why the question from the oppressed is not an interruption of Christian theology. It is an examination of it. It asks whether our confession has become flesh. It asks whether “Jesus is Lord” means anything when the principalities and powers are demanding our silence. It asks whether the church exists merely to preserve itself or whether it exists to stand where Christ stands, among the crucified, the forgotten, and the condemned.

And perhaps this is where the gates of hell become visible.

They are not only somewhere in the future. They are here.

They are wherever human beings are treated as disposable. Wherever poverty is accepted as inevitable. Wherever incarceration is treated as destiny. Wherever violence is called order. Wherever exclusion is called righteousness. Wherever death is accepted as an acceptable price for maintaining the comfort of the powerful.

I have seen what it means when that last sentence stops being theology and becomes a room.

An execution chamber is a room where a human being is reduced, in the eyes of the state, to a problem that must be solved by death. I have stood close enough to executions to know that there is nothing abstract about the machinery of death. There is a body. There is a face. There is a final breath. There is a room full of people who will eventually walk away while one person cannot.

And that is why I cannot read Matthew 16 as though it is merely a question about doctrine.

The church does not defeat the gates of death by talking about them.

It confronts them by refusing to cooperate with them.

So the question remains.

Who do you say that I am?

But perhaps, after all these centuries, we should hear the question differently.

Perhaps Christ is asking us to look at the people standing before us and answer.

Who do you say they are?

Because the answer we give about them may reveal far more about what we actually believe about Jesus than any creed we recite on Sunday.

And if we cannot recognize the image of God in the person society has condemned, then perhaps the problem is not that God has hidden.

Perhaps the problem is that we have learned to look away.

The living Christ is still asking the question.

The oppressed are still asking the question.

And the church is still being built…or unmasked…by the answer.

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Politics and Religion

About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Catholic priest (Old Catholic), theologian, and nationally recognized activist based in North Little Rock, Arkansas. A spiritual advisor to death row inmates across the country, Dr. Hood has accompanied more people to their executions than any other advisor in the U.S., including the first-ever nitrogen hypoxia execution in 2024. His work sits at the intersection of justice, radical compassion, and public theology. Dr. Hood holds advanced degrees from Auburn, Emory, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Alabama, Creighton, and Brite Divinity School, among others. He also earned a PhD in metaphysical theology and founded The New Theology School, where he serves as Dean and Professor of Prophetic Theology. Author of over 100 books—including the award-winning The Courage to Be Queer—Dr. Hood’s writings and activism have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, CNN, and more. A frequent collaborator with men on death row, he sees theology as a shared, liberative act. Dr. Hood has served on the leadership teams of organizations like the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His activism has earned multiple awards, including recognition from PFLAG and the Next Generation Action Network. On July 7, 2016, Dr. Hood led the Dallas protest against police brutality that ended in tragedy. His actions that night saved lives, and his story is now archived in the Dallas Public Library. A father of five, husband to Emily, and friend to the incarcerated, Dr. Hood rejects institutionalism in favor of a theology rooted in people, presence, and prophetic witness. You can read more about the author here.

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