“Don’t you know who I am?”

In America, that has become a go-to retort for celebrities who assume that the only reason they are not getting their way is because their fame is not recognized. Indeed, one of the benefits to being well known is that people tend to treat you differently. So why would the most renowned person in history—Jesus—want to hide his identity?

It only takes eleven verses into Mark’s Gospel before God the Father speaks: “And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’” Yet 14 verses later, when a demon says, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (1:24), Jesus forbids the impure spirit from speaking. This sets up a recurring pattern in which Jesus instructs both people and demons not to reveal his true identity.

Last week, Greg Lanier—associate professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando—addressed why Jesus commanded others to be silent about him. “Jesus’s commands for silence,” Lanier observes, “form part of a broader pattern of simultaneously revealing and concealing who he is.”