In Matthew chapter 16, Our Lord asks a question of his disciples. He begins by asking them a question, using good psychology to get them talking. He doesn't’t come right out and ask them the hard question…knowing full well how easy we humans get defensive and our pride does not easily take feeling stupid. But instead he asks them “What do OTHERS say?” Who do men say that I, the Son of Man am?”This is easy for them to answer…and they give him several of the ideas that were floating around. Some say that you are John the Baptist., Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the other prophets, resurrected…..
But our Lord does not let them off the hook for long. “But who do YOU say that I am?”
Brothers and sisters, this is the CRUCIAL question, the greatest question Any of us can ever face. it’s the questions that defines Christianity itself. Is Christianity a moral philosophy? An ethical teaching? A “path of Spirituality?” Or is it something else entirely.
As in Jesus day, people in our Own day have all kinds of ideas about who he is. Have you ever heard this one? “I dig Jesus….He was a great moral teacher. Christians have distorted who Jesus was over the years, do they could hang on to power. “
But really, when you look at it, there are really only one of 4 conclusions that one can draw, as to who Jesus is. CS Lewis and others have talked about these “Four L’s” Liar, Lunatic, Legend or Lord. Lets take a look at them briefly. . .
LIAR
The first response someone could have to Jesus, and His hard claims about Himself, is that He is a liar. When he made such statements as, “I am the way the Truth and the Life, no man cometh to the Father but by me.” He knew that this was not the case, but he said it anyway. Jesus was interested in controlling people and as many modern day preachers and cult leaders do, he told people untruths in an attempt to manipulate them.
But the problem of this view is, Jesus was put to death by the religious leaders because of the statements he made about himself. Is it really reasonable to expect that he would suffer a cruel and inhumane death, when all he had to do was back of from the things he had said? Would he really suffer the cross for what he knew to be a lie?
Also, what of his loyal disciples? Certainly when the heat was put on them, they would have coughed up the untruths that Jesus had perpetuated? But the fact is, that most of them went on to suffer martyred deaths for the cause of Christ. Judas betrayed our Lord….certainly if their had been any kind of deception going on, he would have been privy to it and would have given that up for money?
So this idea that Christ was some kind of a charlatan does not hold any water. Whatever else he may have been, it does not seem reasonable to think that he was some kind of liar.
LUNATIC
The second option proposed is that, Christ may have very well believed “He was one with the Father.” He might have truly seem himself as a god or the Son of God…but he was grossly mistaken….he was deluded. So he was some kind of a madman, or a lunatic. He went to the cross believing that He was God, but He was wrong all the same.
As a young man, this option was more tempting to me. In recent history we have experienced such tragedies as Jim Jones and the murder suicides in Guyana in South America. David Koresh and the BranchDavidians in Waco Texas. Marshall Applewhite and those 39 who committed suicide with him. These and many others could appropriately be called Lunatic.
But does Jesus fit that category? Was he manipulative and ego-centric? in Jesus we don't observe the abnormalities and imbalance that usually go along with being deranged. His poise and composure would certainly be amazing if He were insane…..In light of the other things we know about Jesus, it's hard to imagine that He was mentally disturbed. Here is a man who spoke some of the most profound sayings ever recorded. His instructions have liberated many individuals from mental bondage.
Psychiatrist J. T. Fisher states:
If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene -if you were to combine them and refine them, and cleave out the excess verbiage - if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount. And it would suffer immeasurably through comparison. For nearly two thousand years the Christian world has been holding in its hands the complete answer to its restless and fruitless yearnings. Here ... rests the blueprint for successful human life with optimism, mental health, and contentment.
. So no, I would have to conclude that the idea that Jesus was some kind of a lunatic is not a reasonable response to his claims about Himself.
LEGEND
The third view does not attempt to explain away the shocking statements that Jesus makes about Himself. The third view states, that Jesus didn’t say any of these shocking things at…..they were attributed to Him by his follower some time after he dies. Its merely a “legend.” This is the stuff of Dan Brown’s “DaVinci Code” and the “Jesus Seminar” scholars.
But does this make any sense? The reality is the bulk of the New Testament were written and circulated within just a few years of his death. The question I have to ask, is where are the contrary reports and documentation? The disciples were preaching Christ’s Resurrection and His divinity from the get-go. Certainly some one would have provided the evidence that they were changing the things Christ’s taught about himself? And there is no answer in antiquity to the problem generated by the empty tomb. The charge that that the Jewish authorities made,,that “his disciples have stolen the body away,” rings awfully hollow.
The discoveries of modern archeology are pretty indicative that the four biographies of Christ (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) were written within the lifetime of Jesus' contemporaries (no later than A.D. 90). It would be incredible for a mere legend about Christ to have gained the circulation and to have had the impact it had without a shred of basis. For someone to claim deity, to forgive peoples' sins, and to have risen from the dead, is a story too wild and fantastic to get off the ground if there were still people around who know such a person.
These gospels were written in an age of careful historical composition. Among contemporary historians were Tacitus of Rome, Plutarch, the greatest of the Roman biographers, Strabo of Greece, and by far the greatest of all ancient Jewish philosophers and historians, Flavius Josephus. No, the earliest Christian documents, and they are numerous, reliably and consistently relate Jesus teachings on Himself, and the experiences of the disciples with Him.
LORD
So we come to the last possible viewpoint….that Jesus IS who He claims to be, that He is Lord and that He has the power to forgive sins. Or as St. Peter put it, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” This would be the truly rational conclusion.
But there is evidently more to it then pure rationality. For Jesus says to Peter upon his confession of Faith, “Blessed are you Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood (that is rationality) hath not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Christ is saying that human reason alone it not enough, but it is through Divine revelation that we finally get to glimpse at what is True.
One of my kids once asked me, I don’t recall which one, why it is that so many smart people don’t believe in God. After assuring them that there were indeed some very smart people who DO believe in God....(CSLewis is one....Fr. Thomas Hopko is one I know personally...), I answered that it was the same reason why so many “not so smart” (like moi) people don’t believe in Him. That is, that if we believe in Him as King and Lord (as the initiate or godparent states in our baptism service) that has many serious implications for our lives. It means that I am not in charge, no matter what illusions I hold to that effect. It means that I must be willing to give my life to Him, and all that is in it, because it is not really mine anyway.
Thus it seems easier to write Jesus off…he was just good moral teacher…never minding the fact that we are basically making him into a liar, a lunatic or relegating Him to the legendary.
I close hear with a quote from CS Lewis, from his book Mere Christianity:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God
Jesus stand here before us, and he asks each of us: “Who do YOU say that I am?” May our father in heaven reveal to us the true answer to that question.
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