"But who do YOU say that I am?"

                          

I've been running around like a chicken with its head cut off for the past few weeks so I wanted to take a few minutes and do some deliberate, meaningful blogging tonight!

When considering what to take a look at, I kept coming back to this whole notion of WHO Jesus really was (and is, for that matter). I'm often struck how so many people who would never adhere to the Christian claims about Christ's divinity are perfectly fine with the notion of Jesus as a "good man" or a "great teacher" - a "great religious figure" and the like.

For me, this notion always seemed weak at best. It is, after all, such an easy position to take; it's also one that neatly avoids digging into the substance of the question by concluding the journey before it ever really begins. In what became known as his famous "trilemma," C.S. Lewis took issue with this common approach to the person of Jesus with these rather blunt words:

"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."

                                                          - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Lewis argued that Christ's claims of divine status, of equality with God, were most clearly evidenced by his claims of authority to forgive sins (see Mark 2:5-7), to have always been in existence ("before Abraham was, I AM," John 8:58) and his promise to return in order to judge (see Matthew 25:31-46).

Now, all of this begs the question, doesn't it? What "good" or "morally upright" teacher/religious figure who was merely a man would ever claim these things? Unless of course he was absolutely stark-raving mad. We see examples throughout the gospels of the outrage expressed by those who heard everything he said and concluded that he was a "very bad man." So too do we see the desire to either shut him up or to get away from him quickly shown by those who thought he was out of his mind. In the end, we see the result of Jesus' words and actions - he was horrifically and brutally executed. I guess the authorities didn't think of him as just a harmless, "nice" and wise teacher.

Why was he executed, then? He was executed precisely because he was claiming to be God. Jesus Christ claimed divine power and authority. Furthermore, and particularly unthinkable to ancient Jews, he applied the Sacred Name to himself. This was truly the point of no return.

So now, 2,000 years later, we look at the question. Was Jesus guilty of the gravest of all blasphemies or not? If not a deliberate villain was he perhaps just terribly deluded? Or was (and is) he precisely who he said he was? What's it going to be? Liar, Lunatic or LORD???