Thursday, April 4, 2013

Lunatic, Liar or Lord?

Jesus. Some people claim he's a great teacher while others think he is nothing more than a great prophet. Some dismiss him as a liar or even a lunatic, (a madman), and yet a countless number hail him as Savior and Lord. The great C.S. Lewis once remarked:
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 a 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 patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Mere Christianity, 56)
Whatever people think of him, nobody can deny that he stands at the very crux of human history. As Talk-Show host Larry King answered when asked who he would most like to have interviewed from across history, "Jesus Christ—I would like to ask Him if He was indeed virgin born, because the answer to that question would define history." Larry King was absolutely right as in his answer, he identifies the hinge upon which all history turns. The call placed on each one of us today is to identify the claims for the deity of Christ so to then understand the foundation of the faith found in Christ through the Holy Spirit.

Life beckons us to investigate the claims of Christ for in doing so we come to realize what it means to be a player in God's drama - that is, to be a participant in this thing called life. ‘God does not play the world drama all on his own; he makes room for humanity to join in,’ and this joining in is made possible through the performance of Christ. And from His performance, humanity is given insight into our own personhood as Christ is, according to Hans Urs von Balthasar, "the center of the world, he is the key to the interpretation not only of creation, but of God Himself. . . . God wills to maintain his relation to the world only with Jesus Christ as the centre of that relationship, the content and fulfilment of the eternal Covenant." (Theology of History, 20-22)

What are you doing to gain the meaning of life? Who do you say Jesus Christ is?

3 comments:

  1. What you call him, should be based on the truth, the knowledge and history of Jesus of Nazareth. A liar I don't believe he lied, I do believe that his disciples in order to gain legitimacy among the Jews promoted Jesus to God. The truth is distorted by history and holy men. The treaty of Niece stole many of Jesus's teachings and abolished them to the orthodox view of Christianity. We will probably never know the whole of his teachings or his life, but to conclude he is anything more than what his disciples called him during his short life is ludicrous. Teacher

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fred:
      Great point. A teacher indeed was Jesus, and yet as Lewis points out, so much more. Thanks for your remark and viewpoint.

      Delete
  2. Please find a completely different Illuminated Understanding of the life and teaching of Saint Jesus of Galilee - who was never ever in any sense a Christian.
    http://www.dabase.org/up-5-1.htm
    http://www.aboutadidam.org/articles/secret_identity
    http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/birthday_message/index.html

    ReplyDelete

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