Skip to main content

Jesus is...

Jesus is fully God and fully man, together*. That is a mystery that we cannot really grasp, another aspect of God of which we can only stand in awe and wonder.

As C.S. Lewis stated, there are only three options to Christ, three ways to respond: that he is Lord, a lunatic, or a liar. And that is how people in his day responded. At one point, his family came to take him - in that day, that meant to take him away, because they thought he was crazy, and some of the people thought he was crazy: "And when his family heard about it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, 'He is beside himself [i.e., crazy]. He is possessed by Beelzebub'" (Mark 3:21). The Pharisees viewed him as a liar, accused him of blasphemy, and even attributed his powers to the devil. Clearly he claimed to be God, for that is why the religious leaders hated him and wanted to kill him; such was clearly stated at his trial. He claimed to be God, a fact that cannot be argued away. No sane human could claim to be God, but Jesus was no ordinary human. If one even intellectually assents that he is God, then that requires a real response; a merely intellectual faith is not an option. 'Lord' means lord over everything, including our lives, and that claim requires a response from you.

For saved Christians, that is part of the purpose of salvation. There's no cheap grace, no getting saved and retreating to a spiritual comfort zone or vacation mentality. "I'm saved, everything's cool, don't need to strain myself" is not an option. We are saved for the purpose of living under his lordship, of living as his disciples. That's a full-time calling.

In those days, a disciple meant a student, an apprentice of a rabbi. Jesus was a self-trained rabbi, and he calls us to be disciples. That's a full-time thing, not like a student in our modern sense (go to school a few hours a day and come home, like living as a Sunday-only Christian). It means spending all your time with your master, giving up everything to follow him, absorbing all this teaching and lifestyle, and learning to practice and teach it yourself.

* In the early days of Christianity, church fathers and theologians debated this a lot - whether he had two separate natures that remained dinstinct (diphysitism, as this view is known, and is common to Catholicism and Protestantism), one nature only - a full merging of the two (monophysitism, condemned as heterodoxy), or two closely mingled and combined natures (miaphysitism, of the Eastern Orthodox Church); and whether he had one combined will (monotheletism) or two - a still distinct human will and a divine will (ditheletism?). These issues still divide the three major branches of Christianity, though they are less important today.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Evangelicalism's gradual demise

The term "evangelical" was popularized by Martin Luther ("evangelisch" in German), which meant a follower of the gospel. The term was originally a very good and useful term, as it referred to someone who believed in a religion based on faith and following the teachings of Christ, rather than man-made religious rules. It was meaningful enough but also broad enough to encompass a general theological orientation and religious lifestyle. It could include and accommodate somewhat different views or interpretations of Christian belief, including those who focused more on the grace, spirituality and lifestyle of Christ. As such, it was not the exclusive property of one religious group or theological orientation. The meaning has been generally positive in modern church history. However, in recent decades the term has been hijacked by fundamentalists who insist on a narrow interpretation of the term, insisting on a set of specific theological beliefs, while ignoring the C...

Portraits of Christ: John’s Gospel, part 2

In John’s Gospel we have an emphasis on Jesus that is unique compared to the other gospels. John not only emphasizes his deity, but his mysteriousness. The reader is left with an impression of Jesus as a mystical teacher, in the sense that his words and actions are not only those of a profound religious teacher, but of one who is other-worldly. So often in this gospel we read of Jesus making statements that the crowds, the religious teachers, and even his own disciples sometimes could not fathom. For starters, there are the “I am” statements (e.g., I am the bread of life; I am the living water; I am the good shepherd; I am the way, the truth, and the life), which were clearly claims to divinity, for these statements in the Jewish context referred to God’s title “I am,” given when Moses inquired of his name at the burning bush. Jesus makes much use of mystical metaphors like these and others, like all the ‘day’ and ‘night’ references in this book, which portrays him as mystical or my...

Portraits of Christ: Luke’s Gospel

Particularly in Luke, we see a Jesus born and raised in the backwaters of insignificant Jewish towns - born in Bethlehem, and growing up in the small farm village of Nazareth. You would think that if God mainly cared for or wanted to influence the powerful and mighty of the world, then Jesus should have been born in Rome, or Athens, or Alexandria, or at least Jerusalem. Instead he is born to a peasant girl named Mary in the middle of nowhere, at a time when the province of Judea suffered under poverty and oppression. Incredibly, her peasant son changed the world. But he never did it by allying himself with the rich and powerful or even seeking them out in order to implement his program. Usually if you want to start an influential movement, even as a grassroots movement, you would still recruit some wealthy donors and celebrities or leaders to promote your movement. Jesus did it totally opposite. He did not even focus on winning over the religious establishment; in fact, he often chall...