Lord, Liar, or Lunatic
In
John 5:16-23, there can be no doubt about Jesus' claim to be the Son of God and
to have the identity and authority of the divine. The Jews, who are fiercely
monotheistic, understood that Jesus was making himself equal with God. This
passage brought to mind C. S. Lewis’s wonderful words in 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.
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