Is Jesus God? (Part 2: Was Jesus Just a Good Guy?)

(If you want to know why you should trust anything the Gospels say, check out Part 1: What Good Are the Gospels?)

I was talking recently to a girl from Boulder whose mother was Buddhist while her father was Mormon. Needless to say, she had an interesting take on religion. When I asked her thoughts on Christianity, she had this to say:

“I mean, Jesus was a BAMF.¹ Like, he was totally awesome. I really respect the guy. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to worship him.”

Okay, ignore the language and look at the point she’s trying to make. Essentially, she’s arguing (like so many secular humanists) that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not divine. You know, like those people who say, “I’m all about the love and forgiveness that Jesus taught, just not all those rules.” Like Jesus was some kind of hippie peace and loving everybody and too high to care that they’re sinning. Like he didn’t turn over tables and call people whitewashed tombs. Like he didn’t tell people to quit sinning.

Read the Gospels and then tell me Jesus was just a really nice guy.

See, the Gospels don’t show a nice guy. A kind guy, yes. A loving guy, certainly. But so much more than that. The Gospels show a guy who claimed to be God. Sure, he never said “I am God.” But if you pay attention, there’s plenty in the Gospels that’s more than just nice, plenty that’s appalling and horrifying and insane or offensive–unless it’s true.

The Father and I are one.” (Jn 10:30)

• Wouldn’t mean a lot coming from a Buddhist, but for Jews, God was wholly other. You wouldn’t claim oneness with God as a Jewish man–not ever. Unless, of course, you actually were one with God. Like in a “the Word was with God and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1) kind of a way, not a “make me one with everything” kind of a way.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (Jn 14:6)

• He’s not an option. He’s claiming to be the only way to God. And not just to possess truth but to be truth. I can’t really see a “nice guy” like Tom Hanks saying something like this and not getting shredded in the tabloids for it.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” (Jn 6:54-57)

• Let’s imagine I came to your church to give a talk and said this. You wouldn’t get on Facebook afterwards and say, “There was this great woman who gave a talk at our church today! She was really funny and so interesting. I mean, she was a little off on some things, but overall, awesome.” No! You’d be like, “There was this crazy chick who told me I was gonna burn in hell if I didn’t take a bite of her arm. So strange.”

And then there’s the kicker, the occasion of my all-time favorite G.K. Chesterton quotation²:

“Before Abraham was, I AM.”

• Sounds like Jesus needs to brush up on his grammar–what’s with mixing past and present verbs there, bud? Remember back in Sunday School when you learned that God’s name was I AM? Jesus isn’t only claiming pre-existence here, or even insisting that he’s greater than the greatest patriarch–he’s doing it while claiming God’s name for himself. It’s like your punk 15-year-old cousin was talking smack before a pick-up game of basketball: “Jordan ain’t got nothin’ on me–I invented Michael Jordan and made LeBron James with the leftover scraps.” Funny, right? Now imagine he meant it. He seriously just told you he’s better at basketball than Jordan and James–and that he existed before them and created them. You’d make him pee in a cup, right? Because this last one, this “almost careless” remark–this is earth-shattering.

If you need more, you’re welcome to check out John 10:9, 28, 36, 38; Luke 5:20; Matthew 25:31-46; John 11:25-26; Matthew 26:27-28;  Matthew 28:18-20; John 5:21-23, 26; John 17:5, 21-22; and John 8:12, 24, among plenty of others. I’m particularly impressed by how often Jesus claims that he can forgive sins and that he’s the only way to salvation. Kind of a jerk thing to say if he’s wrong….³

See, if Jesus said these things–and step one of this argument made it hard to claim that he didn’t–then he couldn’t have been just a nice guy, just a great moral teacher. As C.S. Lewis explained, if he claimed to be God, he was either a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord.

“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 up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

Really–read those verses again. That guy was either tin-foil-hat crazy or so evil he’d make Hannibal Lecter look like Rainbow Brite. He sure as heck wasn’t some sweet sage hugging trees and snuggling puppies.

To be honest, my Buddhist-Mormon-Boulder friend had it partially right–Jesus was a pretty hardcore guy. But he made it very clear that if you weren’t going to worship him you shouldn’t bother paying him lip service. As Chesterton said,⁴ “It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgement, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim.” Or, in simpler words, “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Lk 11:23).

At first glance, this simple little “trilemma” seems to resolve itself. People want to respect Jesus, they want to like him. Nobody who reads the Gospels comes away thinking he was loony or demonic. Your gut tells you this guy wasn’t a lunatic. Lunatics are erratic, irrational, incoherent; Jesus comes across as a clever, deliberate, reasonable guy. He out thinks the Sadducees (Lk 20:20-26, Mk 12:18-27) and the Pharisees (Mk 2:23-28, Lk 20:1-8), educated men who were hell-bent on trapping him. His explanations are clear, his actions purposeful. He doesn’t read like a lunatic.

And he sure doesn’t read like a liar. The reason people think Jesus is just all bunnies and rainbows is that he really was–among other things–kind and loving. He preaches love and mercy and holiness. He raises the dead and heals the blind and consoles sinful women. Sure, he could be the most brilliant con man there’s ever been, but any reader of the Gospels knows that there’s something off about that accusation. There’s a reason that even people who reject the central meaning of his life still put him on their imaginary dinner party guest list.

So he doesn’t feel like a lunatic and he doesn’t feel like a liar. But you know I’m not going to leave you with just vague feelings based on stories written about some of the things Jesus did. If I’m going to be a street-preaching hobo for this guy, I want some pretty clear proof that he is who he says he is. For that, though, you’ll have to wait for part 3, which I’ll try to crank out in less than the month that this post took me.

In other news:

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1. Bad-a@#$ mother-f$#^%*#$, for those of you who don’t speak hipster. Pronounced pretty much like Banff, Alberta, Canada. [↩]
2. Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament stumble over something that would startle him much more than it startles us? I have here more than once attempted the rather impossible task of reversing time and the historic method; and in fancy looking forward to the facts, instead of backward through the memories. So I have imagined the monster that man might have seemed at first to the mere nature around him. We should have a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ named for the first time. What should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion about a certain man? Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step. Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgement, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter’s apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ [↩]
3. We’re so used to these verses, they tend not to shock us. If you want to get a real feel for how appalling Jesus was, read Eli by Bill Myers. It sets Jesus’ coming in the late 20th century. As I read it, I found myself getting angrier and angrier at the Jesus character. How dare he say those things?? Then I remembered that he was supposed to be Jesus and that was exactly the point. [↩]
4. In the passage that I already put in a footnote but what if you don’t read the footnotes? It’s too good not to share. [↩]