Post-Easter Reflections

“Who do people say that I am?”

Jesus asked his disciples this question weeks before he was crucified.

They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets."

"But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" (Matthew 21:13-15)

This has been the question asked countless times throughout the last two thousand years. Who is Jesus, really? The question needs to be answered by each one of us. The remembrance of Good Friday and celebration of Easter has brought this question to my mind and I want to ask it of you. Who do you say Jesus is?

C.S Lewis expounded on this question better than I ever could so I’ll quote him now:

“… you will see that what [Jesus] said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

“One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic… Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history…

“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.”

So… who do you say Jesus is?

[C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company,1954), 40-41 (emphasis added).]