There are only three possible responses to the question of who Jesus is: Either Jesus was crazy, or he was evil, or he was – and is – the son of God.
Consider Eric:
Eric came from a little village to the city about a year ago. He began attending various churches from week to week. Any time there was an invitation for people to share, Eric stood up. He would remind the people, sometimes pretty forcefully, of the need to be fully devoted to God, and to live out that devotion every day. He called churches corporately to deepen their consecration to God, and spoke sternly of many churches’ tendency to get complacent. And when he spoke many people felt convicted and affirmed that, yes, what Eric was saying was a needed reminder. He spoke with authority that seemed somehow deeper or more real than many of our city’s pastors.
Eric began to receive invitations to share in some churches’ worship services. On one occasion, as Eric was speaking, a man stood up and loudly interrupted him, ‘So, you think you’re a prophet from God, do you?’ Everyone froze, startled. They knew the man, but there was something about the look of him, the light in his eyes, that really unsettled them. But Eric simply looked at the man and said firmly, ‘Spirit, leave that man immediately.’ (I know the pastor of that church. He said that the man gave a shudder and collapsed back into his seat). But after a moment he was fine and stood up again. ‘Eric’, he said, ‘Thank you. For a long time I felt – I don’t know – possessed or something, by something evil. Right now, for the first time, I feel free, clean, whole. Something left me just now, when you spoke. Thank you.’ And he had tears in his eyes, and afterward people said he positively glowed.
This man invited Eric over to his home, not far from here, to have lunch with some of his church friends. At his home Eric met the man’s mother-in-law, who also lived there. She was quite sick that day with a nasty flu coupled with an oppressive migraine. On meeting her, Eric apparently laid his hand on her sweaty brow and said to her, ‘Get up. Be well.’ Immediately she was feeling a hundred percent. She had been on the couch the whole week, but she got up right away and made and served lunch to the whole group.
Word spread quickly through the man’s circle of acquaintances and beyond. Pretty soon people started following Eric around, which he did not mind much. He kept talking to them about Biblical things. A lot more people started to experience healing, some of it pretty significant. Crowds started hanging around at his place. But he got into trouble, too, particularly with some pastors and the ministerial association. It happened last September, at his duplex.
He was talking his usual message about ‘taking-God-seriously’ to what probably amounted to a hundred people, who filled the place. It was a hot afternoon and his windows were open, so people were even standing outside listening. Some of those present were pastors who were checking him out because their congregations were talking so much about him.
Suddenly there was a commotion by one of the windows, right near where Eric was sitting. Someone outside was popping off the screen. Then through the open window four men passed a pallet with a man lying on it. The man was, they said, a quadriplegic, and had been for ten years. Maybe Eric could heal him, they wondered.
Eric laughed. He looked at the man and said, ‘I forgive all your sins.’ Well, immediately all the pastors said, ‘Whoa! It’s one thing to preach, but this is too far. You can’t forgive people’s sins. Only God can do that.’
And Eric said, ‘Yes, I can. And I’ll prove my authority to do it. Watch this.’ Then he said to the man, ‘Get up.’ And the man did. He’s been walking ever since. The newspapers got wind of the story, and in doing their homework they discovered that the healed man had truly been a quadriplegic with no hope of recovery, and that the healing was beyond doubt, a verifiable miracle. (In fact, the man now has a job and rides his bike to work most days.)
After that, people started flooding in from all over the province. Most were just seeking miracles, but Eric kept preaching, too. Once five thousand people sat and listened to him.
Over time, he has made some startling claims. For example, that he has the right to interpret for people what God finds acceptable or not, especially as regarding worship. He explicitly says that his interpretation of the Bible is final and absolute. In fact, by claiming that right, and the authority to forgive sins, he actually puts himself on a level with God!
Some people think he has obviously got delusions of grandeur. In a letter to the editor in Thursday’s paper, someone wrote: ‘If you listen to what this man says, he obviously believes he is God.’ (By the way, Eric has no theological training at all. He’s actually a tradesman.) Other people think he’s the real deal. After all, they say, the miracles are real enough. Most people, apparently, love him, or, at least, are enthralled by his power. The religious establishment is almost unanimously opposed to him, saying he is forming his own cult.
Meanwhile, Eric keeps on doing his thing…
*****
There is, obviously, no Eric.
But what if there was? What if someone entered our own circles, doing incredible miracles, teaching about God, but more than that, clearly implying that he was himself divine, eternal, and that all the authority of heaven resided in him. What would you think? What would people make of such a person?
That is exactly what happened when Jesus came on the scene. That is the reality first century Israel had to deal with. Here comes Jesus, a tradesman from small-town Galilee. Obscure, unknown. But immediately many people recognize a divine authority about his teaching. His miracles are great, numerous, and public. His claims are shocking: he claims the right to forgive sins and that he has the final authority to interpret God’s Law (of the Sabbath Day, for example). People couldn’t not respond to him.
Some loved him. Others accused him of terrible things.
We see that in our passage today: three different responses to him.
At this point in his ministry, Jesus is phenomenally popular. His fame as a miracle worker is such that people from all over Israel swarm around him wherever he goes. Twice already in Mark, we have read how, at one point, the house was so crowded that people couldn’t even get in the door, and at another place, at the lakeshore, they were pressing in on him so much that he requisitioned a boat and put out in order to get him some space.
Today it is the same. Again, he is in a house, and so many people fill the house that neither Jesus nor his disciples can even eat. In that situation, two groups of people come to see him.
The first group is his family: his mother Mary and his brothers. They have heard about Jesus’ activities, and about the nearly fanatical following he has. They are just as suspicious as we are of someone who commands this kind of attention. (Maybe they think of him as we think of a Jim Jones or a David Koresh.) The Bible tells us that they came to take charge of him because they thought, ‘He’s out of his mind. He’s crazy!’ This is Jesus. We grew up with him. This “rabbi” thing has gone to his head, and he’s starting to believe the hype. We have got to get him before things get really out of hand!’
In the original language the word translated, ‘to take charge of’ has the idea of ‘force’ attached to it. So Jesus’ family is not coming to talk sense into Jesus or persuade him to give up his ministry. No. They are hoping to grab him, hustle him into the back seat (as it were) and take off for Nazareth.
Who is Jesus’ family? It includes his mother Mary, and some (or all) of Jesus’ brothers. We know Jesus had four brothers, named James, Joseph, Judah, and Simon, from Mark chapter 6. They had once, in John 7, mocked him by saying, ‘If you want to be really famous, you should go down to Jerusalem. Get out of Galilee and go where the real action is.’ But now they think it has gone too far for mere teasing. Jesus needs help. So, they came to take him.
(I can’t help but wonder what Mary thinks. She, of all people, should understand. The miracle of Jesus’ birth, the words of the angel Gabriel… But it was a long time ago, and perhaps 30 years of raising and knowing just the normal Jesus has clouded her thinking. I don’t know. But she’s here, too, to ‘take charge’ of Jesus.)
The second group of people are the teachers of the law. These men are the religious experts, the scholars, the seminary professors, and the denominational leaders. We have met some teachers of the law before, earlier in Mark, but this is different. This group has come from Jerusalem. These are not the local clergy but they have come from headquarters and have traveled several days from Jerusalem to Capernaum. The powers that be have heard about Jesus and are coming to check him out.
They are suspicious of him, based on the reports they have heard, perhaps from their underlings who encountered Jesus in chapter 2 several times. They are here because Jesus’ growing influence warrants the attention of ‘the top’. And all that they see confirms their suspicions: ‘He’s possessed!’ they say. ‘It’s by Beelzebub that he casts our demons.’
(Beelzebub, by the way, was the Philistine incarnation of the god of Baal, who was Public Enemy #1, spiritually speaking. He was the ‘Prince of Demons’ to the Jews.)
Jesus responds to them by turning their logic on its head: ‘How can Satan drive out Satan?’ And he rattles off the proverb-like statements: ‘A kingdom divided against itself can’t stand. . . a household divided against itself can’t stand. . . If Satan is divided against himself, he can’t stand.’
Then he tells a parable: ‘No one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house.’ Satan is the strong man who has been bound, and Jesus is looting his possessions, bringing people out of Satan’s territory, while Satan lies powerless to resist. ‘So,’ says Jesus, ‘what you’re seeing me do is not through Satan’s power, but evidence that Satan is powerless before me.’
Then Jesus utters a stiff warning: ‘I tell you the truth: all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.’ Beware of calling the work of God’s Holy Spirit the work of a demonic spirit!
(Something needs to be said here of the sin of ‘blasphemy of the Holy Spirit’. Many Christians have been anxious about it, afraid that they’ve committed the sin and so forever disqualified themselves from God’s salvation. If you have ever been concerned about that, don’t be. The very fact that that matters to you is proof that you have not blasphemed or rejected the Holy Spirit. You can not blaspheme the Holy Spirit and care about him at the same time. What Jesus is doing here is saying to the teachers of the Law how dangerous it is to see the work of God and say, ‘Satan is behind it.’ It is the most serious of sins!)
Meanwhile, Jesus’ family has arrived but, because of the crowd, they cannot get inside where Jesus is. Of course, maybe they don’t want to come inside. It is pretty hard to abduct someone who is the center of attention in a crowd of people in a small house. So they send a message through the crowd, to Jesus: ‘Your mother and brothers are outside asking for you.’
Jesus’ answer sounds harsh at first: ‘Who are my mother and brothers?’ He looks around at his disciples and says, ‘Here is my family! Whoever does God’s will are my brothers, my sisters, and my mother.’
Jesus is not denigrating his family. But he is saying that, for him, he has a greater priority. He feels a closer kinship to those who recognize God and have a desire to hear and act on what he says. That is the greater thing. ‘Those who do God’s will,’ says Jesus, ‘is my family.’
(In John 6:28, the people want to know what God’s will is: Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the work God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he sent.’)
Three responses to Jesus:
- thinking he was mad
- thinking he was demon possessed
- believing that what he said about himself was true, and that what God wants is for us to believe in Jesus (ie. follow him, respond to his call on our lives, to be his disciples under his Lordship).
(It is also possible to believe, as some do, that the gospel accounts are not reliable and so we do not really know what Jesus did or what he said about himself. They are fictional, embellished accounts written by Christians to back up their religions. That is a non-intelligent position. The manuscript evidence for the Gospels is literally a thousand times better than that of any other ancient document. It was clearly written within a generation of Christ, by his disciples and those who knew them. And for them to manufacture these stories and die for what they knew wasn’t really true… well, we can’t believe they did so. The Gospels are certainly true accounts.)
So, affirming that, only three options are available for us concerning Christ. Saying and doing what he said and did, he was either crazy, evil, or the divine son of God. He was a lunatic, totally delusional with no grip on reality. Or he was a liar, consciously deluding other people. Or, he was Lord: the divine son of God, just as he said.
That’s it.
I think no one has argued this as clearly as C.S. Lewis, whose writings on this have been widely quoted for fifty years. C.S. Lewis said:
One part of the claim tends to pass 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. We can all understand how a man forgives offenses toward himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you; you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden, who announces that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other mens’ money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. 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 employ what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivaled by any other character in all history.
Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even his enemies, when they read the gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that he is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe him, not noticing that, if he were really a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of his sayings.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the very 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 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 a 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.
C.S. Lewis had it exactly right. There are only three options: Jesus was crazy, or he was evil, or he was – and is – the divine Son of God.
And what is interesting is that historically, no one has ever (to my knowledge, at least) ever made a credible claim that Jesus was evil or crazy.
What do you think of Jesus? Chances are pretty good that you do not think he was crazy or evil either, or you would not be here. It is possible that you think he was simply a great man, a spiritual teacher. That is not a reasonable position. Most of you would readily affirm that he is the Son of God, the eternal Lord, and you are right.
To believe that means a number of things that I suspect we often don’t think about, or understand or put into practice. If you say, ‘Jesus is Lord’, then what? Is it a question of mere belief? Or even affirming it by words? Or does it have impact beyond that? Jesus, the Lord, said of himself, ‘My food is to do the will of my Father in heaven’. He said, at the moment of his greatest anguish, ‘Father, not my will, but yours be done’. He taught us to pray, ‘Father, your will be done on earth just as it is done in heaven’. And he said, ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’
If Jesus is not a lunatic, and if he is not a liar, then he is Lord. And if that is so, then there is a great priority to this thing called ‘doing-God’s-will’.
Is he Lord?
Yes.
Amen.