Put yourself in this picture. It’s the last barbeque of the season on a neighbor’s back deck. You’re holding a white, plastic dinner plate with salad, a few chips, and a hamburger, fresh from the grill, which you have just fixed up the way you like. You pick it up to take that first bite and a neighbor turns to you and says, “I see you pulling out of your drive on Sunday mornings. You going to Wawa or Dunkin’ Donuts?” What do you do? Option A: Take a big bite of that hamburger and chew slowly… real slowly. Maybe your neighbor will lose interest before you have to say anything. Option B: Take the easy way out and say “Wawa,” then take a big bite. Or, Option C: Put the hamburger down and tell the neighbor the truth. You go to church and consider it a God moment, an opportunity to talk about Jesus. After all, that’s what Christians do, talk about Jesus – the church isn’t the point – Jesus is.
So, when the topic of church comes up, we could say something like, “Yeah, on Sundays, I go to church. This fall in church, we’re emphasizing reading the Bible and I’ve been learning about Jesus. I’m interested in what you think about Jesus.” You’d be amazed at your neighbors’ reactions when you ask them about Jesus. They like Jesus! People like Jesus. They like what they’ve heard. Why not? If everyone lived as Jesus said, the world would be a better place.
So ask them what they think about Jesus. Our Bible reminds us this morning that people could respond in several ways. For instance, someone could say that Jesus was crazy. I’ve never heard anyone who believes Jesus was deranged, but it is one possible reaction. After all, Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) We’ve put plenty of people in psychiatric hospitals who say they are God or Jesus or Napoleon. When Jesus made such a claim about himself, some might think he was deluded. However, if anyone takes the time to study Jesus’ replies to the trick, deceptive questions the Pharisees asked him, as recorded in Mark, one can’t help being impressed by the clarity of Jesus’ mind. His answers are sheer brilliance. In fact, they could not answer his questions! He was no lunatic.
Yet, his own family tried to pull him away from public ministry early on because they thought he was mentally off. (Read v. 21) Imagine putting your heart and soul into something you feel intensely and your family thinks you are crazy.” Your own family. If everyone else is against you, at least your family should back you up. Even his mother was embarrassed by him. Jesus must have felt the stabbing, deep pain of personal rejection by his own family. He knows what its like. He feels it. There’s an old spiritual that says, “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen. Nobody knows like Jesus.” Jesus knows about our troubles. Not just because he understands it (mentally), but because he has felt the pain of it in his human flesh and heart, as have you. That’s why we turn to him, because he feels it, too and because he does something about it.
When we ask others what they think about Jesus, we have to accept that it’s possible someone might think of him as a lunatic. Jesus’ wisdom and brilliance shows how false such a view is. Another possible response comes from the Pharisees who try to link Jesus to Satan. No one doubts that Jesus casts evil spirits out of people. It is a mighty work. No one can deny it. There’s a power involved. The question is, where does Jesus get this power? From God? The religious leaders say different. They say Jesus gets his power to cast out demons, not from God, but from Satan himself! Verse 22, Jesus is “possessed by Beelzebub and by the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” Jesus is accused of being an agent of Satan. It’s interesting that this charge of being Satan’s agent, a magician who practices Satan’s magic is repeated later in history among Jewish writers who try to discredit Jesus. In fact, that opinion of Jesus as a magician is still floating around. Jesus answers with a famous statement, verse 25, “A house divided against itself will not stand.” Abraham Lincoln picked up that image in a speech he gave in 1858. He warned that a divided house can not stand, and, while he was president, watched while our divided country tore itself apart during the Civil War. Divide anything in two and it is weaker. Divide a boat in half. It’s weaker. It will also sink! Divide an army in half. It is weaker. Why, says Jesus, if I am working for Satan, would I weaken Satan’s hold on people by casting out Satan’s demons? It makes no sense for an agent of Satan to attack Satan. If Jesus is not of Satan, where does he get his authority and power? Jesus continues: “No one can enter a strong person’s house and rob him unless he can first overpower the strong person and tie him up.” The stronger person is Jesus, who overcomes the power of Satan by the power of God. He is not linked to Satan. He opposes Satan.
Our question: “What do you think of Jesus?” could come back with the reply that Jesus is a lunatic or linked to Satan. We’ve seen how short those opinions are. There are other possible choices. Someone could say that Jesus was a liar. He intentionally misled people. Once again, I’ve never heard anyone say this, but it is possible and we need to be aware of it. A person could say Jesus was a liar. She or he could say Jesus never taught what he did. He didn’t heal or raise from the dead. It’s all a lie. The difficulty with thinking that way is that it doesn’t hold up. We don’t rely on what Jesus wrote to inform us about him. Jesus never wrote a thing. Instead, we learn about Jesus through others who witnessed his life. It would have been easy to call Jesus out on any lies, because there were witnesses. And, no one back then disputed that Jesus healed and taught and raised others from the dead. There isn’t much of a case to make for Jesus as a liar.
However, some do say that the Bible is a lie. We can’t trust it. It’s too old. How, they would say, can you depend upon the accuracy of the Bible? It’s ancient. The New Testament is almost 1900 years old. Let’s consider that opinion about the Bible as an ancient document and therefore not trustworthy. Let’s see how much you trust these words, “To be or not to be. That is the question.” Who wrote those words? Shakespeare, you say. How do you know they were written by Shakespeare? Here’s a stunner for you. We do not have any original pages written by Shakespeare for any of his plays. None. There are no originals. In fact, there is still debate over who authored some of his plays, because we have no originals – Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago.
Now, let’s go back farther in history. Way back. I was researching this a bit on the internet and came across a newspaper article, dated 1891, which announced that the British museum had just received a copy of Aristotle’s writing on the Constitution of Athens. The copy was found by archeologists while they were digging up ancient ruins.
It wasn’t the original. It was a copy, unknown for hundreds of years, yet, we consider it reliable. Then, there’s Plato. He lived in the fourth century BC. We don’t have any of his originals.The oldest copy we now have of any of his writings are portions only of his book Phaedo, dated to the 3rd century AD. That’s a gap of 600 years between it being written and the oldest copy we have. Yet, we accept the copy as reliably recording the original book. Take Euclid, the great Greek thinker who developed the system of geometry, which we have all taken in school. He lived in the 3rd century BC. The oldest copy of any of his writings is one geometric formula, dated about 300 AD; a 550 year gap between his life and the oldest copy we have. Keep that in mind. Yet, we say the copy is reliable. The oldest copy we have of the Greek historian Herodotus is dated 900 AD, a gap from the original to the copy of 1300 years. No one questions it. There are no originals of Livy’s history of the Romans, written around the time of Jesus’ birth. The first copy we have is dated around 900 AD, a gap of 900 years. We don’t have the originals of any ancient writings. They are all copies. Then, we come to the New Testament. Again, we have no originals. We don’t have the papyrus on which Mark wrote his Gospel. We only have copies. Mark was written about 70 AD. The earliest of Paul was written about 49 AD, just 16 years or so from Jesus’ death. The oldest copy we have of any book in the New Testament is a fragment dated about 130 AD. That’s only 60 to 80 years difference! The oldest full copies of all the New Testament are the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, written in the fourth century AD. That’s less than 300 years. And, while the other ancient writings may have 6 or 8 or 20 copies today, there are thousands of copies and pieces of the New Testament. With confidence, we can say that that the New Testament is the best attested, most reliable writing we have from the ancient world. The Bible does not lie.
Ah, but someone will say. It may be true that we have far more evidence and copies of the New Testament, but there have been so many changes, and every translation says something different. It’s not reliable. Really? Our English translations are all based on either the United Bible Society Greek New Testament or the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. The two are very similar, but come from different publishing houses. Each sifted through and compared thousands of copies and partial copies to dig out the most significant variations between the texts. It makes sense that one copy will have some differences from another copy, since they all were copied by hand. However, using the tools of scholarship, they know with a high degree of certainty what each original book said. They know what was written. And, in those cases where they are not sure, the difference is slight. There is no place in the New Testament where any variation changes theology or belief. The bottom line is that the Bible does not lie.
What do you think about Jesus? And we must be prepared for the whole range of answers to that question. Lunatic, linked to Satan, a liar. One more response, quite popular today, is that Jesus was a great moral teacher. Great. One of the very few world class teachers. Was Jesus a moral teacher? Some called him “Rabbi,” which means teacher. And yet, Jesus never called himself teacher. He never identified his purpose to be a teacher. The first half of the Gospel of Mark keeps asking the question, “Who then is this man?” That question reaches it peak at the end of the 8th chapter when Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do people say I am?” They answered, “John the Baptist (come back to life) or Elijah or one of the prophets.” Then, he asked them point blank: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, you are the Christ.” (Mark 8:29) That puts him above the teacher category. In describing himself, Jesus said, “I and the Father are One.”(John 10:30) Jesus is Lord. Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21)
C.S. Lewis said:
“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 was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or some-
thing 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.” (Mere Christianity)
So, here’s the thing. If Jesus is not a lunatic; if he is not linked to Satan; if he is not a liar, or a teacher, what are we left with?
“We are faced then, with a frightening alternative,” quoting again from C.S. Lewis.
“This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to be 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.” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)