C.S.
LEWIS’ GREAT WORDS ABOUT JESUS IN MERE
CHRISTIANITY*
After
articulately describing Satan’s rebellious bid to become a god to
himself, leading the first humans into the Fall, Lewis describes how
God begins His redemptive work by selecting a particular people [the
Jews] and spending several centuries “hammering into their heads
the sort of God He was—that there was only one of Him and that He
cared about right conduct.”
Continuing
to quote Lewis:
Then comes the real shock.
Among those Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking
as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always
existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time.
Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians,
anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there
would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a
Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant
the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely
different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you
will see that what this man 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….What should we make of a man, himself
unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for
treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money?
Asinine futility is the kindest description we should give of this
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 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.
Yet [and this is the strange,
significant thing] even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do
not usually get the impression of silliness or conceit. Still less
do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is “humble and meek”
and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man,
humility and meekness are the very last characteristic we would
attribute to some of His sayings.
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 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.
*Macmillan Paperback Ed.,
1960, pp54-56
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