What’s different about Jesus (updated)

Everybody in the post-Christendom West seems to want to claim Jesus, even if they don’t actually know anything about him or like what he actually taught; the vestiges of the cultural authority the church used to have (which are, admittedly, a lot greater here in the U.S. than elsewhere) no doubt have something to do with that, along with the lingering sense that Jesus was somebody really special. The result is a great many attempts to bring Jesus down to the desired size so that his image can be manipulated without fear; Jesus must be reduced to just another great teacher—the greatest of all, perhaps, so long as the difference between him and, say, Buddha is understood to be a difference only of degree, not of kind.

The problem is, that just won’t wash if you actually look at Jesus; as C. S. Lewis pointed out, making the modern world aware of an argument dating back to the early days of the church, that’s the one option Jesus doesn’t leave us. He makes claims that no good, sane person would make, and says things that no one who doesn’t accept his claims would tolerate.

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.

If you can praise him as a great teacher, it’s proof you haven’t taken him seriously. And as James Stewart points out in his book A Faith to Proclaim, this goes further even than what he taught, into how he taught.

There is nothing in the Gospels more significant than the way in which Jesus deliberately places Himself at the very centre of His message. He does not say with other teachers, “The truth is everything, I am nothing”; He declares, “I am the truth.” He does not claim, with the founders of certain ethnic religions, to suggest answers to the world’s enigmas; He claims to be the answer—“Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.” He does not offer the guidance of a code or a philosophy to keep men right through the uncertainties of an unknown future; He says, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Teachers are people from whom we learn and then depart, doing whatever we will with their influence in our lives and our relationship with them; their true authority extends no further than the limits of our submission. While there are many who refuse to acknowledge Jesus’ authority, it is not in reality so limited—indeed, it isn’t limited at all; and he did nothing whatsoever to encourage us to think that it was, or is.

Update: It occurred to me today that I missed an even more important distinction in that last paragraph. Teachers are, as a class, primarily important to us for what we learn from them; there may be a significant relationship there as well, but not necessarily, and even when there is, it’s almost always secondary. That’s not to say anything about teachers, but rather about the way our society understands education: the importance of teachers in our lives is all about us. Jesus is primarily important to us for who he is, for our knowing him and being united to him; what we learn from him is secondary, important not for its own sake but because it contributes to our relationship with him.