Chart Taken from Pew Research
Some people say that Jesus was a good man.
But he was not God.
Kind of a middle of the road position.
A view taken by many, including 1.6 billion
Muslims.
Yeah, he was a good teacher, said a lot of
good things, healed people,
Held children on his lap, even gave his
life for the cause.
Most of that’s easy enough to believe.
But was he God?
That’s a little harder to believe.
And yet, if he wasn’t God—
Then he also wasn’t a particularly good
man.
He’d have been either a liar or a lunatic.
Because he clearly claimed that he was God—
Many times in many ways.
Our Gospel today recounts one of those
times.
Here, Jesus states that he is God.
Maybe not the clearest imaginable language
for us today.
But clear enough.
And to his Jewish audience at that time,
His claim was even more clear.
Clear enough to call it blasphemy.
When you lift up the Son of
Man,
Then you will realize that I
AM.
The Bible version we use at here at Mass stresses
those words, I AM.
It shows them in all caps—I AM—
The name God gave Himself when Moses asked
Him who He was.
Some of those who want to stay in the
middle of the road,
Holding on to the idea that Jesus was a
good man but not God,
Contend that Jesus didn’t actually make
those claims of divinity.
It was just his followers and the Scripture
writers who made them.
But if the Scripture writers were that
dishonest or that mistaken,
Why should we trust that Scripture at all?
Why should we believe that Jesus was a good
man?
Or that he ever existed at all.
Accepting that Jesus did in fact say
When you lift up the Son of
Man,
Then you will realize that I
AM.
It appears that his prediction was
accurate.
It’s been 2000 years now, since he was
lifted up.
Lifted up on the Cross and lifted up in the
Resurrection.
And over 2 billion Christians today realize
that he is God.
Not to mention the billions of others
Who have lived and died during those 2000
years.
But Jesus’ statement hasn’t yet been
completely fulfilled.
Perhaps it won’t be – until the end of
time.
Believers have grown from a handful, to a
few thousand, to billions.
But they currently make up only one third
of the world’s population.
And we can’t really be sure how deeply and
confidently they believe.
And actually, I’ve been using my terms a
little loosely.
Jesus didn’t say that we’d come to believe he was God.
He said that we’d realize that he is God.
Even if we believe, how real is our understanding?
In these last days of Lent,
Let’s ponder that question that Jesus once
posed for us:
But who do you say
that I am?
5th Tuesday of Lent
No comments:
Post a Comment