I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (Jn 14:6)
I sat in an enclosed patio at an inn in Eagle Harbor, Michigan. Enormous picture windows surrounded me on three sides, and Lake Superior was right outside those windows. The morning sun was bright and dancing on the water. It was one of those peaceful times when you get away, and I was enjoying my time alone looking out over the endless blue of the water and the rocky jetty with spruce trees popping out of it. My Bible was in my lap, and I was intermittently reading, then gazing at the lake, then reading, then gazing at the lake. I like doing that. I don’t know if it’s that I love nature or that I get easily distracted. Probably both.
A young woman entered the patio area and sat down at a couch opposite me. She noticed that I had a Bible and asked me some question or other about my reading. We spoke for a bit before I asked her, “Are you a Christian?”
“I’m a Unitarian,” she said.
“Do you read the Bible much?” I asked.
“No, not really. But I like Jesus.” We talked for a short while and she then opened up. “I don’t really understand my church,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, a lot of the leaders in my church get violently upset if we talk about Jesus. I mean, we can read from many books in the church and we can even read from the Bible and talk about it. But what we can’t do is read or talk about Jesus without these people getting upset. I really don’t understand it.”
“I understand it,” I told her and then asked her, “Have you ever read what Jesus said about himself?”
“No, not really.”
“Jesus claimed to be your Lord. He said that He was the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him. He called Himself the Son of God. He said that unless you believed in Him, you would die in your sins.
“I think these leaders are angry at the name of Jesus not because they misunderstand him but because they perfectly understand him.”
Jesus has always divided the people. In His own day, some people worshiped him while others crucified him. It is no different today. Jesus was and always has been a lightning rod. His claims offended many people. Those who think that all religions say the same thing must ignore the central claims of Christ to do so, for He spoke of Himself in a way that no sane man talks, and, in doing so, He founded a faith that is like no other religion on earth.
Nowhere in any religious system will you find anything that approaches the Christian concept of the Incarnation. Scripture says that God paid a visit to earth. This visit, however, is nothing like Zeus or Apollo coming and going and taking on various forms to suit their pleasures. It is far beyond Allah reigning with authority and justice from heaven. It is contrary to the nature gods of Hinduism or the impersonal forces of Buddhism. Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses scorn it; Hindus trivialize it; philosophers denounce it as nonsense. No one understands it. It is distorted, then criticized, but when not distorted it is still not fully comprehensible. The radical claim of the Christian faith is that, for a period of about thirty years, the eternal and transcendent God walked around on earth, ate, slept, wept, spoke, died. The central claim of the Christian faith is that there was a man who was God.
If this claim does not strike you as somehow shocking, you do not understand it. It is the central reason why people reject Jesus. As long as we talk about turning the other cheek or loving your neighbor or forgiving as God has forgiven you, people are with us. They like Jesus. He taught many good things. To some people, Jesus is like a big teddy bear. But when this good teacher begins to say that he and the Father are one or that the Son of Man shall return on the clouds of glory or that he has the right to give and take life, we squirm. The authorities in Jesus’ day squirmed, too. His claims were a large part of the problem they had with him. He said, “before Abraham was, I am” and they picked up stones to stone him. They knew what he was saying.
And so do we. In fact, that’s the problem. If we somehow thought that Jesus was saying something different, we would not squirm so. Nor would we devise so many elaborate ways to circumvent His claims. You know. “Jesus’ claims were just legend,” or “what he really meant was…” These efforts betray a lack of faith. A follower of Jesus does not spend time debunking what Scripture plainly says. The real problem people have with Jesus’ claims is not intellectual. It’s that his claims get in the way with how we live. If Jesus was God on earth, then He really does have the right to be the center of our lives. He has, as He claimed, “all authority in heaven and on earth.” That is the sticking point.
Jesus says He gets to run your life. Indeed, He gets to run the universe. You can reply, “How dare he say that!” Or you can bow your knees.
