Who Is This Man?

He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. MATTHEW 16:15–16

Once Lewis had shown his listeners that there is a moral law, that we have broken it, and that there is a Power behind it, he turned to the question on which everything depends. The second series of radio talks, which became the second section of Mere Christianity, moved from the Lawgiver to the Son. At its heart Lewis set out an argument about the identity of Jesus that has been repeated, adapted and debated ever since.

The claims He made

Lewis began with what Jesus actually said and did, as the Gospels record it. Among the Jews of the first century — a people who believed with fierce conviction that there was one God, utterly distinct from His creation — there appeared a man who spoke as though He were that God. He claimed to forgive sins. He said that He had existed before Abraham. He said that He would come again at the end of the world to judge all people. He accepted worship. He spoke of Himself as the one through whom alone men could come to the Father.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. JOHN 8:58

I and my Father are one. JOHN 10:30

Lewis paid special attention to the forgiveness of sins, because it is the most startling claim of all and the one most easily read past. If someone wrongs me, I may forgive him. But if a stranger steps forward and announces that he forgives the man who has wronged me, I shall think him either absurd or insolent — unless he is the one against whom every wrong is, in the end, committed. When Jesus told a paralysed man that his sins were forgiven, the scribes who heard Him understood exactly what He was claiming.

Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only? MARK 2:7

The middle ground that will not hold

From this Lewis drew his best-known conclusion. People often say, he observed, that they are happy to accept Jesus as a wise moral teacher, but not to accept His claim to be God. This, Lewis argued, is exactly the position that will not hold. Someone who made such claims without their being true could hardly be called a wise teacher of morals. He would be either gravely deluded about himself or deliberately misleading others on the most serious subject there is. Either way, no one would set him up as a guide to life; we would pity him or condemn him. The only remaining possibility is that He was telling the truth. And so the choice is forced on us. We may dismiss Him as deluded, we may denounce Him as a deceiver, or we may worship Him. What we cannot do is admire Him politely as a good man and pass on. The Gospels do not leave that middle ground available, and Jesus did not mean to leave it.

Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. JOHN 20:28

Lewis added that the teaching of Jesus, by common consent, is among the sanest and most profound the world has ever heard; and that His character, as the Gospels present it, shows none of the marks of either madness or fraud. Self-deluded men are not usually humble, and deceivers do not usually go to their deaths for the lie. The consistency of the man with His claims is itself evidence.

But are the Gospels true?

The obvious reply is that the argument depends on the Gospels being a faithful record. Perhaps, a critic might say, Jesus never made such claims at all, and they were put into His mouth by later believers, as a legend grows around a hero. Lewis answered this objection elsewhere, especially in essays written later in his life, and he answered it as a literary scholar. He had spent his career reading myths, legends and romances of every age, and he said that the Gospels did not read like any of them. They have the texture of reportage — the odd, unnecessary details that an eyewitness remembers and a myth-maker would never think to invent. Either, he suggested, the Gospel writers were reporting what they had seen, or some unknown writer of the first century had stumbled, eighteen hundred years early, onto the methods of the realistic novel, with no one before him and no one after. He found the first explanation far easier to believe. He also had sharp words for scholars who claimed to read between the lines of ancient texts while showing, in his view, little sense of what kind of texts they were reading.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life. 1 JOHN 1:1

Why He came

Lewis did not stop at who Jesus is. He went on to ask why God became man, and his answer began from our condition. Humanity is in revolt against God, and the way back is surrender — a giving up of self-will so complete that it is a kind of death. But here is the difficulty: the one who needs to make that surrender is the sinner, and the sinner is precisely the one who cannot make it fully. If God were to become man, however, He could do in our nature and on our behalf what we could not do, and we could share in what He had done. That, Lewis believed, is part of what happened when the Son of God died and rose again.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:21

Weighing it

The argument about the identity of Jesus has strengthened the faith of a great many readers, and it rests squarely on the testimony of the New Testament. Its force is real. Evangelicals have generally welcomed it, while noting that it is strongest when joined to the evidence for the resurrection, which Lewis took for granted more often than he argued for it.

Evangelical readers will want to notice one thing in the same section of Mere Christianity. When Lewis turned to the meaning of the cross, he deliberately declined to commit himself to any one account of how Christ’s death saves us. He held that the central Christian belief is simply that the death of Christ has, in some way, reconciled us to God and made a new beginning possible, and that the explanations of how it does so are secondary. He admitted that the explanation in terms of Christ paying the penalty for our sins had not, at that time, helped him much, and he preferred to speak of Christ as the one who perfectly made, in our nature, the surrender and repentance that we could not make. Many readers, of many traditions, have been helped by his reticence. But the New Testament does not treat the substitution of Christ for sinners as one theory among several. It places it near the very centre of the gospel.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. ISAIAH 53:5

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. 1 PETER 2:24

Lewis was right that we are saved by Christ and not by our theories about Him. But a reader who is helped by his account of the incarnation should go on to the apostles’ own account of the cross, where the language of a debt paid, a curse borne and wrath turned aside is plain and unembarrassed.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. If someone asked you who Jesus is, what would you say? Write your answer in a few sentences.

2. Have you been content to admire Jesus as a teacher without bowing to Him as Lord? What would it mean to change that?

3. Read Mark 2:1–12 and notice what the scribes understood Jesus to be claiming.

4. Read one of the Gospels this week, looking for the small, unnecessary details that mark an eyewitness account.

5. Read Isaiah 53 slowly, and give thanks for the One who was wounded for your transgressions.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You asked Your disciples who they said You were, and You ask me still.

I confess You as the Christ, the Son of the living God. I will not admire You from a distance; I bow to You as my Lord and my God.

Thank You for forgiving sins that only God could forgive, and for bearing in Your own body the sins that I could never pay for.

Let my whole life answer Your question truly, today and every day. Amen.