After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish festival of Booths was near. So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” (For not even his brothers believed in him.) Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil. Go to the festival yourselves. I am not going to this festival, for my time has not yet fully come.” After saying this, he remained in Galilee.
But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but as it were in secret. The Jews were looking for him at the festival and saying, “Where is he?” And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews. (John 7:1-13)
C.S. Lewis says that we can call Jesus any number of things, but he did not leave us room to call Him a ‘good man.’ Lewis’ “Trilemma” states that Jesus is either a lunatic, liar or the Lord. In his book, “Mere Christianity,” Lewis says:
"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 the 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."
Since the day that Jesus walked into the public world, people have been trying to find ways to negate His ministry. Jews called Him a ‘good man’ and a ‘liar’ in this passage. They had no idea He was there walking among them so this was a good chance to tell others what their ideas regarding Jesus were about.
No one is ready for a man to come in to challenge the common ways of thinking and Jesus was doing that with every breath He took. He didn’t hold back … ever.
I’m reading through Stephen Pressfield’s “The War of Art” again. He says that to do what you were called to do, you will upset people – especially friends and family because it is in their best interest that you maintain status quo, that you don’t upset their world as they know it. No one wants to see change happen, even if it will transform the world for good.
Jesus came along with a message of hope, of love, of a plan to bring true peace on earth. But it required change and no one wanted to see that happen. Even in their misery, the Jews wanted things to stay the same. They were comfortable with their misery. They knew what it looked like, how it felt, what it smelled like and how to manage it.
Jesus wanted to rip them out of their comfort with misery. The Romans were in charge, Herod and his cronies were corrupting Judaism, sin among the people ran rampant; yet they didn’t want Him to make things different for them. We live in the same type of world.
Do we call Jesus simply a ‘good man, a great moral teacher’? Do we live like He is Lord? Do we think He is absolutely nuts? Or do we just ignore Him and hope that He will take His message to someone else that might need it worse than we do?
We’ve gotten away with listening to part of His message … for each of us it might be a different part. We are no better than the Jews who were complaining about Him. We really don’t want Him in there messing up our lives, challenging us to be different, asking us to step away from the little pockets of misery we comfortably live within, being no more than we are.
Jesus is not just a peace-maker. He stirs things up, He gets our blood boiling, He challenges us to look at life differently. And if He isn’t doing those things in your life and in your family, within your friends and in your church … you might be setting Him aside as simply a good man … a great moral teacher.
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