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Christianity is often lined up among others as one of the world’s great religions. In this approach to faith, Jesus is presented alongside other ancient thinkers and teachers, like Plato, Aristotle, Moses, and Cicero.
It seems harmless enough. Christians believe that we live differently, because of a moral code that Christ has given to us. We hear a portion of that way of life presented in this Sunday’s Gospel:
Blessed are you who are poor,
for the kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man
Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!
Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. (Luke 6:20-23)
And yet, the person of Jesus Christ is not reducible to simply a moral code or a manner of living. Pope Benedict XVI writes in Deus Caritas Est, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
To be a disciple of Jesus means not simply abiding by a set of rules or laws, but by being conformed to the Master. Being Christian means experiencing Christ as Lord.
The Trilemma
Fifty years before Pope Benedict wrote his masterful encyclical letter on the love of God (quoted above), another Christian scholar was thinking about the same question on the nature of Christ and life with him.
C.S. Lewis wrote the following in his bestselling book, Mere Christianity:
For Lewis, it simply does not square to say that Jesus is a great moral teacher. Just a few chapters after Luke gives us this version of the beatitudes, Luke records Jesus’ great claim to be God. Luke tells us, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Luke 10:22). Too many times in Scripture, Jesus himself directly claims to be God.
How the argument works
Jesus cannot be simply a great moral teacher and have made all the claims about his own divinity that the New Testament holds. One could contest the reliability of the Scriptures of course, but at that point, one has to ask: Why believe the moral teaching? In other words, if the text is unreliable, why pick and choose from it? For C.S. Lewis, then, the reasonable options from the Gospel are: (1) Jesus is a lunatic, (2) Jesus is a liar, or (3) Jesus is Lord.
C.S. Lewis doesn’t mince words as he makes this argument. He concludes,
Faced with this argument, led by the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, what are we to conclude? What, then, is reasonable to think about Christ?
We ought to fall to our knees and worship the Lord. This is not a God who imposes unmanageable burdens. This is not a God who legislates the impossible. Jesus Christ has given us a way of life and he walks among us, giving us the strength to remain faithful to it, to carry on, to strive after happiness and peace.
Jesus Christ, our Lord, is himself our way of life. Let us cling to him with every fiber of our being, let us praise him with every breath we take. Let us proclaim with all the angels and saints down through the ages, “Jesus Christ is Lord!”
