Why Jesus?                                                                                                                                                Rev. Colin S. Marshall

10^th January 2010                                                                                                                     St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Mt. Roskill

Readings: Psalm 9, John 5:1-25, Luke 5:17-26, Acts 2:22-28

        Last week we began a series of sermon looking at the ‘Why?’ questions by asking ‘Why do we believe?’  We asserted that God can deal quite happily with such questions, indeed God even likes to see us wrestling with faith and the important questions of life.  In this way we can build confidence in what we believe, who we believe in and can have an increasing boldness and assurance in sharing faith.  Today we look at the question: ‘Why Jesus?’  Why did Jesus come?  Why do we believe in Him?

Of the reasons for belief I stated that the greatest reason, the most convincing proof lies in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus is the central element of Christian faith, the Rock of Ages, the cornerstone, the hinge or pivot-point upon which Christianity stands or falls. It is Jesus Christ, the person, who conclusively takes belief from the realm of pure theology or even philosophy into the absolute reality of the physical world.

            Let us consider for a moment a simple analogy.  Outside your house in a brick wall there is an ant’s nest.  Imagine that the ants have a limited intelligence.  Each day they see you pass by.  Among the ants there is a mixture of angst and joy as they see you pass.  Some of the ants say that you are wonderful and encouraging, caring and protective, that you leave food to be eaten and nice fluids to be drunk… especially at Christmas.  Others argue that no you are cruel and violent, irrational and uncaring.  Would they be right or wrong?  They could argue until they were black in the face (actually they already are).  Evidence could be brought either way but the decisive factor would fall more into the probability weighting factors of mathematics than decisive evidence could provide.  This is exactly the logic that is used by most religions.  They take from what they can perceive of the Universe, the Created order, and apply to it the best logic, philosophy and perception available to human consciousness to attempt to explain what life is all about.  The outcomes are incredibly varied, as varied as human imagination.  An in such a world almost every explanation is as suitable as another, not as morally acceptable certainly, but logically valid.  This is relativism at its best.  Every man’s or woman’s opinion is equally as valid as another’s because there is no external validation or negation.  Understanding is limited to what can be perceived or interpreted.  What can change this situation?

            The answer is simple.  Back to our ants.  One day you decide you have had it with ants.  They seem to be multiplying and getting into everything and ruining your food.  You decide to get rid of them.  You start with a cloth, sweeping them up and washing down the sink every ant you can see.  From then on every ant you see is squashed with your thumb.  That’s a good start you think.  How do the ants respond to you now?  What they may have thought previously is radically revised.  You are to be feared and avoided. Your interaction with them has changed their behavior radically.  Now they only look for food in the same areas when it is dark.  They avoid open travel where they might be seen.  The key point here is interaction.  Rather than perception alone being the basis of interpretation their personal experience of your action has become a focal point for understanding.

            Now imagine for a moment, and this is your Walt Disney imagination, that you could become an ant for a day or two.  You become and ant and explain to them how their actions have been destructive.  Even though their nature had encouraged them to take anything and everything this wasn’t the best way to go about things.  There were things that it was appropriate for them to take and things that weren’t.  Places be to seen and places not to be seen. And so forth.  Again some might believe you and some might not.  If you could convince them that you were in fact a person as an ant then more would believe and respond appropriately. If they saw you on the last day return to your full stature as a human then they would certainly know who and what you were and then be aware of the importance of your words.

            Without taking it too far you probably have got the drift of my simple analogy.  There is a distance between theory and practice, between thought and actuality.  The reason Jesus is the answer to belief is that Jesus is God getting involved at our level.  It is for this reason He is so central to belief and the reason for belief.  It would be impossible for us to know conclusively whether or not God actually exists if God did not chose to reveal Himself to us. 

Last week I spoke of the importance of prophecy in making the revelatory experience definitive. A single prediction that comes true is interesting but mathematically unreliable.  But multiple specific predictions increase the probability manifold.  Predictions about Jesus include His race, tribe, family, paternal line, His place and date of birth, prophecies about how Satan would attempt to destroy his family line both in Old Testament times and during His own lifetime.  We remember the account we heard before Christmas of King Herod mercilessly killing babies because of Jesus birth all in an attempt to annihilate Him. But there were also the storms at sea, the people at Nazareth trying to throw Him of a cliff and so forth.  There are many more prophecies about His life and death on the Cross many of which you will know.  Some, like the actual day Jesus would ride a donkey into Jerusalem were incredibly explicit.

For every additional prophecy the mathematical possibility of it happening in the life of one individual decreases by a geometric progression.  I like the numerical analysis Dr. Chuck Missler has made of this.  He identified three hundred specific prophecies related to Jesus that he decided to work with.  In terms of the probability that a single life could fulfill all of these prophecies the likelihood he calculated was 1:10¹⁵⁷.  Of put another way: if you had one atom for everything that exists in our universe, and then you had one set of these for each second of the last six thousand years you still would not have got to 10¹⁵⁷.  It’s an impossible number.  Yet Jesus fulfilled all that was required for His life in prophetic terms even though, as a human being, He could have had no control over them.  He could not determine where He would be born, or when, that His parents would take him as a child to Egypt only to return to Nazareth and so forth. 

We might also note in passing that there is no other book, no other religion, nothing anywhere that comes even close to making such prophetic claims, let alone being able to demonstrate them having been fulfilled.  You won’t find this anywhere else except in the Scriptures.  That alone should give people pause for thought. 

This fulfillment of prophecy in itself is encouraging.  But we can move on from there.  Jesus was born of a woman and was human and like us in every way.  But from an early age He also possessed an awareness of who He was that set Him apart.  If we look at the Biblical accounts we see this demonstrated aptly in the story of the twelve year old Jesus in the Temple.  He went to the Temple in Jerusalem and confounded the teachers and scholars.  At twelve this is somewhat startling in a culture that exalted scholars and Biblical understanding.  And Jesus’ remonstrative reply to His parents frustration at being unable to locate Him is also revealing and very strange.  It’s strangeness is lost to us when we have become familiar with the story.

            Jesus said to Mary and Joseph, almost as if they were at fault, “Don’t you realize that I must be about my Father’s business?”  Saying such a thing when Joseph was standing there would have seemed crazy to everyone except Mary and Joseph who had been divinely informed, by way of angel, who Jesus was.  Jesus knew He had a very special relationship with God – and so did Mary and Joseph.  This special relationship, in His early years particularly, seemed to extend itself to other people as well.  Unlike many religious leaders, Jesus was able to connect with people particularly well at all levels of society. The people heard Him gladly and some were willing to effectively drop everything to follow Him – from filthy rich merchants and tax collectors, to the poorest and most destitute.  Jesus had a sense of destiny and purpose unlike almost any other living person and from a very early age.  Even under the cruelest pressure the world could exert He never denied His relationship with the Father nor strayed from His purpose.

            It was Jesus’ insistence on the fact that God was His Father, in the most literal of senses, that incurred the wrath of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership.  They understood only too well what Jesus was asserting – that He was God.  It was for this that they charged Jesus with blasphemy and arranged His execution.  Look at John 5:18. “For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill Him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.”  But if it were true, then it wasn’t blasphemy.  Regardless, Jesus was not One to leave anyone in doubt.  In John 10:30 we see that the gospel writer records Jesus’ own explicit words: “I and the Father are One.”  And in John 14:9, in response to Thomas’ request that Jesus show them the Father Jesus replied, “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well.  From now on, you do know Him and you have seen Him... Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” This cannot be taken any way but literally because the Pharisees and teachers of the Law challenged Jesus on His claim to be able to forgive sin, which only God was able to do.  Jesus not only did so but commanded the paralyzed man to walk.  Just to make the point.

            As the great English scholar and author C.S.Lewis pointed out so bluntly, such a claim made Jesus either a liar, a lunatic on the level of a poached egg, (I think today we might term this ‘genuinely deceived’). Or Jesus was the living embodiment of truth.   If we consider briefly each of the possibilities we see there isn’t really a lot of choice.  Jesus life’s work and consistent personal stability argue against any charge of lunacy.  His calmness and purposeful nature along with a morally pure life were clear to all including His harshest critics.  For Jesus to be generally recognized world-wide as the greatest moral teacher ever to have lived, and yet to have lied about His core teaching makes no sense at all and would require a serious mental disorder.  Such an imbalance in personality is recognized by psychologists to be exposed when a person is under pressure.  But Jesus was under pressure continually, no more so than in Gethsemane and at His time of trial as He stood before Herod and Pilate.  Yet even in these situations Jesus was clearly in control and decisive about what He was doing.  As C.S.Lewis observed “The discrepancy between the depth of His moral teaching and the megalomania which must lie behind His theological teaching, unless He is indeed God, has never been satisfactorily got over.”  By His critics that is.  But if Jesus wasn’t lying, confused or deranged, and it is very difficult to argue any of these, then the implications are life changing.  If Jesus was exactly who He said He was, God among us, the living Truth, then we need to take what he said serious.  More seriously in fact then anything said that has ever been said on this planet.

It is making your own decision on which of these Jesus was that is the critical issue.  In working through the numerous associated issues we need to make our own personal decision.  It’s not just a decision for or against Jesus – it’s also a decision for or against who we believe and recognize God to be.

But the case cannot stop there.  God had more in His plan and reasoning for Jesus.  In terms of His revelation God wanted to speak into our understanding of human ontology – who we are.  Jesus showed us how we could have a relationship with the Father beyond anything that people had imagined previously.  God loves and cares for each one of us with a depth and compassion that is revealed in Jesus’ life and sacrificial giving of His own life on the Cross.  God wanted us, through Jesus to know just how much He cares and loves us.

            Jesus also demonstrates how much God in intimately involved in our lives and does not stand off at a distance simply observing.  We were created to be relational and that relational nature is intended to be expressed and lived with each other and with God.

            Moreover Jesus also revealed a degree of real power that was unique.  This power was shown at different level.  Jesus demonstrated power over the natural order.  Whether it was changing water into wine, calming storms, walking on water, bringing about the death of a fig tree with a word, or raising the dead, Jesus showed He had real power over the physical and natural order of this world.   And interestingly His critics and opponents didn’t deny it.  The Scriptures report that His enemies said that it had to stop or all the world would believe that that He was God.  It’s just sad they didn’t recognize it

            This aside, Jesus’ real power lay in the way His relationship with the Father showed us how the perfect human life is to be lived.  People, even our best role models, will let us down from time to time but Jesus never.  Living as His Own Son, God taught us how we are to be and will be in eternity. 

Consider this for a moment.  Only God can show us perfect man because He was the Creator.  So how did Jesus demonstrate this?  Jesus balanced perfectly a complete God consciousness in dedication and faithfulness to God through obedience and care for those about Him.  He made the most of the gifts, graces and virtues that God had given Him and these were limited to what is available to each one of us.  Jesus received no special privilege in this aspect because He was fully human.   To summarize the observations of writers like Little & Schaff: Jesus’ obvious intelligence did stifle piety, prayer was not a substitute for work nor visa-versa.  His zeal was not irrational passion or a stubborn obstinacy but focused and purposeful.  His benevolence never became weakness nor His tenderness sentimentality. His lack of worldliness was free from criticism, indifference, unsociability or undue familiarity.  Jesus’ temperance was not austerity, nor was His self-denial morose, rather it was a perfect self-giving in love.   His true manliness was shown in consistent courage, strength and determination with a child-like innocence, true concern for people’s welfare, and a tender love for the sinner matched with an untiring severity against sin and those who promoted it.  He didn’t fail even when abandoned by those closest to Him. He commanded dignity with unfailing humility and bestowed it on the lost.  In all His ways Jesus walked with a loving gentleness even under the most intense, unrelenting pressure and criticism. 

And if all this wasn’t enough two further factors answer the ‘why Jesus?’ question.  Firstly, God had to deal with sin.  Jesus shows the reality, significance and cost of sin. Secondly, Jesus is God’s final proof and engagement for those wise enough to recognize it: resurrection and life today.  While the Romans and Jews killed Jesus He did not remain dead.  The ultimate answer in the human world is death.  It is the final factor that no one can avoid.  It ends all plans, completes each life, finishes the worldly sentence. But Jesus demonstrates that this is not all there is.  His resurrection to life proves all that He said and promises something more.  And because He is risen He is alive today and keen to meet and talk with us.  But more on all of this topic next week as we look at sin, it’s cost and consequences in ‘Why Resurrection?’ For now “Why Jesus?” The answer should be obvious.