Tag: Jesus

When there’s nobody around to hear

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So, another day, another meme. A few days ago, this came across my Facebook newsfeed:

whoknew

So, how might one respond to a meme like this?

Is it accurate?

The first thing to ask is, does this meme accurately represent what Christians believe? After all, if someone’s religion is wrong, it shouldn’t need to be misrepresented to be shown to be false, right?

So, what do Christians believe about the Trinity? Well, we believe that there is only one God, but that within the Godhead that there are three persons: the Father, the Son and the Spirit. So, when the Son was praying, He wasn’t praying to “Himself”, but to the Father.

This meme already isn’t looking that promising…

I wasn’t there…

The meme appears to suggest that, unless you were present at an event, then you couldn’t possibly know what happened.

However, I’m sure there are many events you know much about, but for which you were not present. These events range from the great events in history to the story of how your parents met. The reader will know about these events because those who were there have either told them directly, or because they have read descriptions found in diaries and letters.

The same is true for the life of Jesus. St. Luke didn’t witness Jesus’ ministry, yet he can tell us what happened by reporting the testimony of those who were present at the time. Luke speaks about his sources in the opening of his Gospel:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you… that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.

Luke 1:1-4

No witnesses

Okay, so it’s possible for me to know about an even if I was not there to witness it… but what about the situations where, say, Jesus was alone and there was nobody to hear what He said and see what He did?

For example, all the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13, Luke 4:1-13) record Jesus going out into the desert alone for forty days. Despite Jesus doing this alone, Mark tells us that He was tempted by the devil, and Matthew and Luke go into detail about these temptations, even going so far as to narrate the exchanges between Jesus and Satan. How did they know what was said?

The answer to this is, I think, rather obvious. Many of my friends know how I felt when I watched the sunrise each morning as I was walking across Spain. They know this because I told them. Likewise, the events in the desert could easily have been passed onto the Apostles by Jesus Himself. Perhaps one night around the fire, after casting out an unclean spirit in a Synagogue earlier in the day, Jesus told them what had taken place during His time in the wilderness.

Jesus would never call other people wrong

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I just had a very strange interaction on Facebook… A friend of mine posted the following video of the Protestant evangelist Todd Friel:

One of his friends, a man called Simon, responded with the following curious assertions:

His response struck me as a strange for several reasons, but first and foremost because it demonstrated very clearly that Simon was rather unfamiliar with the New Testament! I responded by pointing out that Jesus would absolutely call other people wrong. In fact, at times He could be quite mean, even to the point of calling people names:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites… You fools and blind men… For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness… you brood of vipers” 

Matthew 23:15, 17, 27-28, 33

He was even known on occasion to flip tables!

And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables – John 2:15

John 2:15

Naturally, there are many other Scripture passages which I could have quoted, not least Jesus’ exclusive claims about Himself:

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

John 14:6

With wearying predictability, rather than adjusting his statement, Simon immediately accused me of “judging” him. Some folks really love to jump to play the victim card even at the mildest of challenges. I wonder if he would have said exactly the same thing if I had pointed out an error in his arithmetic…

Amusingly, he then tried to quote Romans 2 to me:

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?

Romans 2:1-3

At this point I suggested to him that, while I’d be happy to discuss that passage with him, it probably isn’t a good idea to quote the Bible at a Christian right on the heels of making a demonstrably false statement about Jesus. He then said that he didn’t want to discuss his beliefs with me any more, so I closed by saying that hopefully I had at least disabused you of the notion that “Jesus would never call other people wrong”. I concluded with a passage which denies this explicitly:

“[Jesus said] ‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God'”

Matthew 22:29

…and, for good measure, I also included a passage where Jesus teaches His followers about judgement:

“Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly”

John 7:24

Needless to say, he wrote with the following:

…and then thirty seconds later deleted the thread.

Wise Words on Wednesday: Jesus was not dull

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So that is the outline of the official story—the talk of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him.

This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero. If this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore; on the contrary, they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left to later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him “meek and mild,” and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.

To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggested a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand. True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites; he referred to King Herod as “that fox”; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a “gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners”; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.

But he had “a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly,” and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.

Now we may call this story exhilarating or we may call it devastating, we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish, but if we call “dull” then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist hearing of it for the first time would recognize it as news. Those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that.

Dorothy Sayers, The Dogma Is the Drama
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