Liar, Lunatic or Lord

C.S. Lewis is not a fully orthodox teacher. He is a brilliant teacher and I recommend him in certain cases but you would not be served to take everything he says at face value. He is not an evangelical 'saint' but he's a good writer. He wrote all kinds of things-he has a huge corpus of writing-but probably none of it would have happened if he had not made one particular quote. This quote, originally part of one of his weekly radio addresses made during WWII, rocketed him to be what he would be. His explanation to who Christ is, dealing with the common statement that Jesus is simply a good teacher goes thus: "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.” Lewis quote informs our reading of the passage opened from the pulpit this Lord's Day, Mark 3:13-35. In this text, we see several groups of people and leaders interacting with Jesus, stating who or what they believe He is. Mark agrees with our friend Lewis, Christ is either a liar, a lunatic or He is the Lord. Let us, by God's grace, seek to emulate those who call Him Lord.