4 – Jesus and the Magicians

‘It is not (possible) for any human being to whom God has given the Book and wisdom and prophethood to say to the people: ‘Be my worshippers rather than God’s.’ On the contrary (he would say): ‘Be devoted worshippers of your Lord, because you are teaching the Book, and you are studying it.’ Nor would he order you to take angels and Prophets for lords. Would he order you to disbelieve after you have submitted to God’s will?’ (Qur’an 3:79-80)

Who was Jesus? Or—if we prefer the present tense, as many do—who is he? What would Jesus have told us two millennia ago, what would he tell us today, about his ministry, his mission, his objectives, his identity? These are fateful questions, questions that challenge us.

If the Christian writer C.S. Lewis and the other mainstream scholars and theologians of Christianity are correct, Jesus would say to us, ‘I am God Incarnate, the second person of the Trinity.’

Lewis supports this view of Jesus with words to this effect: ‘Two thousand years ago, a man appeared among the Jews claiming to be God, a man whose words and deeds profoundly unsettled the religious authorities of his day, and whose mission continues to unsettle all of mankind. In evaluating this man’s career, there are only two possibilities for us. We may consider him a lunatic, or we may consider him the Son of God. There is no middle ground. And who will maintain that Jesus was a lunatic?’

Now, I must be honest and admit that this line of argument has irritated me for many years … because it reminds me so much of a magician’s performance.

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Magicians, when they wish to make it appear to a paying audience that they have supernatural powers, often employ a series of careful misdirections: an unexpected flare from some flash powder, a pretty lady in a revealing gown, a loud noise from offstage, even something as simple as a gesture or a word. Magicians employ these misdirections, not for the sake of simple showmanship, but with a purpose, and while holding a subtle goal in mind.

Consider, for instance, the case of a card magician. The aim is to distract an audience member who has been called up onto the stage for just a moment, just long enough to manipulate the deck, and then to move quickly enough to convince her that she has freely chosen a card on her own. In fact, however, the magician has ‘forced’ a predetermined card on her.

This is the magician’s principle of misdirection.

Lewis engages in very similar sleight-of-hand with his ‘lunatic-or-Son-of-God’ argument, which appears in his book Mere Christianity.

Of course, there is no thoughtful, spiritually aware person—Christian or otherwise—who can read the Gospels with an open mind and an open heart, and come away from that experience convinced that Jesus was a lunatic. And so the believer finds herself holding a ‘card’ that she did not choose, a ‘card’ that has been forced upon her, a ‘card’ that informs her that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, the human component of the Trinity—as (she is assured) he himself claims to be.

The thoughtful Christians, however, must be prepared to appeal to the most authentic words of the Gospels to determine the truth or falsehood of such matters.

Once we resolve that much firmly in our hearts, we may find that we really are brave enough to pose the question for ourselves: Who is Jesus?

Does he say, ‘I am the only begotten Son of God and the second person of the Trinity’? If we examine this fateful question carefully, we reach an extraordinary conclusion. We may look through the Gospels for as long as we please, but we will have a very difficult time indeed locating any verse in which Jesus says this.

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Now, Islam teaches that Jesus Christ forcefully rejected claims that he was divine. Most mainstream Christians who disagree with the teachings of Islam do so because of its emphatic insistence on this point.

We certainly have a right to be skeptical about Islam’s claims about this issue. It is only fair for us to demand evidence from the Gospels, and not from any other source, before we conclude that Jesus rejected the divine role that so many believe he was born to play in human affairs.

So the question becomes: Can we find even one Gospel passage that plausibly suggests Jesus rejected today’s prevailing understanding of his mission? Can we find a verse that shows him denying that he was the divine incarnation of God, the second person of the Trinity?

If we cannot find such a verse, then the discussion is over. Islam has failed to support its claims. If we can find such a verse, we are perhaps obliged to look a little more closely at what Islam has to say about Jesus.

We have, I think, both the right and the duty to determine whether or not Lewis, as he spreads out his deck of cards for us, is trying to distract us with his lunacy-or-divinity argument—and if he is, what he might be trying to distract us from. Misdirection is fine for entertainment, but it has, we must admit, no place when it comes to the important business of determining one’s own path to salvation.

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Well. What could Lewis be eager to direct our attention away from?

Perhaps from Gospel passages like this one … in which Jesus explicitly denies any claim on divinity:

‘And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.’ (Mark 10:17-18)

If Jesus was God, why in the world would he say something like this? Did he somehow forget that he himself was God when he uttered these words? (A side note—I had a discussion with a woman who assured me that this passage in Mark was not really in the Gospels, and who refused to believe that it appeared there until I gave her the chapter and verse number and she looked it up for herself!)

Have we ever gone to church and heard a homily or sermon exclusively devoted to Mark 10:18?

If our answer is ‘no,’ perhaps it is fair to ask why that is so … and to ask what other Gospel passages our magician may be attempting to distract our attention from.

Perhaps the magician would prefer to distract us from the italicized words that appear in the following Gospel passage … words with which Jesus makes clear that all of the truly faithful are (metaphorically speaking) Children of God:

‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you, that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ (Matthew 5:44-45)

Or perhaps the magician is eager to distract us from Gospel passages like this one … in which Jesus draws our attention away from reverence of him, and towards obedience to God Alone:

‘And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’ (Luke 11:27-28)

Or perhaps we are meant to be distracted from this Gospel passage … in which Jesus reminds us that it is God Alone who forgives sinners:

‘Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me. Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.’ (Matthew 18:32-35)

In this parable, does Jesus say that he himself will deliver us over to the torturers if we do not forgive those who wrong us, after we ourselves have been forgiven?

Or does he say that his heavenly Father—our heavenly Father!—will deliver us over to the torturers if we choose to persist in this hypocrisy?

We are entitled to ask: Is this heavenly Father he speaks of the same as, or different than, the Father referenced elsewhere as the Father of all the faithful, the One who causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall on all of us?

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To be sure, all these passages appear in the New Testament, and they are all easy enough to look up and consult. But if you have ever tried to engage members of the clergy in a discussion of these passages (as I have), you will find that a very interesting thing takes place when you try to talk about these passages. St. Paul keeps popping up.

You may begin by talking about the words of Jesus, but somehow you will always end up talking about the words of St. Paul. And this, I submit, is misdirection.

The faith Jesus preached was not Paulism, and no amount of legerdemain can possibly alter this fact.

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We should not have to ask for any special permission to focus on the authentic words of Jesus, and only on the authentic words of Jesus. And if we are willing to focus only on the authentic words of Jesus, we may eventually conclude that they paint a picture of Jesus as a human Prophet, a picture that is startlingly similar to the picture offered in the Qur’an.

Christians around the world repeat the Lord’s Prayer faithfully every day, attributing its exquisite words to Jesus himself. We are entitled to ask: Does this prayer require the faithful to appeal to Jesus himself? To the Trinity? To the Holy Spirit? Or does it require the faithful to appeal to ‘our Father’?

We are entitled to ask: To whom was Jesus praying when he spoke these words? Himself? Certainly not! And it is not ‘my Father’ that Jesus appeals to … but ‘our Father.’

And we are entitled to ask: Why was he even speaking these words, if he himself was God?

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In the end, our own honest answer to the question ‘Who is Jesus?’ need not be much more elaborate or sophisticated than a simple ‘I don’t know.’ That may very well be the best answer as we make our way through the Gospels. It’s certainly not an answer to be ashamed of: ‘I don’t know.’ And it is far better than answering as though the question we were facing were actually ‘Who does St. Paul say Jesus is?’

The only answer that is worthy of shame, when we are asked ‘Who is Jesus?’ is the one that elevates the force of our own habit over the actual words of the Gospel. We may well face grave difficulties if we consciously choose to answer this question out of force of habit when we know better.

C.S. Lewis and the theologians of what is today known as mainstream Christianity may want us to answer that question out of force of habit, of course. They have their reasons. They have made their own choices. And they have arranged the deck as they see fit.

Whether we accept the card that has been extended, and then tell ourselves that we have chosen it freely, however, is up to us.

At eighteen, I headed East for college and entered the Roman Catholic Church. In college, I met a beautiful and compassionate Catholic girl who was to become the great love and support of my life; she was not particularly religious, but she appreciated how important these matters were to me, and so she supported me in my beliefs. I do a great injustice to her seemingly limitless resources of strength, support, and love by compressing the beginning of our relationship into a few sentences here.

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I asked the campus priest—a sweet and pious man—about some of the Gospel material that had given me trouble, but he became uncomfortable and changed the subject. On another occasion, I remember telling him that I was focusing closely on the Gospel of John because that Gospel was (as I thought then) a first-person account of the events in question.

Again, he stammered and changed the subject and did not want to discuss the merits of one Gospel over another; he simply insisted that all four were important and that I should study all of them. This was a telling conversation, and a fateful one, as it turned out.