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WWJD: Why Does Jesus Matter? (The Uniqueness of Jesus)

Jesus the Legend

In his magisterial work The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard notes that:

Along with two thieves, he [Jesus] was executed by the authorities about two thousand years ago. Yet today, from countless paintings, statues, and buildings, from literature and history, from personality and institution, from profanity, popular song, and entertainment media, from confession and controversy, from legend and ritual — Jesus stands quietly at the center of the contemporary world, as he himself predicted. He so graced the ugly instrument on which he died that the cross has become the most widely exhibited and recognized symbol on earth.¹

And Jaroslav Pelikan — perhaps the most respected Church historian of our day — notes that "Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?"²

Finding the Real Jesus

It is a curious fact that virtually every ideology in sight wants to claim Jesus as its own. For Buddhists, He was a bodhisattva; for Hindus, an avatar; for Muslims, perhaps the greatest prophet ever.

When the members of the liberal Jesus Seminar re-create Jesus, He always looks strangely like the members themselves as they claim the He was really one of them (for universal healthcare, pacificism, and so on).

Gay activists appropriate Jesus and conservative politicians do so as well.

What makes all this so curious is that Jesus lived some thirty-odd years in a very remote part of the Roman Empire, far away from political or military power. He was a blue-collar worker, and He did not travel far from His place of birth. When He died, His followers amounted to a scant number of ordinary Jews who were bewildered and discouraged. Anyone familiar with the power of the Roman Empire and the staggering number of indigenous religions during Jesus' day can only stand back in awe at the rapid and stunning spread of Christianity in the decades following Jesus' execution. It is no accident that today we name our children Peter and Paul and our dogs Caesar and Nero!

The fact that virtually every religion wants to claim Jesus as its own provides an insight for apologetics-minded believers. When a religion appropriates Jesus, it invariably has to tinker with Him so that He fits. The result: a watered-down, distorted Jesus.

Now, suppose someone claimed to be a meat-lover and was "feasting" on a dry, stale hotdog. If that person were offered a sizzling, tender T-bone steak and refused, it would become obvious that he/she was not really a meat-lover but, instead, a dry, stale hotdog lover. Similarly, imagine a person who claimed to be a God-seeker and was spiritually "feasting" on a watered-down, tame, distorted Jesus. If this person was offered the real Jesus, through the preaching of the Gospel, but refused to accept Him, it would become obvious that he/she was not really a God-seeker. Instead, the person would be devoted to something else — retaining a sense of belonging to one's culture, ethnic or religious group, avoiding persecution, wanting to hold to a form of religion without really having to face intimacy with the living God, not wanting to change, and so on.

A Life of Discipleship

The greatness of Jesus is one — and only one — indication of how valuable it is to enlist as His apprentice in the school of life. I sometimes meet people who say, "I'm not going to follow anyone. I'm my own boss, thank you very much, and my motto is 'To thine own self be true.'"

Such an attitude is shallow and silly. Why? First, a life of discipleship does not shrink one's self — it expands it. It has been the testimony of millions of pilgrims for centuries that by giving their lives to Jesus, they actually came to find their lives.

Second, no one goes through life without taking the advice and wisdom of experts. Folks regularly go to a therapist, a doctor, a financial advisor, a bookstore, college, their friends and parents to receive knowledge, wisdom and help in their journey. It makes no sense to do this for specific areas of our lives and not do it when it comes to living life as a whole.

Moreover, Jesus would be the first to say that if one could find a better guide to life than He, then by all means follow that other guide. But Jesus knew that there is no better guide. When He said that He was the Way, the Truth and the Life, He wasn't just whistlin' Dixie! I need all the help I can get in life, and I have found that following Jesus is the best way to go, as have multitudes of others.

People say that it is hard to follow Jesus. They have a point. Learning to do anything — play tennis, speak a foreign language, love your enemies, get good at life, be a disciple — is always hard in the early stages of learning. But in another sense, following Jesus is an easy yoke as He Himself said (Matthew 11:28-30). Life goes much easier if you learn to forgive, set aside anger and so forth. The really hard path is the one lived far away from discipleship unto Jesus.

Why Jesus Matters

But how are we to explain the impact Jesus had from the earliest days of His ministry to the present? Clearly, one could point to the appealing nature of His person. When people the world over read or hear about Him, when they actually examine the gospels themselves, it is hard not to be drawn to the historical figure of Jesus. One could rightly appeal to the power and depth of His teachings.

Among other things, the history of Western ethical thought has been shaped by and measured in terms of Jesus' teachings. From the purely "human" side, all this is quite correct. But I believe they are inadequate to explain Jesus' impact. These legitimate points must be supplemented with two further items.

First, Jesus performed miracles and rose from the dead and thereby demonstrated that He was no mere man but the very Son of God Himself. New Testament scholars have shown that from the earliest days of Christianity, the followers of Jesus took themselves to be proclaiming as their central mission not a good teacher or virtuous sage, but a miracle-working, resurrected Divine Son of God who had been prophesied for centuries.³ Without a resurrection and a Divine Jesus, there would have been no church.

Second, because Jesus is still alive, He does not come to us simply through His teachings or the glimpses of His love and character in the New Testament, as important as these are. To cite Willard again:

I think we finally have to say that Jesus' enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity."⁴

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Why do you think Jesus matters?

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For this and countless other reasons, Jesus is the greatest person who ever graced the pages of human history.