Labeling Jesus Series

A. You’ve heard the old joke: “You can call me anything you want, just don’t call me late for dinner.”

1. Have you ever had someone call you a name that hurt you? We all have, right?

2. Some people call us names to deliberately hurt us, but others sometimes call us names in jest, and yet those names can still hurt.

3. Have you ever heard these names being thrown around? Bozo. Dork. Weirdo. Wuss. Porker. Geezer. Spaz. Crazy. Birdbrain. Lamebrain. Dingbat. Dingle-berry. Dimwit. Chatterbox.

4. Did your parents teach you the nursery rhyme that’s been around since the 1800s that help’s children overcome the pain of name-calling? “Sticks and stones my break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

5. In some respects, that’s true because names can only hurt us if we let them hurt us, whereas we don’t have much of a choice about the sticks and stones hurting us.

B. In the section of the Gospel of Mark that we will explore today, as we continue our sermon series on Mark’s Gospel, Mark tells us about the opinions that some people had about Jesus and about the names and labels that they were giving Him.

1. As we work through our sermon today, I want us to wrestle with the question of who Jesus was and what was people’s opinion of Jesus during His life and ministry.

2. Mark reveals to us that some members of Jesus’ family thought He was deluded and some of the religious leaders thought that He was demonized, but neither of those judgments were true.

3. The truth of the matter is Jesus was and is divine.

4. C. S. Lewis popularized the “trilemma” of Jesus being either “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic.”

5. In Lewis’ book “Mere Christianity,” he wrote: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. 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 …. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

6. We might state it this way: Jesus claimed to be God. His claim is either true or false. If it is true, then He is God. If the claim is false, then either He said it knowing it was false, in which case He is a liar, or He said it not knowing it was false, in which case He was deluded. Therefore, we are left with three logical options: He is either God, or a liar, or a lunatic.

a. To say Jesus was a liar will seem quite a stretch for most people (even unbelievers), particularly if they think He was a great moral teacher. A great moral teacher would not, by definition, lie, and certainly not tell a lie of such magnitude as to claim to be God when He wasn’t.

b. To say Jesus was a lunatic is also a stretch, since His teaching would appear to be the quintessence of sanity—and, of course, a great moral teacher is, again by definition, sane.

c. So, if He was not a liar and was not a lunatic, then the only other logically possible conclusion is that He is God.

7. Let’s see how Mark sandwiched together the incident with Jesus’ family and the incident with the Jewish leaders to help us understand who Jesus is so that we can follow Jesus better.

C. Mark wrote: 20 Jesus entered a house, and the crowd gathered again so that they were not even able to eat. 21 When his family heard this, they set out to restrain him, because they said, “He’s out of his mind.” (Mk. 3:20-21)

1. Some Bible versions translate three of these important phrases differently.

2. The first phrase “Jesus entered a house” could also be translated “Jesus came home.”