Four Portraits, One Jesus (Epilogue): Why Don't They Just Call Him "God"?

If He walks like a healer, human heart-reader, forgiver of sins...

In one of our earlier posts, we mentioned that all four of these portraits of Jesus have one crucial piece in common: Jesus is the divine Son of God. Of course, this is not the only thing that each Gospel has in common, but it may very well be the most important, and it certainly is the piece that is most often attacked.

We discussed that critics often point out that the Gospel of John is the only Gospel that really comes close to saying that Jesus is God, and that this is especially significant when we remember that John is the latest. Why? Because the later and later we push Jesus’s followers’ recognition that He was God, a new story begins to emerge: maybe the earliest believers never thought Jesus was God in the first place. Maybe Jesus was thought to have done some remarkable things, but it was only after a few generations that legends about Him began to grow until finally, people forgot He was only a man and started to think of Him as divine.

And among the many ways that critics have supported this view, there’s one convenient fact that lies at the bottom of all of this: Jesus never says in simple terms, “I am God.” What’s more, none of the Gospel narrators ever say that about Jesus either. In fact, Thomas is the only person in all four Gospels to make this statement (John 20:28).

But what if, instead of being suspicious of what they have to say, we were to start by giving the Gospel authors the benefit of the doubt? Is there a reason why, even if they believed it—and even if they were trying to convince us it were true—they might not want to say, “Jesus is God”?

The earliest Christians generally used “God” almost like a proper name for the Father. For this reason, to use it when talking about Jesus would have obviously been confusing; if they were being called by the same exact name all the time, there would be times when it wouldn’t exactly be clear who was being referred to.

More than just being confusing, failure to make this distinction could have even hindered these Christians’ testimony. By referring to Jesus as God, the Jews may have thought that these Christians had introduced a second God, and they would have immediately rejected the Christian message. On the other hand, Gentiles could have easily mistaken Christianity for one of the many other religions with multiple Gods.

But there’s something more important beneath all this: Christians really do need to be able to know the difference between the Father and the Son, and using different terminology made it easier to grasp that the Father and the Son are different persons, even though they are the same God. It also would have protected a full understanding of who Jesus is: by not always referring to Jesus directly as God, it is easier to remember that Jesus is also fully human as we are.

So what are some of the ways the New Testament writers still made clear that Jesus was God?

Paul may be our earliest writer, and a religious attitude towards Jesus is all he knows. What is really striking about Paul is that he never defends Jesus’s divinity. Apparently, not even his most bitter rivals and the false teachers he wrote against had any disagreements on this point.

But we’re talking about the Gospels: four portraits, one Jesus, and we’ve argued that each one is in agreement here.

Even if they do not call Him God, they certainly call Him “Lord,” which happens to be the exact word used to translate God’s name in the Old Testament: Yahweh.

And yet the Gospels present us with a divine Jesus in an even more powerful way. Mere statements of fact, such as “2+2=4” or “Jesus is God,” do not leave an impression on us very effectively, and even when they do, it’s not always clear what they have to do with us. But do you know what is much more effective?

Stories.

A good story will not only stick with us, but they invite us to place ourselves in the story as well. In a way, stories have the power to read you as you read them, searching your heart and confronting you with a truth that demands an answer, and maybe even a decision about what to do about it.

All the more with biblical stories.

If you take a look back at our discussion from last time, we focused on how the same story of Jesus’s healing of a paralyzed man recorded in both Mark and Luke paints different pictures of the same Jesus. This time, let’s briefly look at what they have in common.

It may be helpful to check out Mark 2:1–12 and Luke 5:17–26; you can revisit the previous post to see the main highlights. In both authors’ retelling of the story, Jesus’s teaching is so great that large crowds are flocking to Him. Even if He wanted to be kept hidden, it would have been impossible. What’s more, His awesome power is on display: He reads human hearts, and He heals a man so weak that he needed to be carried, apparently just by telling the man to get up.

The people’s reaction tells it all. They are absolutely amazed by Him. In Mark, the people even say that they had never seen anything like what they saw that day. The implication? It had never been done before.

And then there’s the one detail that makes clear that Jesus is not only a miracle worker: He forgives the man’s sins.

There was no confusion when the religious leaders heard this. In each version (Matthew’s too; chapter 9 verses 1 through 8), the religious leaders protest that this has to be blasphemy, because only God is able to forgive sins. And yet the Gospel authors tell us more than even the most educated leaders of Jesus’s day were able to pick up.

Jesus forgave the man because he and his friends had faith in Him to bring healing.

As if it wasn’t enough to simply make it plain to us that Jesus really is God, the Gospels add that He is the object of our faith. And they do this time and time again.

We’ll look at more of these stories in the coming weeks (can there be epilogues to the epilogue?). In fact, we’ll look at another one of these stories this Sunday.

Have any questions? Shoot me an email!

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