How silly it is to describe Jesus as "a good man." He is defined by the supernatural: a virgin birth; the heavens opening and the voice of God speaking, "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased"; water turned into wine; demons cast out; food multiplied; the dead raised to new life; standing on a mountaintop in a brilliant, glorified state with two men long ago dead; a tomb that cannot hold him; appearing after his death, not as a ghost, but as a resurrected being who could eat fish and enter locked rooms; ascending into heaven. As C.S. Lewis so clearly articulated, there is no possibility of Jesus having been merely a good man. God's own account does not leave that lukewarm assessment as a possibility.
"The ascension," Oswald writes, "is the consummation of the transfiguration." Peter, James and John saw Jesus in his glorified state at the transfiguration. They heard God's pronouncement. Elijah and Moses signified by their presence the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.
Webster Online defines transfiguration as "a change in form or appearance: metamorphosis; an exalting, glorifying or spiritual change."
A good man might have gone to heaven right then -- at the height of his success foregoing Gethsemane, persecution, torture and crucifixion. A good man, one who wasn't God incarnate, who didn't have the power to save the world, would certainly not have walked knowingly off that mountaintop experience into the valley of an excruciating death.
"We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death when we were of no use whatever to him," Romans 5:7-8, The Message.
Jesus was not merely a good and noble man. He was, is, God, and he calls me to relationship. The work of my life -- worth the investment of every gift he has given me -- is to figure out what that means.
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