Hamburgers & Jesus

I was thinking about hamburgers the other day. What a funny word, “hamburger.” There’s no ham in the burgers I eat…no ham that I know of, anyway. Now a SPAMburger, that would have some ham, but I digress.

Words. They mean things. Someone reading a McDonald’s menu 200 years from now might think that a hamburger would have some ham in it, after all, it’s right there in the name. It’s obvious right? They might even argue with the scholars of their day. “It’s in the word guys! Just look…H A M burger.” But after a little more digging, maybe he would find out that there’s no ham after all, hamburgers just originated in Hamburg, Germany…that’s what Google told me anyway.

People have been doing this with Jesus for years. Ask a Baptist, a Muslim, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Mormon, and an agnostic who Jesus is, and they will all have a different answer. Oh, they will all be talking about Jesus, but which one? This isn’t a case of tomato/tomata either. We can deceive ourselves into thinking we’re talking about the same thing, when really we’re all talking about something completely different. We live in an age where no one wants to offend anyone and everyone wants every word to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean…but 2+2 does not in fact equal 7. And I won’t be getting on an airplane with any pilot that thinks it does.

C.S. Lewis said that Jesus was either crazy, lying, or telling the truth. That sounds about right to me.

What about you? Who do you say Jesus was? A lot of people say a lot of different things about him. But everyone can’t be right.

In the end, I guess what we think about hamburgers doesn’t really matter. But what we think about Jesus…that matters.