Jesus and other Religions - Discovery Website

Jesus and Other Religions

It's an attractive idea, isn't it? We can go to Sainsbury's and buy Mexican salsa, Lebanese couscous, Indian dhal and Japanese tofu. If we're clever, we might even be able to mix them all together in a single recipe! So can't we just 'mix and match' religions in the same way? After all, don't they lead to the same God?

At one time I was a very passionate believer in this myself. At university I was able to experiment with Taoist rituals, to join a Buddhist meditation class, to investigate Hindu philosophy, to attend a Baha’i meeting, and to engage in long conversations about God with a Muslim friend. During this time it seemed natural to me to believe that all spiritual paths led ultimately the same way.

In 1989, however, one event took place which was to completely change my thinking. A clergyman friend lent me an autobiography entitled ‘The Torn Veil’. The book was written by a Muslim woman from Pakistan, who claimed that she had been paralysed completely down one side of her body for eighteen years, until Jesus had appeared to her in a vision and healed her. (All her previous knowledge of him had been through reading the Qur'an, which refers to some of his miracles). As a result she had abandoned her Islamic beliefs completely and become a Christian, being forced by her family to flee to England.

Naturally, I suspected at once that the story was a hoax. However, I was astonished to hear from the friend from whom I had obtained the book that he knew the woman personally, that he could verify every detail of her account, and that she was actually living in the same town as me, and even attending church in a neighbouring parish!

If this was true, the implications for me were staggering.  Not only was Jesus still appearing to people today - but actively encouraging them to change their religion!  So much for my ‘everything goes’, ‘all-roads-lead-to-God’ hypothesis! I had to think again.

Over the next few months I had the opportunity to hear and read many other testimonies of Jesus’s continuing power to heal. One week the daughter of a well-known Christian writer described in church how her mother had just been delivered from an otherwise incurable paralytic condition - an experience I was also able later to verify for myself.

Later I was astonished to meet a man who related that he had seen one of his legs visibly grow to the length of the other during a group prayer session (since he was a Lecturer in Finance at a prestigious College of Higher Education, I hardly thought he would have made up the story!)

Gradually, as I encountered more and more such miracles in the lives of others, it dawned on me that if even one of these accounts were true, any of the miracles in the Bible could actually have taken place. And if any of them could have happened, it was at least feasible that all of them might actually have occurred in the way they were described! In other words, it was quite possible for Jesus to be exactly who he said he was!

A unique claim?

So what makes the claims of Jesus special? And what grounds do we have for taking him any more seriously than Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, or any other enlightened prophet of the past?

One factor that might cause us to pause for thought is that the claims Jesus made for himself are far, far greater than those of other great religions. When, for instance, did Confucius or Mohammed suggest that ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9); ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10:30); or 'Before Abraham was, I AM' (John 8:58)? When did the founders of other world religions claim to control the wind and the waves (Mark 4:41), to command angelic beings (Matthew 24:31) or to give life to the dead (John 5:21)? Jesus was, in short, making a staggering assertion for himself - nothing less, in fact, than absolute divinity itself!

As the writer C.S. Lewis once commented, to describe Jesus simply as an inspired prophet or an excellent teacher is inconsistent - either he was completely deluded, deliberately fraudulent, or he really was what he claimed to be - in other words, he was either mad, bad - or God!

Yet here we find a staggering contradiction. If Jesus was God in human form, he was willing to identify with us so completely as to die as our personal substitute on the cross, taking the consequences of our rebellion against him entirely upon himself. As a modern hymn reflects, ‘hands that flung stars into space’ were ‘to cruel nails surrendered’.

Many have seen the film 'The Passion of the Christ'. But what really happened on the cross? In six hours of gruesome torture a ‘divine exchange’ of staggering proportions took place, as Jesus willingly absorbed in his own body every human sin ever to be committed, so that we might in return receive the gift of his everlasting life.

Does this sound uncomfortably dogmatic or exclusive?  If so, it is no more so than Jesus himself was, in declaring himself to be the direct human expression of God. And, if Jesus actually was in fact everything he claimed to be, we have no alternative but to take him very seriously indeed. Yet the Bible warns us that his death on our behalf can only benefit us if we accept it  for ourselves, by trusting him as our own personal Saviour and surrendering our lives fully into his hands, acknowledging him, as his friend and disciple Thomas did, as ‘My Lord and my God’.

How will we respond? Jesus is calling you and me personally, and in the end it is up to each one of us to make that choice on our own. Let us not forget that whatever decision we make has consequences that will last us for the whole of eternity. Be assured that, if we are serious about finding him, he will do everything to guide us towards our true destiny, and the ultimate goal of eternal life with him.

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|Jesus and Other Religions|Jesus for the Despairing|A reflection and a prayer|