The men who knew the Scriptures best looked at Jesus and saw a heretic. The scribes and Pharisees were not villains. They were the most devout, most Bible-saturated people in the room, and they wanted him dead. Why? Because he kept breaking their categories. He touched what they would not touch, forgave what they said only God could forgive, worked on the day nobody worked, ate with the wrong people, and saved his hardest words for the right ones.
The Greek word underneath all of it is skandalon, a stumbling block, the thing set in the road that trips you. Jesus was, by heaven’s design, a scandal to dead religion. This series walks through eight of the offensive things he actually did, and holds each one up like a mirror. Not to shame the church, but to wake it up. We do not need a scandal for its own sake. We need the specific scandal of Jesus back in the room.
Start here and read straight through
- This Church Needs a Scandal — Why the most devout men of Jesus’ day judged him a heretic, and what the word skandalon has to do with us.
- The Man Who Touched Lepers — Jesus touched what the Law said would defile him, and cleanness flowed the other way.
- Who Do You Think You Are? — He forgave sins out loud, and the scribes were right that only God can do that.
- Breaking the Sabbath on Purpose — He healed on the Sabbath in full view, then defended it out loud.
- Bad Company — “This man receives sinners and eats with them,” the truest accusation they ever made.
- The Wrong People Get In — A Samaritan for a hero and a Roman for a model of faith.
- Turning Over the Tables — He wrecked the temple economy and called the religious whitewashed tombs.
- The Scandal That Saved the World — The cross as the offense that became our salvation, and the empty tomb that had the last word.
Read them in order, or start with whichever offense unsettles you most. Either way, the question the whole series keeps asking is the same. If Jesus walked into our churches doing what he did then, would we recognize him, or would we file the same complaints the Pharisees did?
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