Hank's Bible Study Resources

Picture the men who wanted Jesus dead. In your imagination they are probably villains, cartoon Pharisees with sour faces and greedy hands, the kind of people you would never be caught standing next to. But that picture is a lie, and it is a comfortable one, and it is the first thing we have to give up.

The men who read Jesus as a heretic were the most serious believers of their generation. They tithed down to the mint leaves in the garden. They knew the Torah the way you know the way to your own kitchen in the dark. They fasted when they did not have to, prayed when no one was watching, and built their whole lives around not offending the God of Abraham. If you had lined up every person in first-century Judea and asked which ones loved the Scriptures most, these are the men who would have stepped forward. And they looked at the Son of God with their own eyes, listened to him with their own ears, and concluded he was dangerous.

Sit with that before you explain it away. The people best equipped to recognize the Messiah are the ones who called for his execution. That should frighten anybody who has spent a long time in church.

The stone God set down on purpose

There is a Greek word buried under this whole collision, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Jesus uses it about himself in Matthew 11:6. John the Baptist, sitting in Herod’s prison and starting to wonder if he had bet his life on the wrong man, sends word to ask if Jesus is really the one. Jesus answers with a list of what is happening, the blind seeing, the lame walking, the poor hearing good news. And then he adds this, “And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”

Offended. That is our word.

The word did not start out religious. A skandalon was the little baited stick in a deadfall trap, the piece an animal bumps that drops the weight. From there it grew to mean anything set in the path that makes a person trip and fall. When Jesus says blessed is the one who is not skandalized in him, he is saying, plainly, that he is going to be the kind of stone people trip over. Some will fall over him and get up worshiping. Some will fall over him and never get up at all.

Paul says the same thing without flinching in 1 Corinthians 1:23. “But we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness.” That phrase, stumbling block, is our word again. A crucified Messiah was not a hard idea for the devout. It was an offensive one. It broke every category they had. The Anointed of God was supposed to break Rome, not hang from a Roman cross like a common criminal under the curse of Deuteronomy. To a Torah-loving Jew, the cross was not merely wrong. It was blasphemy.

And here is the part that should stop us cold. This was not an accident. Isaiah saw it coming seven centuries early. “He will be as a sanctuary, but a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to both the houses of Israel” (Isaiah 8:14). God tells us ahead of time that the same stone will be a shelter to some and a trap-stick to others, and that the difference will not be intelligence or pedigree or religious résumé. The stone does not move. The people do.

So the offense was not a bug in Jesus’ ministry that we have to apologize for. It was designed. He broke the Sabbath rules the way the rabbis had built them. He touched the people the law said would make him unclean. He forgave sins out loud, which only God can do, and everyone in the room knew it. He ate with the wrong crowd, praised the wrong nationalities, and reserved his hottest words not for prostitutes and thieves but for the men who had memorized the most Scripture. He was, by intention, a stumbling block to dead religion.

The rut we are actually in

Here is where I have to turn the light around and let it shine on us, and by us I mean me and the church I love, not some other church across town that has it worse.

We are not in danger of hating Jesus. We are in danger of something quieter and, honestly, harder to catch. We have heard these stories so many times that we have worn the sharp edges off a dangerous man. We know how the accounts end, so we never feel the terror of the middle. We have turned “eat my flesh and drink my blood” into a communion liturgy we can recite half asleep. We have taken the Man who emptied the temple with a whip in his hand and put him on a flannelgraph in a soft blue robe, gentle as a golden retriever.

That is what familiarity does. It is not rebellion. It is erosion. A church does not usually fall away in one dramatic afternoon. It settles, the way a house settles, into grooves that feel like home precisely because they no longer ask anything of us. The forms stay. The songs stay. The offering plate still goes around. But the form of godliness can go right on running for years after the life of it has quietly drained out, and from the pew it is nearly impossible to tell the difference.

The scary thing about the Pharisees was never that they were irreligious. It was that they were religious in a rut so deep and so old that when God himself walked into it, he looked like a threat.

More of the real one

So what do we do with a Jesus like this. Not less of him. That is the reflex, to sand him down further, to make him safer, to keep only the parts that comfort and quietly file away the parts that offend. But a tamed Christ has never saved anybody. The cure for a church gone stiff was never a smaller Jesus. It is more of the real one, the whole one, the one who still refuses to fit inside the boxes we build for him.

This series is going to walk, one offense at a time, through the specific scandalous things Jesus actually did. The Sabbath he broke. The lepers he touched. The sinners he ate with. The sins he forgave with his own mouth. And each time, we are going to hold that ancient offense up like a mirror and ask an uncomfortable question. Where have we settled into the very rut that once could not recognize God in the flesh.

If that stings a little, good. The blessing in Matthew 11:6 is for the one who is not tripped up by Jesus, and you cannot know whether you have tripped over a stone you have stopped looking at. So we are going to look. Steadily, book and chapter and verse, at the man the devout could not stomach.

This church needs a scandal. Not a new one of our own making. The old one. The stumbling stone God set down on purpose, still lying right where he left it, still splitting the room, still holy, still blessing everyone who falls over him and gets back up on their knees.

Start there. We will pick up the whip next.