The Best Offense

He said to His disciples, “Offences will certainly come, but woe to the one they come through! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” – Luke 17:1-2

He went away from there and came to His hometown, and His disciples followed Him. When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard Him were astonished. “Where did this man get these things?” they said. “What is this wisdom given to him, and how are these miracles performed by his hands? Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And aren’t his sisters here with us?”

So they were offended by Him. – Mark 6:1-3

Have you ever been offended by something? I was talking the other day about how I took offense at the way people treated me and subsequently made my own life more difficult by becoming bitter and doing my best to further alienate people. We will often do things that are detrimental to ourselves just to hurt or get back at those who have offended us. We say sometimes that a person will do something just for spite. A spiteful person is one who has been offended, and not necessarily by the one suffering their spite.

There are things that ought to offend us. I remember as I was crossing a parking lot one day, minding my own business, I saw a man slapping his girlfriend. This offended me. We should be offended by bullying and intimidation, by injustice and ingratitude, not when we suffer – in which case our first response should be forgiveness -- but when someone else suffers under it. The weaker and more helpless need us to become offended enough to step in on their behalf.

The world is full of people who have a grievance against God. Scratch a militant atheist and you’ll likely find a little Catholic or fundamentalist kid who got offended by an over-simplified, childish depiction of God in His Nature and Person. The arguments presented by these great intellects are generally unsophisticated. The best of them is probably something along the lines of how the universe would be different if there really was a God – as if anyone could know that – and even that one mostly comes down to “there would not be any suffering”. Essentially the atheist is reduced to arguing that God, as He can be understood, is no different than no god at all – hardly a convincing proof for the non-non-believer.

People get offended toward God for many reasons, but the source is too often found in their relationships to other humans. Jesus warns us that as believers we need to be careful how we live and what we say. I am aware of a situation where some people who call themselves Christians are not representing the Lord at all well to those on the fringe of belief. Based on the behavior and attitude of these church-goers, a non-believer might deduce that Christians are vengeful, vindictive, envious, greedy, and deceitful. The church-goers excuse their behavior on the grounds that the unbelievers should suffer because of their unrighteousness and that the “sinners” need to learn whose side God is on.

Sick.

But there is another kind of offense that is unavoidable. One Sunday afternoon, I ran across a group of young men sitting on tailgates drinking whiskey and telling bawdy stories. They were parked beside a cemetery not far from a church. I pulled in beside them, since I was well-acquainted with them, and we began to talk about one thing and another, but mostly about the nature of God and the work of Christ. You might say we were having a Bible study. Some religious folk passed by on their way to the church’s Sunday evening service. Several months later, I happened to be in a conversation with one of those passers-by, and she said, somewhat nastily, that she had seen me out there. “You should have been in church,” she pronounced triumphantly.

“With you?” I replied, and I confess to saying it with more than a hint of sarcasm. I had offended this good church-lady by doing exactly what Jesus would do, and does. I had been a friend to sinners. Now if I confirm a sinner in his sin, ease his mind about his actions and attitudes, and work to quiet his uneasy conscience (which is the voice of God), I do him no favors. On the other hand, if I can genuinely befriend him and encourage him to good then I am fulfilling my purpose as an ambassador of Christ and an agent of the Holy Spirit. There is a time to speak of holiness and judgment, but there is also a time to speak of the Holy One as the Good Shepherd who lovingly searches for His lost sheep.

Let us be careful never to offend the little ones. Let us never hesitate to turn on the light for fear of offending self-righteous cockroaches.