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.

Blowin' in the Wind

Jesus answered, “I assure you: Unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Whatever is born of flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again. The wind blows where it pleases, and you hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with every one born of the Spirit.” – John 3:5-8

As God told us first in Genesis, each produces after its own kind. The great failing of religion, as personified in Nicodemus, is the attempt to produce that which is spiritual from the works of the old carnal nature. We see programs and promotions, sincere efforts, fervent efforts, and radical efforts, but they are all efforts and exertions of the flesh and will, in the end, produce only more flesh. Sadly, all too often, when our multiplied efforts have failed repeatedly to bring spiritual life to us, we find another poor lost soul on which to exercise them. As Jesus said, we will shut the door of heaven and not go in ourselves or let anyone else go in, if we can help it. We hold meetings and send missionaries to gather proselytes so we can make them twice as bad as we ourselves are (Matthew 23:13,15).

Pneuma is what Jesus says we need – to be born of pneuma; the pneuma blows wherever it chooses. As John says earlier about those born of the Spirit, we were born “not of blood, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). That is sort of good news/bad news for most of us. The bad news is that we are not in charge – which is also the good news. Those who are seeking God on their own terms may be shocked to find that the Spirit has His own agenda. Those who think they are not seeking God at all occasionally wake up to a new life in spite of themselves. And those who seek and keep on seeking will find, and keep on finding.

“[B]orn of water and the Spirit” – so what does that mean? Unlike some I have heard, I don’t think water refers to the natural birth. Jesus was using the term “flesh” as His contrast. Besides, the necessity of a physical birth is a given – all those to whom He is speaking have gotten that part. No, water has significance, as does wind, in relation to the birth “from above”. The life of water is all beneath the surface, hidden. Life is “in” the water. Both air and water can give life when taken in, and both can bring death as well as life. Flesh by itself is dead. The Spirit gives life. Jesus came that we might have not just the severely delimited animal life of the flesh, but the boundless life of the Spirit, unfettered and inscrutable as the wind or the seas.

The Logos offers us the wordless mystery of the Spirit. The other night I was watching a movie which I think was based on a book called Joshua. In one scene, there is the protagonist, Joshua, and a priest on the shore of a lake at night. The priest is undergoing a crisis of faith and believes that he has failed in his calling. He believes that he can never fulfill the requirements of his vocation. He explains this to Joshua (that is, Jesus in a sort of modern Christophany), and he ends by throwing his Bible into the lake and leaving. We then see Joshua rise and slowly wade out into the water until he is submerged completely. The next scene is early the following morning. We see a slightly bedraggled Joshua seated on the bank, head down, with the perfectly restored Bible in his hands.

While the theme is clearly restoration, it is also symbolic of the way revelation works. Revelation is brought out of the hidden. It comes up from the depths, brought to us by the Lord Himself both through His written word and ultimately in the Person of Christ. If we will receive it, this revelation becomes a portal through which we may enter the Mystery. Jesus describes Himself as the Door in John 10:7, and it is through Him that we enter into this hidden kingdom. Certainly if a person is able to get only the ethics of Scripture, his life will be improved. If someone is able to receive the relational wisdom the word of God contains, it will be beneficial and not in any way to be dismissed or diminished. Yet the letter of Scripture, as sweet and beautiful as it is, is hardly even the shadow of its purpose and power. This is evident in the encounter with Nicodemus from which our passage it taken. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a ruler, a member of the Sanhedrin, and – as Jesus said to him with what appears to be gentle mockery – a teacher of Israel. Men like Nicodemus knew the Law and the Prophets word for word. They could quote lengthy passages verbatim. Yet, when confronted with revelation, Nicodemus could only stare at the mystery in wonder while asking child-like questions.

That’s not a bad thing to do. Unlike most of the other Pharisees, Nicodemus was able to humble himself and begin to enter at the Door – the only Way in. In John 7, when others attack Jesus for His teachings, Nicodemus speaks up – albeit somewhat ineffectually – in the Lord’s defense. And, of course, after the Crucifixion, it is Nicodemus along with Joseph of Arimathea who provide for His burial. The words of God had become the Word from God for Nicodemus, and the wind of the Spirit had begun to bring forth a new kind of man.