“The world looks on the slaughtered Lamb with pity, disdain, and even abhorrence. Through the tinted glass of self-importance it views his sacrifice as a joke, or as the natural end of an outmoded ethic based in superstition. But the world itself gives the lie to its own interpretation. For had the Lamb provided such a senseless life and death, the remedy would be to leave it alone to fester and wither away. But the Lamb would not go away. Instead of a few bleached bones and the smell of putrefaction he left an empty tomb and His Spirit who so seared the truth of the gospel into the hearts and minds of his little band of followers that they began to turn the world upside down. For this the world will not forgive him. It rises up and lashes out at the Lamb while pretending that he isn’t real. It does this because the one whose spirit pervades the world knows full well that the slain Lamb is his downfall.”
-Graeme Goldsworthy*
This quote from Graeme Goldsworthy’s Gospel in Revelation adequately summarizes why Jesus is the world's stumbling block today, even though said world is so positively effected by him. What I mean is that Jesus of Nazareth is the most influential man who ever lived, and His imprint is all over the western world as we know it. It’s similar to John 1:10, where John the apostle, describing Jesus’ coming into the world, says that though the world was made through Him, yet when he came, the world didn’t know him. In a similar way, Jesus has profoundly transformed the western world and given it it’s entire ethical grid, yet said western world doesn’t realize it and won't acknowledge it.
But we also have cultural and social sins that seem to mar our Christian past, and this past has an unavoidable effect on our present still. So when one says, “We need to look to the Jesus who we used to follow,” the seemingly obvious response is, “Yeah but look where that has gotten us in the past and today!”
But philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that our societal problems today are not the effect of applying Christian ethics as they come from Scripture, but from applying those ethics divorced from the God who first gave them to us.** When we divorce the precepts of God from God Himself, which we’ve done in our scientific age (see Taylor), we replace Him as the precept’s reference point with ourselves, and the precepts are only thought of in terms of what it does for us. No longer does it matter how practicing the precept glorifies Him, puts us in His will, and helps us to serve others how we’re made to serve others.
So I submit that the real solution is not to run from Jesus who has destroyed us, but to get back to Jesus who offers us life. And as we do, Jesus will change us and bring about good among us. Practically, this means loving others as ourselves, but for Jesus’ sake, and treating others how we want to be treated, because of how good Jesus is to us. He becomes the reference point for every ethic, and we move away from society’s fickle opinions as the reference point.
Hunger
But getting back to Jesus isn’t as easy as it may sound. Jesus said Himself that to come to him, one must hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matthew 5:6, John 6:36). You can’t make yourself hungry directly. It has to happen to you indirectly; the only way you can affect it is by seeing or smelling good food on purpose. Similarly Jesus said one has to have this hunger and thirst for righteousness within them if they’d find the satisfaction that he offers. One has to long for Him to bring healing. And we only long because we are out of solutions.
Paul the Apostle repeatedly referred to Jesus’ gospel as a mystery (eg. Rom. 16:25; Eph. 1:9, 3:3; Col. 1:26-27, 2:3). He didn’t mean that the gospel is hidden from people intellectually, as though one has to have a certain IQ to understand it. Paul meant that the gospel is only visible to the one who is hungry for it. Just like one must be sick in order to go to the doctor's office for healing (Matthew 9:12), so one must need Jesus in order to come to him and receive him.
Proud Israel was told that if they humbled themselves and longed for God’s healing, he’d heal them (Deut. 30:2ff). Therefore the prophets were constantly talking about the need to simply return to the Lord (eg. Hosea 6:1 – “Come let us return to the Lord … that he may heal us.”) The cultural problems might have seemed complex, but the confusion was only set in where people were outside of God’s truth. Therefore, it was promised that the Christ would come into the world of grey, and ruled according to righteousness (Isaiah 11:3-5). And still today, people must long for righteousness to be practiced according to absolute definitions of right and wrong; when they turn to Jesus, they see that he alone meets the need (Mark 10:14). This is the spirit of the Psalmist in Psalm 18:30, who loves God’s truth because it cuts so clean and proves itself true.
Stumbling Block
Why is Jesus such a stumbling block to the world, as Paul says? Because to get Him one must accept that there is such a thing as ultimate reality: truth, which must be faced, believed, and reoriented toward. Today we’re accustomed to dividing up into tribes and defining the world’s problems in terms of what the opposing tribe is doing and saying (or not doing and saying). And there will likely be some level of truth to any accusation we make against fallen sinners in Adam. But this will lead nowhere, because it doesn’t account either for our own problems or the good that the opposing tribe is fighting for. Even talking about it this way seems to make the issues confusing. But it isn’t as confusing as it may seem. It’s only grey where we’ve rejected the idea of black and white, and I’m convinced relativizing truth to each person’s experience is an alternate reality man makes in rebellion to the God who is the ultimate reference point. Jesus calls for us to see truth in Him. And He not only promises to make known to us the way, but promises to love into us the change we need to reflect His glory back to Him.
I once read John Piper say that because Jesus is always out of sync with the world, he is thus always relevant.*** I think this is true, because we will always be out of balance in at least some aspects our cultural sensibilities. And thus we always need to bow the knee and ask for help. The question is simply this: Are we hungry for righteousness, as Jesus defines it? If so, He has the track record to validate his truth claims: One who rose from the dead must be taken seriously as an authority figure, perhaps (as I believe) the Authority figure; and one certainly doesn’t lie to the very people He gave himself in loving self-sacrifice for. He promises that if we seek His way, He’ll receive us, keep us, and lead us. But we must hunger and thirst.
I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.
*Goldsworthy, Gospel in Revelation, 322.
**Taylor, A Secular Age, 22, describing what he describes as “Subtraction Theory.”
***I read this in Piper’s Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. I can’t find my copy to give you a page citation! I recommend this book as a powerful study in how the gospels present Jesus as the perfect man who meets all of our needs. Even if you don’t prefer Piper (many don’t!), look past that for this book.
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