No Offense

Text: Matthew 11:2-6

As my retirement rapidly approaches, I can tell you two things for certain. First, I am grateful to God to have been called as pastor of Cove Presbyterian Church. I will forever treasure my years of ministry with you.

Second, and I say this with absolutely no hesitation: NEVER MOVE! As many of you know far better than I do, moving is one long, extended headache. Whenever you move, you spend an inordinate amount of time covering the basics – finding doctors, dentists, mechanics, attorneys, plumbers, electricians, hairdressers and the list literally goes on and on.

         Whenever I have moved to accept a new call, the first thing I have looked for are covering all these basics, with one important attribute. I want to find people with good credentials. I don’t want to entrust my eye care to someone I like but who finished last in their on-line school of Ophthalmology. I don’t want to entrust my car’s brakes to a nice-enough young mechanic who has been changing oil at Jiffy Lube for less than last six weeks. These folks may do just fine, but let them do “just fine” with someone else’s eyes and car. I want to find those who are well-qualified in whatever area I am looking.

I realize that it is a privilege of the prosperous to be picky, but the prosperous are not the only one who search for credentials. John the Baptist is hardly prosperous. In fact, he is in prison when he sends his advance team to check out Jesus’ credentials. This bold, fire-eating, insect crunching prophet has his delegation ask: “Hey Jesus, are you the One who is to come or should we wait for another?”  Or, in other words, “Hey Jesus, can we see your credentials?”

John has built quite a following and he keeps telling his adoring crowd that one is coming who is really mighty. He will send all those who pretend-to-be mighty running for their lives. So, John asks, “Hey, Jesus, are you the one we have been waiting for?” If you listen between the lines, John is not simply asking for information, he is challenging Jesus to get on with being the promised Messiah. The question from John: “Are you the One who is to come or should we look for another?” is another way of saying: “No offense, Jesus, but you sure don’t look like and you sure don’t act like the Savior of the World.”  

John could have been the first person to challenge Jesus’ credentials, but he is not the last. In every generation since John, people have asked the same question about Jesus. How can an uneducated, tortured, and executed Jew be the Savior of the world? And, often throughout its history, the church has not handled this question especially well. It has considered questions like John asks out-of-bounds because the church’s business is to defend Jesus.

  Throughout the generations, church artists have conspired in this defense of Jesus. They have dressed this infant born a refugee in poverty to look like royalty and shown him with a golden halo as an infant. Artists have done all that is within their power to make sure Jesus, as infant, child, or adult looks the part of Savior. 

Matthew, though, paints a fuller, richer, and more disturbing picture of Jesus than most artists. The Jesus we meet in Matthew is asked a straightforward question and he gives anything but a straightforward answer. The Jesus we meet in Matthew reminds me of infuriating teachers in my past. When I asked them a straightforward question, rather than answering my question, they asked me, “Well, Gary, what do you think?”   

         So, when asked the most important question of his life by John’s disciples, what does Jesus do? He pulls out the old trick of my least, favorite teachers. He returns fire and says, “Here are my credentials. Now, what do you think?” It is worth noting the credentials that Jesus displays – the deaf hear; the lame walk; the blind see; the dead know new life; the poor finally get a home delivery of good news. The credentials of Jesus announce his authority to overthrow all of the death-dealing forces that keep people sick, in shelters, in prisons, that keep people hopeless, estranged, impoverished.

The credentials Jesus presents to his suspicious and testy visitors may look like a fake I.D., but there is nothing fake about them. They may not match John’s dream of who the Mighty Messiah should be, of what the stump of Jesse should look like when back in power in Rome, but his credentials match the dream of the prophet Isaiah, who said: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:1-2).  

After Jesus shows his credentials to his incredulous guests, he leaves them with a blessing. At first, it looks to be a throwaway “blessing,” like the perfunctory prayer before dinner or a “God bless you” after someone sneezes. Take another look. It is not perfunctory at all and it is hardly a casual thought. It is intense and about as edgy as Jesus gets in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus shows his credentials to John’s inquiring examiners and then he tells them, “Blessed is the One who takes no offense in me.”

         I have a world of respect for scholars who translate the Greek New Testament into English, but “take no offense” just doesn’t cut it. What the word “offense” translates is a Greek word from which we get the English noun, “scandal” and verb, “scandalized.” Jesus does not tell John and his boys, “Blessed are those who take no offense in me.” No, he tells them, “Blessed are those who are scandalized by following me.” “Blessed are those for whom it is not a scandal to follow me.”

         John’s disciples arrive on Jesus’ doorstep looking for an inoffensive, scandal-free Jesus, for General Jesus who’ll start acting the part of Mighty Messiah – punishing the bad and rewarding the good. They come looking for a particular set of credentials, for what they have always wanted God to be and expected God’s Chosen One to be. That is not what they find.

It is tough to be too hard on John and his boys because they may have wanted it first, but you and I still want it – an inoffensive, scandal-free Jesus. We want a sweet little white Jesus boy, born in a manger, tucked nice and cozy in the middle of our mantel crèches, far removed from the real scandal of poverty in a nation of plenty, safely insulated from fleeing for safety because the power brokers are looking to do him harm. 

         We want not a controversial but a stylish Jesus, a Jesus whose adorns our necks with crosses and decorates our sanctuaries with cradles, a fashionable Jesus who would be right at home in our nice neighborhoods and health clubs and churches, far removed from the scandal of war and violence, especially the violence of state sanctioned executions, the terror of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the absolute chaos of Syria, the nightmare of needing reproductive health care in many U.S. states only to be denied. 

         We want a well-mannered Jesus, the kind of boy you would want your daughter to marry, far removed from the scandal of public humiliation that comes in associating with lost causes, an antiseptic Jesus who is glad to give the needy a handout as long as they are deserving, who is happy for us to hand-out an annual turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas as if the poor were not hungry and destitute throughout the year.

         “Are you the One who is to come, or should we to wait for another?” ask John’s disciples. “If you’re looking for an inoffensive, scandal-free, Jesus,” look somewhere else says Matthew. “If you want a high and holy Jesus, who sits next to God and eats celestial cherries, while the world cries out in misery and the powerful mistake occasional acts of charity for justice, look somewhere else. If you want a mysterious, mighty Messiah, who’s happy as long as you’re happy, then look for someone else.” 

  Matthew does not tell a story about a scandal-free Jesus and he has no patience with a scandal-free church – a church that always steps lightly so as not to offend anyone in the congregation, never speaks to the Herods or the Pilates of the day so as not to offend any political or civic leader who can in turn make it hard on the church, always finds ways to soothe the waters even when those waters are drowning the poor in their poverty and infecting the rich with terminal affluenza, the church that does backflips to avoid scandal. Matthew knows that the church is the living credential of Jesus.

The Jesus we meet in Matthew invites the church to worry less about its self-image and more for every child who is created in the image of God, less about being liked and more about being faithful, less about keeping elected officials happy and more about sounding a trumpet for justice on behalf of those whose voices are being muted, less about accepting the way things are in the world and more about trusting that the whole world is in God’s – not Rome’s, not America’s – hands, less about what has died in us, in the world, in the church, and more about giving birth to what God is bringing to life in us and through us. 

If you want to follow an inoffensive, a scandal-free Jesus, just walk outside and join the crowd. Get in line for this year’s version of a comic Christmas, where people pretend that a new Lexus draped in a red ribbon has anything to do with Jesus. If you want to follow an inoffensive, scandal-free Jesus, just walk into any number of churches nearby, where preachers promise that our Mighty Messiah wants us to be prosperous beyond our wildest dreams and always to be pain-free.

         But if you’re looking for the real Christmas, if you want to follow the blessed Jesus beyond the borders of Bethlehem, take a long, hard look at his credentials.

                  No offense intended.

                                    AMEN