Giving Offense

"And they took offense at him."  That's what today's gospel says about the hometown folks when Jesus returns to Nazareth.  They are wowed at first, but then they remember just who Jesus is, and they "take offense," or more literally, "were made to stumble." (The Greek word is the root of our word "to scandalize."

Jesus offends or scandalizes a lot of people. That is sometimes hard to reconcile with the sweet, meek and mild Jesus I met in Sunday School and church as a child. How could this Jesus ever offend anyone, especially offend them to the degree they felt it necessary to kill him.  Even as an adult, it often seems to me that the church has tamed and domesticated Jesus to the point he is not at all threatening. But he is not all that compelling or enticing either.

Richard Rohr's devotion from yesterday quoted Bernard of Clairvaux regarding how we eat Jesus in the Eucharist and are likewise eaten by God. "If I eat and am not eaten, it will seem that God is in me, but I am not yet in God." Rohr goes on to note that modern, rationalistic minds are upset - I might add offended - by such language. And I do think that forcing Jesus, God, and faith into our rationalistic, logical slots can be one more way we tame and domesticate Jesus.  (I can say this even while embracing many of my own Reformed Tradition's issues with Catholic eucharistic theology and practice.)

And so I found myself thinking about the sort of people who routinely are offended by Jesus in the gospels, as well as those who are not. Starting with today's reading, we have the people who thought they knew who Jesus was. To those we can add many of the good religious folks of the day, the religious establishment, and the Roman government. On the other hand, Jesus rarely seems to offend the outcasts, the sinners, the poor, and others whom the good religious folk looked down on.

Doesn't it seem that a faith that represents Jesus to the world would still have an offense problem with the same sorts that Jesus did. The dynamics of power and greed and institutions don't seem to have changed all that much from Jesus' day.  So it stands to reason Jesus would still confound and trouble those who think they know him best, the religious establishment, the powers-that-be, and so on. And so when a community of faith truly is the body of Christ, truly embodies Jesus, surely it will find itself giving occasional offense to such folks while attracting the broken, the outcast, the powerless, the sinner, and such.

It makes me wonder a little about the Jesus we church folk represent to the world. 

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