First Presbyterian Church
Wichita Falls, Texas
June 26, 2011
GETTING PAST THE OFFENSE
OF THE GOSPEL
Matthew 10:40-42 (NIV)
40 “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives the one who sent me. 41 Anyone who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and anyone who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward. 42 And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.”
There is something about the gospel that is inherently offensive. I don’t like saying that, and you may not like hearing it. But it is incontestable. The gospel puts some people off.
Take David and Roland, two high school friends of mine. David was what you might call a nominal Christian, by which I mean he was a Christian in name only. He and his family belonged to a church, but you wouldn’t exactly call it the church they went to. It was more like the church they stayed away from. One time, just to get David to go to his own church, I went with him. For him, the faith was inessential, at best a nicety. If he ever even thought about what churches are for, he might have said, as others have, that they’re there simply to ‘hatch, match, and dispatch.’ The church is nothing more than a place to get baptized, married, and buried.
My other friend, Roland, was not nearly so amicable in his estimation of the faith. He considered himself an agnostic, and not only did he think that religion was inessential; he considered it to be dangerous. For him, the faith was intellectually indefensible. He could see very little evidence for the existence of God and much evidence against it. I spent I-don’t-know-how-many evenings composing letters that I would give to Roland the next morning, in hopes that I could persuade him of the truth of the gospel. I never did.
Both David and Roland found the gospel to be offensive. For David, Christianity was simply inconvenient. It seemed much too restrictive in its demands. It was an irritant that threatened his independence. It was a commitment too costly to make. It was an uninviting path. For Roland, the offense was different. Christianity was philosophically inconsistent. He couldn’t match up its claims with his coveted rationality. He found the Bible and it system of beliefs to be beneath him intellectually. I was unable to persuade either David or Roland of the truth of the church’s creed. Like many others before and after them, they found the gospel to be offensive. And they rejected it.
Over the centuries, the church has replied to this rejection in a variety of ways. Two of the most common are accommodation and withdrawal. When the surrounding culture has been unreceptive to the gospel, the church has sometimes tried to take the offense out of its message. It has ‘watered down’ the truth in an attempt to make it more palatable. To some extent, that’s what Friedrich Schleiermacher attempted in the eighteenth century with his book, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.
At other times, the church has said to society, ‘I’ll just take my marbles and go home.’ It has chosen to withdraw into the safety of its own isolation. Fearing that too much of the world’s ‘water’ is getting into the proverbial boat, it simply seeks safe harbor and goes into dry dock. Or, it may be that the rejection is too painful, or the claims of Christianity too embarrassing, or the effort to tell the story too costly. And what do we do? We retreat. We fold. We give up.
Neither accommodation nor withdrawal, though, seems to be the faithful response to rejection. The passage we read today from Matthew, chapter 10, of course, talks more about those who receive our message than it does those who reject it. But when we look at the context of the passage, we see that it is part of a larger whole. And that larger whole is made up of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples before he sends them out on their first mission. And if we read Jesus’ words in their entirety, what we see is that Jesus is pretty ‘street smart.’ He gives ample indication that not everyone will receive the well-intended ministry of the disciples. They are being sent ‘to heal every disease and sickness’ (v. 1) and to announce that ‘the kingdom of heaven is near’ (v. 7). But not everyone will be glad to see them.
In verse 14, Jesus says, ‘If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave.’ In verse 17, he says, ‘Be on your guard…. [Some people] will hand you over to the local councils and flog you….’ And in verse 22 he says, ‘All men will hate you because of me.’ Think about it: This is the very first mission trip ever! And it is no Sunday School party. It is fraught with danger. ‘I am sending you out,’ Jesus says, ‘like sheep among wolves’ (v. 16).
But Jesus sends them out anyway. And he says to them, ‘Do not be afraid’ (v. 28) – though there is much to be afraid of. ‘Whoever acknowledges me before men,’ Jesus says, ‘I will acknowledge him before my Father in heaven’ (v. 32). And Jesus considers this due consolation for the risks at hand. There are plenty of hazards out on the high seas, but we sail at dawn anyway!
Why do some people find the gospel so offensive? Sometimes, of course, it’s not so much the message they find repulsive as it is the messenger. We appear self-righteous. We are inconsiderate. Our inflated egos betray our true motives. We forget that ‘people don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care.’ We lord it over others instead of serving them. We go hunting for spiritual scalps rather than harvesting ready hearts. We take short cuts. We get lazy. As Paul says in Romans 2:24, ‘God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.’
But it’s not always the messenger who is offensive; it is the message itself. The gospel is good news, but, in order for us to see it as good, we must accept what it says is bad. Surgery is a great gift, but it requires incision and excision. The surgeon must cut in order to bring healing. No physician can effectively treat a patient who will not accept the diagnosis. Denial is the principle form of self-delusion. And when the gospel announces that there is a remedy for sin and we take offense that we should be considered in need of remedy, we are in denial.
The gospel wounds human pride. It is to the ‘poor in spirit’ that the kingdom of heaven is promised, but we resist the very notion of our spiritual poverty. The gospel assails us not only at the point of our sin but also at the point of our perceived righteousness. ‘All our righteous acts are like filthy rags,’ it says (Isa. 64:6). And in our over-valued attitude of self-sufficiency, we take offense. ‘I’m as good as the next person,’ we say, and we think we shall be judged by comparison to those whose sins are greater than ours. But the gospel will not tolerate our self-deception. ‘Everyone will die for his own sin,’ it says (Jer. 31:30).
This is offensive to the human ego. We do not want to be told of our need. We do not want to be held accountable. We do not want to relax our hold on our own adequacy.
But here’s the good news: God can melt away our resistance. ‘I will give you a new heart,’ he says, ‘and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh’ (Ezek. 36:26). And when God changes our hearts, he changes our attitude. He changes the way we respond to the gospel. Paul speaks of those who live ‘in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding,’ he says, ‘and separated from the life of God because of…the hardening of their hearts’ (Eph. 4:17f.). But look! Now the gospel announces that the Holy Spirit softens the heart, illumines it, invades it, subdues it, and, when he does, we are willingly humbled before God. And we see the light that exposes our need not as some glaring, off-putting intrusion but as the grace and mercy that it is.
Jesus says to his disciples, ‘He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives the one who sent me.’ When we welcome the messenger of the gospel, we welcome the message. When we welcome the ambassador of the kingdom, we welcome the king he represents.
The gospel says to us, ‘In Christ, God rescues sinners.’ When we put our trust in that word, we put our trust in Christ. We get past the offense of the gospel, and what we find in it is the best news of all. By God’s power, we pass from darkness to light. By God’s mercy, he transfers us from death to life. By God’s grace, we get past the offense of the gospel, and what before seemed a reproach to us we receive with thankful hearts.
