Scandalous Jesus (by Major Chick Yuill)

			There is no doubt that Jesus was scandalous, particularly to the religious people of his day. Religious people are easily scandalized. Since Jesus’ birth, there have been all sorts of suspicions about the nature of his conception. His origins in the backwater, one-horse town of Nazareth prompted some to ask: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” We know about the company Jesus kept: tax collectors, prostitutes and undesirables, people caught in the very act of sin. He told scandalous stories that turned the received wisdom of religion up on its head; stories that put the most religious people in their place; stories that announced God’s love wasn’t simply a reward for the good but was offered unconditionally to the damaged and the morally and spiritually indifferent. His miracles so scandalized that on one occasion, after casting the demons out of a poor, oppressed man, the authorities accused Jesus of providing deliverance by the very power of Satan. His claim to be the Son of God was also scandalous. He said it in symbolic action as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, announcing himself to be the coming King. He said it in an act of political resistance when he cleansed the temple and cast out the traders who preyed on the poor and prevented them from reaching God. His death between two thieves was scandalous in the extreme—who could believe in a crucified Messiah? The disciples made a whole series of scandalous claims: the tomb was empty, Jesus was alive. Jesus was scandalous. We’ve known it since childhood, but it seems to make very little difference to us. It has had little impact on the Church. Ministering from the “Ghetto” One thing that has characterized the Church and even The Salvation Army in my lifetime is that we have ministered from the safety of the Christian “ghetto.” I know we have been concerned about the world, but it has tended to be from the security of our ecclesiastical islands, the safety of our organizational strongholds and the comfort of our culturally gated communities. Tony Campolo commented two years ago at the first SAROOTS: “If the 1950s ever come back, The Salvation Army is ready for it.” At Extreme, an Army event in California, Campolo said: “The trouble with The Salvation Army is you’ve got a ‘field of dreams’ theology.” Remember the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams? “You think, ‘If we build it, they will come.’ So you build and you facilitate and you program and you wait for people to come. Jesus never told you to do that. Jesus said ‘go.’ ” I suggest to you that the weakness of our position is expressed in the question we have asked for most of our lifetime: “How do we get people to come to church?” The answer is most of them won’t. And I can’t blame them, because they have to come on our terms, at our times, to listen to our teaching and our testimonies, in our buildings, in our culture. Of all the promises that Jesus made, I wonder if the one he most regrets is “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Be honest, you’ve sat in some meetings feeling as though you’ve lost the will to live. The Son of God has to turn up at every one of them! And I have to honestly ask myself why a decent self-respecting sinner, who’s had a fun Saturday evening, should get up on a Sunday morning to come to some of the services that we do. The serious truth is that the Christian Church in the West has become increasingly marginalized, discounted and dismissed, even by those who are spiritually hungry and who are turning to almost any “ism” and philosophy to find satisfaction. So much of what we have done has been working from the safety of the “ghetto.” Now that is not being entirely fair to The Salvation Army. I’ve exaggerated the position. Despite our tendency to minister from the ghetto, we have a proud record of service to the community and we are rightly respected for it. There’s nothing wrong with being grateful for serving in an Army that has served people of every class, race and creed in the name of Jesus. Thank God we do embody a global caring Jesus. Delivering service to the community is a necessary expression of the Gospel, but it is not the very essence of the Gospel. That’s why I am glad that we are finally developing a strategy for mission. We’ve begun to realize that the question we’ve asked: “How do we get people to come to church?” is pointless. We have begun to ask: “How do we take the church and, more importantly, the Lord of the church, to people?” We have begun to realize that even a postmodern world that has lost its trust in reason and seems lacking in traditional morality is a world that is hungry for spirituality. A Strategy for Mission There has to be a paradigm shift in what our leaders deliver to us. The old paradigm was that we expected a leader to pastor the flock. We even wrote it into our regulations?18 hours of home visitation a week. It’s a good thing to be a shepherd of the flock, though I fear that too often we became sheepdogs, running after people, rather than shepherds. Yes, there is a need for pastoral care, but that need is to be shared by the whole community and cannot be delivered by one leader. In the old paradigm, we wanted officers to preach a good word, however, most of the time we expected them to be a resident holy person who preached a nice, little homily that made us feel blessed but wouldn’t actually disturb us. We wanted them to preside over the rites of passage—births, marriages and deaths—and to preserve denominational tradition: “He’s a good officer because he uses The Song Book.” There’s still a place for all of those things, but today we need leaders of a different hue. We need leaders who will become skilled in mission, who will build bridges into the community, who will understand the culture in which we live and will become masters of spiritual commerce, who are able to speak to a spiritually hungry people with a language and in concepts that they understand. That has to be our strategy for mission. In Chronicles, when all the tribes of Israel rallied to King David, they came in their thousands, apart from the men of Issachar, who numbered only a few hundred. These men of Issachar “understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). We need leaders at the territorial, divisional and local level who will understand the times, and discern God’s will for the Army. We need to raise up and release that kind of leader. We need to become the church beyond the Church, less concerned with our denominational traditions and more concerned than ever with the possibility of reaching and rescuing a dying world. Telling the Story We are just beginning to become a church that understands how to explain the story of the Gospel. I believe in absolute truth, that some things are true and some things are false. But I’ve learned that there’s no point in talking like that to a postmodern world that no longer trusts reason and rationality. I was invited to represent The Salvation Army in a media program on prostitution in Manchester, U.K. We were scheduled to arrive an hour early so we could talk with the producer. When I got there, I was fascinated by the mixed group of people. There was a woman whose daughter had been murdered while working as a prostitute, two girls from Amsterdam who worked in the red-light district, psychologists by the score and three girls, whose appearance immediately betrayed that they earned their living on the streets. When they set up for the program, they sat me beside a Christian woman from an aid agency and an Anglican canon. I knew what the producers were looking for. They wanted us to shout moralistic, condemnatory truths, and I wasn’t going to be set up. I told the producer: “I don’t want to sit beside these religious people. I’d like to sit nearer the girls.” And I did. During the program, I said: “I belong to a part of the Christian Church that longs to create a society where no girl is forced into prostitution because of a drug habit or poverty. I want to make a better world in which prostitution will not be necessary.” At the end of the program, they said: “We didn’t expect a Christian to say that.” The time has come for us to live out the story of Jesus. Yes, there’s a time to speak in condemnation, but we need to be telling the love of Jesus. It’s time to tell stories?stories of how God deals with us, stories of how the Gospel intersects and interacts with and transforms our story. In the movie Amistad African slaves are thrown into prison in America. They don’t read any English, but find an illustrated Bible and flip through the pages. They see pictures of Jesus with the children, healing the sick and pinned on the cross, and they say to each other: “This man’s story is like ours. He suffered unjustly.” And the story of Jesus begins to make sense of their story. There is only one story that will make sense of the world in which we live. It is the story of the cross. We’ve got to tell it. The world will not listen to our absolute truth, our well-reasoned theological arguments, but it can’t resist a story. Brian MacLaren, in his book Truth on the Other Side, writes: “In the modern world, we could wield a proposition like a sword and a concept like a hammer. In the postmodern world we have to hold a mystery like a lover and a story like a child.” While in Russia at a Salvation Army camp, I met a rock group who were impressed with the Gospel. They asked all sorts of questions. One of them told my wife, Margaret, that he couldn’t explain it, but there was something about Christians that is like little children. He had no idea that he was echoing the words of Jesus: “Unless you change and become like little children …” The world needs people with the simplicity of childhood. I told a funny story the other day and a child said to me: “Tell that story again.” We’ve got to become the kind of people to whom the world may say: “Tell me that story again.” We’ve got to learn how to “gossip the Gospel.” The Scandal of Grace We will be transformed when we start to live out the scandal of grace. The thread that held the ministry of Jesus together was grace. Jesus was scandalous because he is the complete embodiment and fullest expression of the grace of God. By his life, death and resurrection, he says to us: “God loves the world unconditionally, even at its worst. And God loves you, even at your worst.” God demonstrates that love not from a distance, not from the safety of Heaven, not from the majesty of a celestial throne, but from the straw and the stench of a cattle shed, from the hustle and bustle of an ordinary home, from the sawdust and shavings of a carpenter’s bench, from the stern of a boat in the midst of a storm, from the dusty roads of a Galilean countryside, from crowded marketplaces of villages and ultimately from the cross on a hillside outside of Jerusalem. The life of Jesus was not primarily one of religious devotion; it was the most extravagant revelation of the nature of grace—generously, outrageously poured out upon all at the cost of his life. The religious authorities thought that they were making an irrefutable accusation when they berated Jesus for eating and associating with sinners. In fact, they were paying him the highest accolade. They were scandalized by his life, disgusted by his disregard for social convention, appalled by his attitude to people they had dismissed as beyond the reach of God’s love. Like the elder brother in the story of the Prodigal Son, they failed to realize that their pride and self-sufficiency put them farther away from God than any immoral act. The Salvation Army was once the scandalous part of the Church. Edward Joy’s book, The Old Corps, tells the story of the parish clergyman from the fishing quarter of the town who sent a message to the Salvation Army captain to ask “whether the peace of our town is to be disturbed night after night for a bastard flag that represents nothing and nobody.” He ran out of words to describe the offence that was the early day Salvation Army. Let’s Get Serious What would it take for us to be a scandal of God’s grace in our age? We’ll have to care passionately about the 12- and 13-year-old girls being sold into sexual slavery. We’ll have to become a nuisance to our governments by telling them that we are less concerned about our privileges, taxes and cheaper gasoline, and more concerned about how much money they are giving to developing countries and how they are addressing injustice around the world. We’ll need to get serious about the obscenity of the arms industry. The World Health Organization estimates that in the 20th century 191 million people died as a result of armed conflict. The money that the U.S.A. has spent on armaments since the Second World War is the equivalent to $26 million a day since the birth of Christ. It was General Eisenhower who said that every military plane we put in the sky and every bomb that we drop represents a theft from those who were hungry and need to be clothed. It’s time the Evangelical conscience was stabbed with things like that. What about asylum seekers who come to our country looking for help, and are turned away by respectable people? Let’s be willing to be unpopular for people in desperate need. The truth about God’s people is that they too were strangers in a foreign land. We were no people and God made us a people. I believe in the sanctity and beauty of lifelong heterosexual marriage, but if all we do is criticize the gay community, the last place homosexual people will come for understanding and help is the Church. I want to say to people like that: “If you’re gay, then come and we’ll work together, because in our church we’ve got gossips, gluttons and people that hold bitterness and resentment. What would it take to change the conscience of our Evangelical brothers and sisters in order to reach out to the gay community? I’d love to be part of a Salvation Army like that. I want to live scandalously. I’m fed up with low-level Christian living. I’m tired of a Salvation Army that everybody speaks well of. I long for the days when people see us as dangerous, as an irritant, as a cause for complaint. The truth is you won’t be about to truly live scandalously until you’ve been a recipient of God’s grace. Mother Teresa wrote: “By blood and origin I am an Albanian. My citizenship is Indian. I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. But as to my heart, I belong entirely to the heart of Jesus.” What about you? Can you say the same? Does your heart belong to a scandalous Jesus?