This is one of the basic attacks on the Christian faith. We understand Christian faith better by taking it seriously. It is just as well to recognize that to give up the supernatural is to give up Christianity. We may keep the form of it, we may even do our best to keep up the morals of it, but if we cannot in fact think of a universe which is open to the activity of its Maker, we have given up the Christianity of the New Testament. And of course it is unreasonable; it is foolishness, it is the place where Christianity takes leave of the prevailing thought of our world by believing in the power of God.
Greek rationalism had no room for Paul. if there was a god at all it would not be Paul’s kind of god. Things have not greatly changed. The Christian account of the universe and the Christian way of living are “too simple and naïve.” It is simple and naïve to think that anything exists beyond what our senses tell us—that human life is more than the product of the circumstances in which it is lived, that human nature can be changed by an independent power operating outside itself; that the affairs of humankind are ultimately in the hands of One who is most literally King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Well, so be it. We know where we are. If Christianity is wrong on these issues, then it is wrong with Christ himself; we share the same foes. We must move to the next point.
CHRIST AS OFFENSE
The objection of the religious. There is a far more profound kind of objection to Christ and Christianity here. It is easy to see the point of the person who says, “Away with the supernatural! Down with miracles and prayer and anything that goes beyond the reach of a materialistic faith, or leaves God any scope in the universe.” The objection of the enemy who is prepared to accept all these points is far more subtle. In the Gospels we meet this objection in the Pharisees. Unlike the Sadducees, they believed in nearly everything that Jesus believed in. They believed in a living God who did things in history; they believed in life after death; they believed, where some of us find hard to believe, in angels, spirits, and demons. More than this they were good people. Not a few of the things Jesus said about right conduct, they also said. “Do unto others what you would like them to do to you.” Before Jesus, the rabbi Hillel, asked by someone if he could teach him the whole Law, while he stood on one leg, had put the same thing the other way around—“what is hateful to thyself, do not do to thy neighbor.” On the face of it, you would have expected the Pharisees to be Jesus’ keenest supporters. They turned out to be the deadliest of all enemies. Why?
Here there is no shortage of material and it would do you no harm to make a special reading of the Gospels to look for it. I have time to pick out only a few points. Take an incident in Mark 2. Jesus is in a house thronged by a crowd. People are wedged together, no one else can get in. But here is a group of five men, four of them carrying a sort of stretcher on which the fifth is laid, paralyzed. The door is hopeless, but there is as usual an outside staircase leading to the roof. Up they go, armed with a pick ax and in a little while there is a hole in the roof, big enough for the stretcher to go down and to lay the sick man in front of Jesus (no one seems to have made a fuss about the roof. There were more important things at stake!). Now if Jesus had said at once, “Get up, pick up your stretcher and go home,” there would have been no room for objection. Pharisees believed in miracles, but instead Jesus said, “my lad, your sins are forgiven you.” And that does make the theologians prick up their ears. “It’s blasphemy,” they say. Only God can forgive sins, therefore Jesus has no right to.
There at once you see one line of attack upon Jesus. “He claims too much, he is pushing himself into the place of God himself. He is setting himself up against the very Law of God. You even hear him quoting and commenting on the Law itself in these terms.” “You have heard it said. . . . But I say to thee. . . .” Over against this, they say, “We are prepared to believe in God, but we are not prepared to believe in Jesus as God’s mouthpiece. We know what God is like, and this poor, uneducated, unauthorized, unofficial person, does not fill the bill.”
There is one other picture I must give you from the Gospels. The most extraordinary thing ever said about Jesus was that he was the friend of publicans and sinners. There is no doubt that the company he kept caused deep offense. Again and again you read words like these: “the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with the sinners and publicans said unto the disciples ‘he eats and drinks with the publicans and sinners’” (Mark 2.16). Or when they saw it, they all murmured saying, “He has gone to lodge with a man who is a sinner” (Luke 19.7).
It is important to see what is involved here. It is not simply a matter of snobbery (like the snob value of living near the “block” in the Tower). It is eventually a matter of religion. The Pharisees were good people and their goodness took the form of religious obedience to the religious law. It was this law, and their obedience to it that constituted, as they believed, their standing before God and their hope of salvation. If one were to take God seriously, he could hope to come before Him only if he had been scrupulously obedient to the law, and earned his right to do so. But what Jesus was doing, if you accepted him as what he claimed to be, amounted to the precise opposite of this. It meant that all the privilege, all the virtue, all the religion of the Pharisee amounted to precisely nothing at all, because the outcast and the outsider were as dear to God as the pious few; that he loved people, not because they deserved to be loved, but because he was love, and nothing was so truly God as to care for those human beings despised.
This I think is the crucial offensiveness of Christianity, which gained for Jesus, for Paul, and for Christianity the bitterest enmity. If someone disagrees with us as a purely intellectual issue, we can, most of us, agree to differ. That which people find always the most disturbing is something that questions the basic presupposition by which most of us live—and this goes not least, but perhaps most for religious people. That presupposition is that we must and can look after ourselves, so that a just God will be bound to give us our due. When therefore the Christian faith asserts that we are all guilty sinners with no claim upon God, and no hope except in the undeserved mercy of God, then we are more deeply offended, and become the enemies of Christ himself.
For many reasons this ought to be the end of the sermon. But I cannot think that even Mr. Short, who devised this series of sermons, intended me to demonstrate how foolish and offensive the Christian faith is, and to leave you to go home with that. So there must, I fear, be another point. What can change this reaction to Christ? How can he, who first impresses human beings as foolishness and offense become the power and the wisdom of God.
THE POWER AND THE WISDOM OF GOD
I have time to say two things. First, you should examine your presuppositions if you are going to discuss Christ today as merely foolish and offensive. You have to be a great deal bolder than the Pharisees and Sadducees. He has in 1900 years proved to be the source of too much wisdom and too much power to be lightly dismissed. Perhaps we are getting the man wrong. Now in any other field of life, when you get the wrong answer, you know what to do. If your business isn’t prospering you ask, “Am I producing the right kinds of goods? Are my cost estimates wrong?” and so on. If the scientific problem won’t work out, you look for some neglected factor . . . so here. Perhaps the way you think about the world, about life, about God is wrong. Try to think Christ’s way, and see if the answer comes right.
But the issue is not simply intellectual and we should not clarify but observe the issue by laying too much stress on that. If you look in the Gospels you will see on the whole that the best brains got on the wrong side. The people who oppose them are described by Mark rather roughly as “those who were around him.” They were the people to whom the mystery of the Kingdom was given, they were the babes to whom God revealed the secrets he concealed from the wise and the prudent. And they have one qualification only—they are on his side. They have learnt to swallow their pride, give up the boasting, and to trust and obey