Jesus had a strange faculty for annoying people. If you read the last few verses of John 6 for instance, you will find that many of his disciples, finding His teachings too hard to bear, turned their back on Him and a little later others took up stones to throw at Him (John 8, 59) . Often the problem of this offence lay in the way Jesus dealt with mankind and the problems of mankind.
For example, the Jews of Jesus' day were very interested in political questions; they persisted in thinking of themselves as a nation, and the national problem was to them a great issue so naturally they wanted Jesus to do something about it. But he did not seem to do anything of the sort. He talked to a handful of very ordinary common people; he went about the villages and seemed to be wasting his time dealing with individual cases of suffering. “Why,” they thought, “if this man were truly the Messiah, he would not be bothering like this with individuals, but instead he would be dealing with the big questions and problems.”
Many people today have the same problem. God does not seem to be doing what we think he ought to do. We have our ideas and preconceptions about what Christianity is and yet if we actually take the time to read the Gospels, we discover that Jesus does not seem to be saying the same thing, so we turn out back on Him.
You see, Jesus did not paint a large canvas, so to speak, but rather He dealt with one particular thing- the soul of man in its relationship with God. He kept on saying that there was something about the individual soul that was of priceless value: “What shall it profit a man,” he said, “if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8, 36).
This is one of the ways in which Jesus stands apart from all the great philosophers the world has known. Philosophers are interested in the soul as an idea. They are very fond of discussing it and arguing about it as a concept, as a kind of category in their philosophical systems. Jesus never did that. He did not come merely to talk about God; He did not merely come to talk in general about the soul: He did not come to draw up a number of platitudes about life and how it can be lived in a world like this. No, Jesus came to do something that is directly personal. He speaks to individuals and addressees people one by one.
Most of us are quite happy to talk about religious ideas and concepts, but the moment it gets personal, it is the moment that it has gone too far and starts to offend us. But according to Jesus it is intensely personal for the whole question is the individual's relationship to God. The only way to change the world is to change individuals, and only God can do that in a truly revolutionary and lasting way.
By Andrew Stewart
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Details of 2008 houseparty:
23rd - 30th August 2008
Stanbridge Earls School,
Romsey, Hampshire
Mums and Tots
Friday morning 9.30am
At the church