“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you… all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”

(John 15:18-21, ESV)

We can do a lot with this idea. It’s quite a simple one, and an encouraging one in a sense, because it gives Christians tools to endure the persecution and opposition we face. But it also requires careful reading – this does not always justify our being offensive to people, and if the way we approach public proclamation of the gospel leads to opposition, offence, and persecution, then we are not given carte blanche to continue regardless. In this passage, and elsewhere in John’s writings, we are told to expect opposition because, being of God, we are not of the world, and so the logical way for the world to respond to our frustrating distinctiveness is to oppose us. But there are plenty of other ways we might provoke opposition from the world which have nothing to do with our being of God. I think that, in the context with which I’m most personally familiar, there’s a prevailing sense that the opposition we encounter as Christians falls into the of-God-distinctiveness category, without good justification for this. Tim Farron makes precisely the equivocation I’m talking about in the following quote from an interview with The Times in September:

“Once upon a time a Christian teaching jarred with the culture on slavery. Today it is sexuality. In a hundred years’ time it will be something else.”

The assumption Farron makes here is that the opprobrium he received from the media was an inevitable result of his godliness being confused with anti-worldliness. This is worth scrutinising, and it’s certainly worth thinking about in the context of the opposition each of us comes across for believing, and proclaiming, what we do.

I think the problem that I’m driving at can be expressed most clearly by thinking about whom, precisely, we offend. It’s tempting to expect, as conservative evangelicals, that LGBT+ advocates, people from other religions, and generally liberal-minded people will be offended by the ‘gospel’, but other people will mind a bit less because our gospel is less offensive to them. If this is true – if we should expect that the people most offended by the gospel are the people most likely to be put off by doctrines of sin – then the ministry of Jesus poses us some problems. Why is it that Jesus provokes offence, not by railing against beleaguered tax collectors and prostitutes, but by eating with them as a witness to the inclusivity of grace? Why is it generally the Pharisees who are most offended by Jesus, rather than the ‘sinners’? I am not trying to trample on the doctrine of repentance. I am merely arguing that it is not the only context in which we see offence expressed at the teachings and actions of Jesus in the Bible – it is not even the primary trigger for this offence!

Why, then, is the gospel offensive? Surely it is not just because it requires of people that they relinquish their grip on their idols – there is nothing at all distinctive in this world about a worldview that says ‘you need to let go’. Loosening our grip on things that let us down underlies a huge number of popular worldviews – it is the very premise of Marie Kondo, meditation, ‘work-life balance’, postmodernism… Neither can it just be the list of things we ask people to relinquish. Such a list is not the gospel, but the shallowest kind of legalism. No, the offensive core of the gospel is the cross – it’s the whole premise that the battle each of us faces is won outside of ourselves in an act which looks like a shameful defeat, which flies in the face of everything that we hold to represent success and value, and which denies us the agency we all crave in setting things right. We want to make ourselves right before God – and surely among the most offensive things the gospel says is that we don’t, we can’t, and that by the time we turn to God we find that He’s been there all along, in a posture that is infuriatingly inadvisable, pathetic-looking, and even foolish. What kind of God wins an ultimate victory in a horrible criminal’s death, with blood dripping down his body, as a taunting crowd (which freed a murderer in his place) drenches his parched mouth with vinegar from a sponge? This is the God Christians want me to worship? (Spoiler alert: yes. It is.)

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

(1 Corinthians 1:22-25, ESV)

Paul goes on to write in 1 Corinthians that God has actively chosen the weak to shame the strong, and the fool to shame the wise. In a university which has built its existence and relevance on the need to be wise, among a student body which finds its value in the strength of its opposition to political enemies and individual students driven by the taste of success of getting that grad scheme, it is highly counter-cultural to suggest that God honours instead the weak, poor, and foolish. “Next time you’re playing the organ in some cathedral,” says Arthur Scargill to Ted Heath in Netflix’s The Crown, “having lofty thoughts in the heavens close to God, think of my members, my comrades, down there in the heat and the darkness, digging for coal, because when they go to work and break their backs and risk their lives, they’re nowhere near God.” Aren’t they? The dismal picture Scargill paints of the pit of the mines calls to mind exactly the torment that Jesus Christ endured at Calvary. It’s fashionable to suppose that ‘God’ is for the sheltered upper classes who can sustain an illusion of God because of their blindness to real world suffering. If this is so, the illusion thereby sustained is not the God of the Bible.

Terry Eagleton puts this very clearly in his marvellous book Reason, Faith, and Revolution. ‘The whole cumbersome paraphernalia of religion is to be replaced,’ writes Eagleton, ‘by another kind of temple, that of the murdered, transfigured body of Jesus. To the outrage of the Zealots, Pharisees, and rednecks of all ages, this body is dedicated in particular to all those losers, deadbeats, riffraff, and colonial collaborators who are not righteous but flamboyantly unrighteous – who either live in chronic transgression of the Mosaic law or, like the Gentiles, fall outside its sway altogether.’ Far from sustaining illusions formed in sheltered privilege, this gospel is ‘a brutal destroyer of human illusions’ (emphasis mine) – Eagleton expects it to subvert the expectation that submission to the God of the Bible is easily compatible with comfortable middle-class living and functional idolatry of success, prestige, and smoothness of life. Although Eagleton flirts precariously with a tendency to overstate his case, the underlying point is an important one: at the core of the gospel is a claim that each of us should find repeatedly offensive: failure, defeat, and humiliation are key elements to the actions of God in the world.

Modern Christians’ experience of resistance to the doctrine of repentance may also be a feature of how much human culture and systems of value have changed since the time when the incarnate Jesus walked the earth. It may evidence the foolhardiness of drawing straight lines of application from the patterns of Christian witness we observe in the Bible. But if we do not ever ask questions of our own blind spots, prejudices, and doctrinal shortcomings, we will naturally drift away from values and standards upheld by the Bible. Is the gospel we preach offensive to people around us because it is the gospel, or is it offensive in the wrong ways and to the wrong people because it is not?