Stumbling Blocks

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
January 27, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

I Corinthians 1:18-25
Matthew 16:13-26; 18:6-7; 26:31-35

“Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!”

The question Jesus asks at the turning point of Matthew’s gospel is the same question he asks at the turning point of your life and mine: “Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Simon Peter says and for one bright shining moment, Peter seems to have it right. He says this not as if it were his own human opinion, according to Jesus, but because God had chosen to reveal this to him. Therefore Jesus names him “Petros” (Stone) and goes on to declare that on this petra (rock) the church would be built.

Tragically Peter will understand neither the meaning nor the near-at-hand implications of his confession until he is found weeping bitterly in the courtyard while the cock crows thrice. In the meantime and now assuredly in the presence of the Son of the living God, Peter’s mind turns instead to Jesus’ impending triumph—and by association, his own. Jesus, on the other hand, immediately begins to speak of the necessity of his rejection and suffering, his death and resurrection.

Suddenly the Stone turns into a boulder on the road leading to the cross and the rock on which the church was to be built becomes a stumbling block to Jesus. “God forbid it, Lord!” the Stone cries out. “This must never happen to you.” It must never happen, according to human thinking, because Jesus’ death would spell the end of any possibility of a movement or a following or a nation restored or a successful institution established.

“Had Jesus imitated Peter’s ambition,” writes Rene Girard, a professor of French literature and a profound if not obscure interpreter of texts, “the two thereby would have begun competing for the leadership of some politicized ‘Jesus Movement.’ Sensing the danger, Jesus vehemently interrupts Peter.” “Get behind me, Satan!” he roars. “You are a stumbling block to me….” The same rock-hard confidence that issued from Peter’s confession has become, in an instance, a stumbling block to the gospel he will be called to proclaim.

Stumbling block! The word is skandalon or skandalizo and appears 44 times in the New Testament; 19 of those appearances are in Matthew. Literally defined, it is “the name of a part of the trap to which the bait is attached.” It is the hook that holds the temptation sure to snare you so that you may be reeled in and had for lunch! Originally, according to Webster, scandal and scandalize referred to the unseemly conduct of a religious person who discredits religion or causes a moral lapse in another. In postmodern parlance, scandal is understood to be any act, person or thing that offends or shocks the moral feelings of the community.

But for Jesus the scandal had a name. Not Peter but Satan, he said, get behind me! You are a stumbling block to me. Satan is here the voice that tempts human beings to rivalry, says Girard in so many words, tempts Peter immediately to think being given the keys to the kingdom of heaven, he now possesses them and just may know better than Jesus the way of God’s will. Satan, says Girard, presents to us a possessive model and so is “a seductive tempter who suggests…the desires most likely to present rivalries….Satan is skandalon personified.” And may I add, Satan is alive and well in most Christian denominations [not to mention political parties] today!

But Jesus hears something more in Peter’s words: “You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Having just been chosen of God to confess the one divine thing that was worth his life, Peter immediately returns to the realm of human opinion. One can only guess that the particular human thing Jesus hears beneath Peter’s obvious ambition and rivalry is the offense Peter takes before the prospect of Christ’s suffering and cross. In opposition (or rivalry) Peter poses what Dietrich Bonhoeffer later called “cheap grace.” “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate,” Bonhoeffer writes. Or more to the point of this exchange, cheap grace is grace without Jesus Christ, rejected and crucified. As an early advocate for cheap grace, the rock on which the church was to be built became, in an instant, a rock-solid human certainty which could only be a stumbling block on the road leading inexorably to the cross.

Jesus next is heard to speak of stumbling blocks in Matthew’s gospel after the transfiguration, as he instructs his disciples and readies them for leadership in the early church. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones [if any of you scandalize these new Christians] who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.” That is to say, if anyone causes another to lose faith in Christ, if anyone misleads or encourages another to fall away, if anyone denies the cross to save his life or secure her future, if anyone proclaims with absolute certainty not divine but human things, thereby confounding another’s trembling first steps toward Jesus, it would be better if that one were dead!

God knows there are many human things about the church throughout the ages that have caused people to lose their faith, not the least of which is the rivalry of convinced believers. In this sense, Christianity has built itself more on a boulder [skandalon] intent on generating rival human opinions than on a rock to whom the Messiah, the Son of God was once for all revealed.

Apparently and according to Paul, this has characterized the church from the beginning! Consider the Christians to whom Paul wrote in Corinth where the rivalry of minds “set not on divine things but human things” seems to be well under way! The report of Chloe’s people to Paul was of quarrels among Christians in Corinth due to rival theological perspectives. Whether they belonged to Paul or Apollos or Cephas [that is, Peter] or even if they claimed the high ground of belonging to Christ, members of each faction believed they possessed the superior wisdom of the apostle who had baptized them and taught them the faith.

Paul refuses to be drawn into their rivalry and announces at the outset that Christ has sent him to proclaim the gospel, “and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” Then (eloquently, in my opinion) he poses a different sort of rivalry: a rivalry between the cross on one hand and the wisdom of the world on the other. But he does this scandalously in order that the Corinthians will be hooked! The tempting bait is the unspoken assumption on the part of the Corinthians that they stand on the side of the cross. Yet given that Paul means, by the wisdom of the world, neither enlightened human reason nor the secular surmise of the pagans but is referring to human thinking, about God, he juxtaposes [it pains me to say this] theology itself against the cross! He pits the church’s contentious thinking about God—even at this early stage in her life—against the God revealed in opposition to all human knowing by way of Christ’s rejection, suffering and death.

According to Paul, our thinking about God and so the opinions we reach about who God is can only be at odds with the revelation of the God who has come to us in Christ crucified. Because God has absolutely made foolish the wisdom of the world, “human speech about God cannot be [absolute],” says Peter Lampe, the biblical scholar who started me down this difficult road with Paul and Matthew. All human thinking and speaking about God “is threatened by its own subject--by God. [God]…constantly withdraws…from human theology, putting up resistance against domestication,” against human control, against idolatry.

That is why Paul trembles as he proclaims the gospel in Corinth, trembling being “the correct attitude of the theologian.” “I decided to know nothing among you,” he writes, “except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” “The theologian,” says Lampe again, “does not possess absolute dogmas but is ready for constant revision and discussion, being aware that he or she may repeatedly have to start from scratch and that even thirty volumes of dogmatics does not permit one to know anything definitive which would allow one to brag triumphantly ‘I am a Paulinist, a Lutheran, a Calvinist, or a Barthian.’” The cross confounds our highest and our humblest human thinking about God!

All of which leads us back to Matthew’s gospel and to the third time Jesus speaks of skandalon. The scene is the last supper and the disciple in question is, once again, Peter. Jesus says “You will all be scandalized because of me this night.” Or as our newest revised translation reads, “You will all become deserters because of me.” A single step back and we read in the older revised version, “You will all fall away because of me.” (You will all be made to stumble because of me.) The New English Bible suggestively translates, “Tonight you will all fall from your faith on my account”; and the Revised English Bible tells us directly “You will lose faith because of me.”

The word, once again, is skandalon: the name of a part of the trap to which the bait is attached.” “You will all be scandalized in me,” making me think King James had it right all along, not only from a literary point of view but literally speaking: “All ye shall be offended because of me this night.” Offended, scandalized, put off, leading us to end our search for this little word’s true meaning at the foot of the cross of Christ. “…woe to the one by whom [scandal] comes,” he warned, and yet his cross is that scandal and he is the one!

Peter, of course, refuses the bait: “I will never be scandalized by you,” he announces (with some degree of pride, I think). That is to say, he will never abandon the way he thinks about God to be hooked and had by Christ’s cross. So say we all: we are his; we intend to follow him; we mean to represent him in the world to others; we are determined love him more than most anything we can think of at the moment. But we say this of a Savior so domesticated by religion that the suggestion he might scandalize Chestnut Hill, might offend the Mainline, might cause us by his absolute demands to quit following him: well that is ridiculous. We would never desert the Savior of our human surmise. So say we all!

But Christ crucified? Of course we have and we do. We who call ourselves his disciples are a scandal to the gospel, have caused so many to fall away from him because of our human thinking, have rivaled his rejection and suffering with the social respectability of an institution. Nevertheless at the turning point of the gospel and at the turning point of our lives, he asks us still: Who do you say that I am? Pray, by his grace, that we together may become a trembling witness to Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles but to those who are the called, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Thanks be to God.

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