When Christians Become the Scandal

The Cross should offend the world by the extremity of its love—not Christians by the poverty of theirs

“Always consider the other person to be better than yourself.”

— Philippians 2:3

There is a scandal that belongs to Christianity.

God becomes man.

The Creator kneels before the creature.

The Sinless One sits among sinners.

The Judge refuses to condemn the woman thrown at His feet.

The Lord washes the feet of those who will abandon Him.

And when nails are driven through His hands, He does not curse those who hold the hammer.

He forgives them.

This is the scandal that saves the world.

But there is another scandal, and this one does not save.

It is the scandal of Christians who confess the Crucified and yet do not love one another.

Perhaps we have grown too accustomed to this contradiction.

We speak of human weakness. We remind ourselves that the Church is composed of sinners. All of this is true.

But sometimes these explanations become a way of avoiding the terrible simplicity of the Gospel.

Christ said that the world would recognize His disciples by their love.

And sometimes it does not.

Sometimes those who do not know Christ show greater tenderness toward one another than those who bear His name.

Sometimes the sons of this world forgive more quickly.

They overlook offenses.

They remain beside wounded friends.

They make allowances for weakness.

They know instinctively that suffering human beings should not be humiliated further.

And sometimes Christians - who stand continually before the mystery of divine mercy - can be astonishingly merciless with one another.

We can remember offenses for years.

We can speak about another’s weakness as though we ourselves had never needed forgiveness.

We can reduce a human being to the worst thing he has done.

We can withdraw affection as punishment.

We can disguise resentment as discernment and cruelty as truthfulness.

Worst of all, we can do these things with a clean conscience because we have convinced ourselves that we are defending something holy.

The desert fathers were terrified of this.

Not because truth did not matter to them.

Because they knew what pride could do with truth.

A brother could be correct about another man’s sin and still lose his own soul in judging him.

This is why Abba Moses came to the judgment of a brother carrying a leaking sack of sand:

My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge another man.

The fathers understood something we continually forget:

It is possible to be right about another person and wrong before God.

That possibility should make us tremble.

For pride does not require falsehood.

Sometimes pride feeds upon truth.

It takes something real - the weakness of another, his failure, his inconsistency - and uses it to construct a place from which we may stand above him.

And this is precisely the opposite of Christ.

Christ sees everything.

There is no illusion in Him.

He knows Peter’s cowardice before Peter denies Him.

He knows Judas’s betrayal before Judas kisses Him.

He knows the hidden history of the woman at the well.

He knows every secret of the human heart.

And what does such knowledge produce in Him?

Descent.

This is the mystery revealed in Philippians.

God sees humanity from above and comes down.

We see our brother from above and remain there.

That is contempt.

Contempt may be one of the purest forms of the anti-Gospel.

It looks downward, but not in order to descend.

It looks downward in order to preserve distance.

Christ looks downward and comes to find Adam.

Contempt looks downward and says:

Thank God I am not like him.

The entire Gospel stands between those two movements.

One is the movement of God.

The other is the movement of the Pharisee.

And perhaps this is why the Fathers place mercy so near the heart of spiritual life.

Mercy destroys the distance upon which pride depends.

The merciful man cannot remain safely above another because he has discovered himself in the other man’s wound.

He knows:

That weakness is not foreign to me.

That fear is not foreign to me.

That darkness is not foreign to me.

Had grace not held me, I do not know where I would be.

This knowledge does not make him indifferent to sin.

It makes him incapable of contempt.

There is an enormous difference.

We have sometimes confused mercy with pretending that nothing matters.

But mercy is not blindness.

Mercy sees clearly and refuses to abandon.

God’s mercy toward us has never consisted in His believing flattering things about us.

He knows us.

That is precisely the wonder.

He knows us and loves us still.

Perhaps this is why genuine holiness has a peculiar gentleness about it.

The saint may say difficult things.

He may call us to repentance.

He may expose what we desperately want to hide.

But somehow we do not feel reduced in his presence.

We feel seen.

There is a difference between being exposed and being despised.

The saint exposes in order to heal.

Pride exposes in order to diminish.

And the human heart knows the difference.

The modern elders possessed this same quality.

People came to them carrying ruined marriages, addictions, betrayals, unbelief, despair, moral failures, years of wasted life.

And somehow they left with hope.

Not because the elder told them that sin was unimportant.

But because he looked at them and still saw someone for whom Christ had died.

What would happen if Christians looked at one another this way?

What would happen if, before speaking of another person, we remembered that Christ desires him?

What would happen if every judgment had to pass first through the Cross?

What would happen if we asked ourselves:

Would I say this about someone whose feet I had just washed?

Perhaps many of our words would disappear.

And perhaps that silence would be the beginning of holiness.

For the Christian witness is not merely the proclamation that Christ died and rose.

It is the appearance in the world of a people whose manner of living would otherwise be inexplicable.

People who forgive enemies.

People who refuse retaliation.

People who protect the dignity of the weak.

People who do not rejoice when those who wounded them fall.

People who can disagree without hatred.

People who can separate without contempt.

People who can suffer injustice without allowing injustice to reproduce itself within their own hearts.

This is not natural.

And that is precisely the point.

The world does not need Christians to demonstrate that human beings can form factions, protect institutions, nurse grievances, compete for position, humiliate opponents, and justify themselves.

The world already knows how to do these things.

We have nothing to teach it there.

Our witness begins precisely where the world’s logic ends.

“Father, forgive them.”

That sentence is Christianity.

Everything else must eventually pass through it.

And perhaps this is why the failure of love among Christians wounds so deeply.

We expect weakness.

We expect disagreement.

We expect sin.

But somewhere in the human heart there remains the hope that those who have stood beneath the Cross will have learned something there.

That those who continually ask for mercy will become merciful.

That those who eat the Bread of forgiveness will learn how to forgive.

That those who bow before the Crucified will become less capable of crucifying one another.

When this does not happen, the world sees the contradiction even when we do not.

Perhaps we should allow ourselves to feel the shame of this.

Not the sterile shame that turns inward and despairs.

The holy shame that becomes repentance.

For repentance begins when we stop explaining ourselves.

The question is not whether my anger was understandable.

It probably was.

The question is not whether the other person truly failed me.

Perhaps he did.

The question is not whether I can construct an argument proving that I was right.

Perhaps I can.

The question before the Cross is much simpler:

Did I love?

Did I preserve the dignity of the person who wounded me?

Did I desire his salvation?

Did I secretly delight when he was diminished?

Did I speak of him in ways I would be ashamed to speak if Christ were visibly standing beside me?

Did I remember my own need for mercy?

These questions leave little room for self-righteousness.

And perhaps that is why we avoid them.

Yet there is freedom here.

We do not have to make ourselves innocent.

Christ never asked us to be innocent.

He asked us to repent.

We can simply come again to the place where every Christian life begins:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Not have mercy on them because they are wrong.

Have mercy on me.

Let me see my brother as You see him.

Let me remember what You have forgiven in me.

Let me descend from the tribunal I have built in my heart.

Let me become incapable of contempt.

And perhaps then something of the original scandal will return.

Not the scandal of Christians behaving worse than the world.

The scandal of Christians loving in a way the world cannot explain.

A man wounded who does not hate.

A woman betrayed who still prays.

A brother humiliated who refuses to humiliate in return.

A community in which the weakest person is treated with the greatest tenderness.

A Church where truth does not become cruelty and mercy does not become falsehood.

Human beings who have ceased asking who deserves love because they have discovered that they themselves live entirely by a Love they never deserved.

That would be scandalous.

That might even make the world wonder again.

For perhaps at the end we will discover that the most convincing defense of Christianity was never an argument.

It was a human being in whom the mercy of Christ had become visible.

And the world, encountering him, caught for a moment the fragrance of another Kingdom.