The Impact of Jesus

Introduction

There’s a quote I came across the other day by historian and scholar, J.P. Meier who said,

“What is beyond dispute is that in the ministry of two or three years, Jesus of Nazareth attracted and infuriated his contemporaries, mesmerized and alienated the ancient world, unleashed a movement that has done the same ever since, and thus changed the course of history forever.”

What I found interesting about that quote is how he spoke of Jesus both attracting and infuriating those around him. That Jesus mesmerized and alienated the world.

Now, for those of us who follow Jesus, and I mean, truly follow him, meaning that our lives are centered around him and his glory. That the foundation of our lives is planted in the Word of God. That we are striving by God’s grace and power to go make disciples and live counter-culturally, that we are crucifying the flesh and putting sin to death as we walk in close community with one another.

If this defines our church culture, as it should, then we continue what Jesus began, both attracting and infuriating. Mesmerizing and alienating.

The Jesus of the Bible is both beautiful and offensive. And I used that phrase, “The Jesus of the Bible” very specifically because we do not have the right to define who Jesus is. Now, our culture has sought to soften the edges of Jesus. It has sought to create a Jesus that just doesn’t exist.

We even see within the church a desire to lessen the impact of Jesus. So, let’s not talk about sin, let’s not talk about wrath, let’s not talk about condemnation and Hell. Let’s not talk about the fact that Jesus said if you want to truly find eternal life then you’ve got to turn your back on everything in the world and follow only Him. Let’s not mention that Jesus said that he is the only way to God.

Instead, let’s just create a rosy picture of Jesus that makes us feel good, doesn’t call on us to change, doesn’t confront us. Well, all we’ve done then is create a Jesus in our own image. And again, we do not have the right to do that. Jesus defines himself.

And so, listen, the message of Jesus is infuriating and alienating and offensive to all of us in our natural state of sin.

But the character of Jesus, the nature of Jesus, the hope of Jesus is attractive, is beautiful, is mesmerizing to those who are changed by it.

It was the apostle Paul who said in 2 Corinthians that,

2 Corinthians 2:14-16, “Through us [the church] spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him [Jesus] everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.”

Do you hear what he’s saying? Paul’s saying, God’s given us the message of Christ to take into the world. For some it will be the fragrance of life, it will be sweet smelling as people find new life in Jesus but for others the message of Christ will be the stench of death for it will remind them that they are under God’s judgment. And rather turn from their sin and submit to Jesus, they reject him and consider the message of Jesus to be insulting and offensive to how they want to live their lives.

Problem

Now, here’s the problem we all face. Even for those of us in this room who have been gifted eternal life in Jesus, we’re still going to struggle with our flesh, and we’re still going to struggle with submitting to his Word.

Let me give you a perfect example of this that we can probably all relate to.

When someone offends us don’t we just naturally want to remain in our anger toward the offender? But what’s Jesus say? Go to the person and make things right, seek reconciliation, offer forgiveness, extend grace and love.

But we don’t want to. We want to remain in our anger because it gives us a sense of superiority and power over that person. It’s self-exaltation. But the gospel calls us to come and die to find life. To recognize that we’ve offended God and yet, he’s given us grace, so therefore, how can we withhold grace and forgiveness to others?

Now listen, for those of us in Christ, we know these things in principle, and when we’re not angry or offended by anyone we can agree to what Jesus says, but the moment you have to put it into practice, it grates on us.

Listen, Jesus is both beautiful and offensive.

Main Aim

But, the hope though today as we walk through this text is that we would better understand how the world will respond to Jesus and that regardless of its response our mission still remains to preach and proclaim the gospel of Christ and advance His kingdom to every corner of the earth.

Big Idea

You cannot encounter Jesus and not be impacted by him. He will offend you, mesmerize you, and disrupt you.

Body

So, we’ll look at two worldly reactions to encountering Jesus and then wrap up today with our response in spite of how the world reacts.

Reaction number one, and we’ll spend the majority of our time on this reaction this morning:

Jesus offends.

Verses 1-3.

Mark 6:1-3, “He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.”

Now, this isn’t the first time that Jesus has upset people with his teaching.

If you remember back to Mark 3, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath, which in the religious leaders minds was a huge, no-no. And it says in Mark 3:6 that after this took place both the Pharisees and the Herodians met together to start plotting how they could destroy Jesus.

Now, the Pharisees were the religious elite of the day and the Herodians, were a Jewish political party that sympathized with Rome. Now, the Pharisees considered Rome to be the occupying presence that they were not supportive of so, naturally they were not friendly to the Herodians. In fact, they most likely hated each other and strongly opposed one another.

But here you have one thing that caused them to put their gloves down and join forces. They both hated Jesus and wanted him out of the picture.

And so, you have in Mark 3 a picture of the elite class of the day banding together in solidarity against Jesus. They were offended by him.

But here we have in Mark 6 the people of Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown being just as offended by Jesus. Now, Nazareth was nothing. We know almost nothing about it other than Jesus lived there. It was a tiny little village in the middle of nowhere.

In fact, in the gospel of John as Jesus is calling Philip and Nathaniel to come follow him, Nathaniel hears that Jesus is from Nazareth and says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

So, in our context just think small-town rural. “Sticksville.”

Now, think with me. How often are the “elites” in our culture and small-town USA ever united in anything? Rarely ever.

And yet, Jesus has the ability to bring these two sides together in a common offense against him.

Jesus said this would happen though in John 15.

John 15:18, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.”

Here’s the thing we see about Jesus. He offends everybody. Hear what Jesus said there. “The WORLD” hates me. Not certain portions of the world. It’s not like, Jesus is really accepted in the western world just not in the east.” He offends across the board. His own family was offended by him.

So, now, let’s turn our attention to why Jesus offends.

Now, much of the world is simply offended over the simple message of the gospel. That God is holy, we are sinful and rebellious and unable to save ourselves. That our only hope in life and death is to repent of our sin and turn in faith to Jesus alone.

Now, right away you can begin to pick out different aspects of the gospel that are offensive. We are sinful. We are broken and flawed. There is no good within us. We have to turn from the things of this world and submit to Christ alone. That’s offensive to us.

But here in Mark 6 I don’t believe those things are the root of their offense.

Notice what they say. “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”

Here’s what offended them. Bill Lane, in his commentary was a big help to me. He says it was “The ordinariness that surrounded him.”

Jesus was an ordinary guy. Now don’t hear me wrong. Yes, he was God in the flesh. But he was an ordinary Jewish man.

Isaiah prophesies of Jesus and his ordinariness.

Isaiah 53:2-3, “For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

The apostle Paul in Philippians 2 says Jesus laid aside his glory, made himself nothing, and took on the form of a servant.

Now why would that offend?

Two reasons.

It undermines our view of salvation.

Here’s what I mean. The world’s philosophy and the world’s religions paint salvation in different ways but ultimately with the same outcome and that is a type of liberation from ordinary humanness. And so salvation in the world’s eyes is a way to be set free from what makes us human.

And so, for example. Buddhism teaches that life is suffering and that through good behavior, meditation, and spiritual and physical labor one can enter into a transcendent state of enlightenment or nirvana. It’s this idea of escape from our humanness.

So, the hope one day is that “we all will be released into a kind of ethereal, transcendent, purely spiritual existence.”

But that’s not the message of Jesus, that’s the message of Scripture. True salvation is not the escape from what makes us human, it’s not an escape from the world, it’s the transformation of ourselves and of the world.

And so, Jesus is God in the flesh. God come to us in our ordinariness. He’s a carpenter, He’s from Nazareth. Jesus got entangled in the ordinary human life but without sin. He suffered, He experienced pain and ultimately dies upon a cross in order to redeem and restore it. Not so that we would escape it.

What do we see in the final chapters of Revelation? A new heaven and a new earth.

Revelation 21:1-3, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”

What we see here is not the escape from our humanity and the world but the renewal of it. He’s making all things new.

And so, I think this offends because Jesus is just so ordinary and like them.

But secondly.

It undermines our access to salvation.

In 2 Kings 5 you read the story of Naaman. He was a great and powerful military leader and was struck leprosy. Now, he was not a follower of God but had heard about how great the God of Israel was. And so, he decides to go to the prophet, Elisha, to find healing for his disease.

So, Naaman brings money, and his entourage, and all sorts of other gifts to give to Elisha so that he could earn his healing. So, he comes to Elisha’s house and Elisha doesn’t greet him but sends instead a messenger to Naaman telling him to go dip yourself in the Jordan River seven times and you’ll be restored.

Naaman’s furious over this. Greatly offended. Why?

Listen to 2 Kings 5.

2 Kings 5:11-12, “But Naaman was angry and went away, saying, “Behold, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper. Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?” So he turned and went away in a rage.”

What’s he offended over? He’s angry that he couldn’t earn his healing. He’s offended that as a man of great power and authority, he has to go dip in the dirty Jordan River. He’s offended that there wasn’t the spectacle and the show. He’s offended that Elisha didn’t even come to greet him.

This salvation offended his ego.

Jesus is proclaiming a gospel of repentance and faith. Everyone from the king all the way down to the lowest of the low is on equal footing before God and there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves. We have to rest in God’s grace and grace alone.

The gospel is simple in that it is simply repent and believe but complex because we don’t want to do that.

So, we can say we want salvation and we want Jesus but at the same time say, don’t call me to change anything about who I am. Well, then you don’t want Jesus. Jesus will offend you. The gospel is offensive. The world will not respond favorably to it.

I can say this as well. If you’ve never wrestled with the offensiveness of the gospel then you probably actually don’t know what the gospel is.

In Matthew 11, Jesus says, “Blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”

You know what he’s saying here? He’s saying that we should feel the offensiveness of the gospel as it rubs against the grain of our sinful flesh but not take offense to it because we’ve also tasted and seen that the Lord is good and a delight.

You see, the people of Nazareth were offended by Jesus and therefore Jesus did not do any great works of healing or miracles in their midst. They responded with unbelief and so therefore they couldn’t receive blessing and joy.

You see, here in Nazareth, it wasn’t that Jesus couldn’t do any miracles. He’s omnipotent but as one author put it, “He could not do miracles because he would not in the face of their blatant unbelief.”

The second reaction we see today is found in verses 14-29.

Jesus Disrupts.

We’re not going to read through this whole story again but let me just hit the highlights. News about Jesus had spread all the way to King Herod. And people were really beginning to talk and ask, “who is he?” Now again, you see just some of the ordinariness of Jesus here. They don’t accept him as a Jewish man from Nazareth, no he must be Elijah, or one of the prophets of old.

But Herod’s life is disrupted greatly and he thinks Jesus is John the Baptist come back to life.

Now, you heard the story read this morning. Herod had John put to death because he made a stupid promise to a young girl who was dancing provocatively before him.

Now, Herod wasn’t willing to follow Jesus but I’m sure he had lots of sleepless nights going forward wondering what Jesus was all about. Because Jesus disrupts our comfortable, cozy lives and calls us to deeper fellowship and mission with him.

Jesus’ teaching is counter-cultural.

Mark 9:35, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”

Luke 9:23, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

Luke 6:27-28, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”

Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

We can keep going here. These are life-disrupting teachings.

And the majority of people in the world today will hear this and say, “Not for me. I’m out.”

Application

Listen, we either take all of Jesus or we take none of him. He is not a God to be cherry-picked. I like this, but I don’t like that. He has not given us that option. Again, I’ll say it, we either take all of him or we take none of him.

Now, Jesus was preparing his disciples for the world’s response to him. He’s preparing them for rejection. They’ve seen Jesus being rejected and that’s why Jesus in verse 11 said to shake the dust off their feet if anyone would not listen to them. The mission Jesus sends us on is not easy, it will not be well, or even widely-received.

You see, what we see in verses 7-13 with Jesus sending his disciples out is counter-cultural. It rubs against the grain of what we just read. Jesus’ own hometown rejected him and the next thing we see is Jesus sending the disciples out with the gospel message.

In our minds we would think, hey we need to regather and strategize about how to make Jesus more appealing. His own hometown sent him packing. How are we supposed to have any different of a result.

But Jesus says, go and gives them all they need to go. And again, what he gives them is not what we would think. Look at verses 7 and 8.

Mark 6:7-8, “And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts—”

We would think for this mission we need lots of supplies. It’s going to be rough so I need to prepare for the worst. But Jesus says, no, you don’t need supplies, you just need me.

As we close here, I want to draw our attention to three principles for gospel mission in a hostile world.

Dependence upon Christ and his authority.

Jesus said here that he gives them authority over the demonic realm and to proclaim the gospel with power. This should remind us of the Great Commission in Matthew 28.

Matthew 28:18-19, “And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”

We do not go in our strength, we do not go in our wisdom but in the strength and wisdom of Christ.

2. Live among the people we desire to reach.

I really think there were two reasons for why Jesus charged them not to bring anything with them. First was so they would depend on him but secondly, so that they would need to live among the people they were trying to reach with the gospel.

Money and resources could allow them to stay on the outskirts of the town or village. Bringing food with them would allow them to eat in seclusion but take away those things and now they need to live amongst a people that they’re sharing the gospel with. They’re eating meals with them, they’re staying in their homes with them.

I think we see from Scripture that gospel-empowered transformation in a person’s life takes time. We’ve got to live among the people we’re trying to reach. So, this means going to coffee with unbelievers, inviting them into your home, knowing your neighbors well enough to be invited into their home, building those relationships with them because you truly love them.

3. Serve those we desire to reach.

In verses 12 and 13 we see that they not only went out and proclaimed the gospel but that they served people. They anoint the sick, the cast out demons. They didn’t go just with a message, but with actions to back up the heart of the message.

Listen, it is the gospel that works in people’s hearts to draw them to Christ. But our love for people is what demonstrates that the message is real.

Conclusion

You see, the gospel is both beautiful and offensive. So, on one hand as messengers of Christ we’re going to be both attractive and offensive. Attractive in the sense that we seek to serve others, love others, minister to others, sacrifice for others. But offensive because we’re still calling on people to repent and turn to Jesus as Lord.

And so, are you willing to be both attractive and offensive for the cause of Christ? The more we become like Jesus the more we will be the sweet aroma that leads to life, but that also means the closer we get to the heart of Jesus the more we will be the stench of God’s judgment which leads to death.

Regardless though, we follow the King, the Servant King who gave his life for us.