The Offensive Jesus

Matthew 11.6 “Blessed is he who takes no offense at Me.” ~ Jesus

Parts of my life have felt like a slow-walk around the figure of Jesus. Like I’m purchasing goods and want to know that the product is agreeable. Except, Who purchased who? Now there’s a strange paradox. He paid for me, but I have to choose and take Him home–to my clownery of a human heart.

But the reason I keep slow-walking is not so I can size Him up anymore–my choice is made. No, I just want to see Him. I am chest-burning so big to see Him.

I’ve circled that beautiful, broken body a few times, looked over the Divine like the unhurried window shopper–down the celestial backside and soak-looking up the front. I’ve clutched those trade-man-hands and felt my eyes go soft in the examining of story-lines that play pick-up-stix across His palm-flesh. I’ve swallowed the olive-aroma of His desert-peasant-hair and traced my finger-tips over the furrows canyon-ing His earth-face–emotion lines creasing parallel through forehead, intersecting with the skin-stored memory of all His cosmic laughter. I’ve gone Mary Magdelene-low before the good-news-feet with nothing but a baby sprout of hope that my veiled vision could touch an atom of heaven inside the dust-dots compressed in foot calluses, the calluses from all His holy ground walking.

His stripped skin and punctured flank? The bleeding parts? I can barely brush against those, but when I do? It’s finger-open and feather-light and it smells like a metallic waterfall when I lean in on the inhale.

And this I believe:

Every essential feature of His person I really and truly behold with my stretched senses, looks and feels like a parallel experience that I have lived through with Him–side to wounded side–and genuinely caught soul-deep comprehension for:

That one year we fought 365 days to save our marriage? We bled red from so much broken epidermis.

The three years we scavenged to save our home before losing it? Oh, the calluses came with. And narrative-marks stroked and swept over the art gallery of our hands.

When our six-week old son, Seth, died and resurrected? I would swear to you I was standing on the shadowed edge of Lazarus’s tomb, my heart so full with at least one galaxy.

And, through it all, there are the crow’s feet of Christ-laughter cresting just there–where the eyelid corners kiss–and marking us for good.

I know that I have missed an infinity of detail, but I also know that I get many more rotations around the Son and I look forward to the ongoing circular journey, even though {even though} all historical evidence strongly suggests that I will be compressed and pushed and spread thin and ripped wide by the process. I look forward to it because I become more like Him and I decided when I was doing all the God-perusing that I would look like Him anytime, anywhere, anyhow. And always, if I could.

These thoughts waltz in my heart when I read the Jesus-quoted verse in Matthew, “Blessed is he who takes no offense at Me.”

All these revolutions, all this viewing, all our experiences together . . . and I still can’t find anything offensive about You.

Mine.

Jesus, holy and wild Christ.”

I do not consider it offensive that the proclaimed God of the universe and Savior of the world was born–a great Light–from the darkness of a virgin’s vagina and landed in a feed trough wearing diapers, grew up in “nothing good can come from there”, was raised a carpenter’s Son, preached good news to the poor {when everyone knew He was the poorest of them all}, picked His clothes out of the Goodwill leftovers, washed the feet of His disciples like He was their servant, blackmailed Himself to a cross for the return of His people and by whose ruptured spleen and split lip we are somehow healed?

The poor are rich, the weak are strong, the persecuted are blessed.

Love your enemies.

And while you’re at it, become like dirty-faced, bubble-gum chewing, street scampering children–of all things.

“The blind receive their sight

and the lame walk,

the lepers are cleansed

the deaf hear,

the dead are raised up,

and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

And “blessed is he who takes no offense at Me.” Matthew 11.5-6

My Jesus.

The offenses You are known for? Are the veriest reasons I keep walking loops on the outside of You, to get to the inside of You.