And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”
Luke 7:22-23
Jesus is controversial. He always has been. Early in His public ministry even John the Baptist had questions about the nature of Jesus’ ministry. John had prepared the way for a Messiah and a deliverer of Israel. Yet Jesus was doing things at a very different pace and in very different ways than John did. And so Jesus gave John and his disciples this answer.
Jesus lets His work speak for itself. There was no miracle of healing that Jesus would not do for someone in need. There was no disease too dirty for Jesus not to cleanse. And there was a beautiful gospel… a kingdom message of good news in a world of bad news… and it was taking root among the neediest people. Jesus was doing the true work of deliverance: He delivered from darkness, paralysis, silence, uncleanness, and even death itself.
The final word Jesus gave was to remind John not to see what Jesus did as something to stumble over. The meaning of “offense” is to trip or stumble over a stone in the path. Jesus was NOT in the way, but rather He IS the way. “Offense” is related to our work “scandal”. We can be scandalized by Jesus, especially in the later work of His death and resurrection, or we can be saved by Him. But we cannot ignore Him. We have to deal with the divine disruption He has made in our world! Even today, as Jesus still saves and heals lives, He disrupts and transforms. We have to deal with the disruption and answer for ourselves: “Who is Jesus?”
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