121 - The Scandal of the Gospels: Jesus, Story and Offense

The Scandal of the Gospels: Jesus, Story and Offense
By David McCracken
New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 204 pp. $29.95.

Paul described the gospel as a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23) and resisted any attempt to remove that scandal (Gal. 5:11). David McCracken, Professor of English and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington, has written an evocative book intended to reanimate the biblical skandalon so central to the Gospels. In those narratives, Jesus causes offense to all who encounter him. Centuries of Bible reading, however, have tended to dull the possibility for offense. In McCracken's words, ".. . [w]e have translated and interpreted the Gospels to minimize and domesticate the offense, making it barely recognizable." The diffuse rendering of the Greek noun and verb in modern translations contributes to the failure even to recognize how central this idea is to the Gospels. One explanation for this state of affairs is that we are generally uncomfortable with scandal, any violation of norms, but especially so in sacred texts. Scandal not only evokes disagreeable emotions and sensations, it may challenge our "most fundamental and cherished beliefs." Consequently, Bible readers seem destined to adapt the text by various means, including rigorous critical historical investigation, to fit into the scheme of their own desires. The dangerous and the fascinating qualities of the scandal are safely obliterated, ameliorated, or displaced and turned into a comfortable lie. Any bothersome collision with the truth is thereby conveniently dodged. A classic example,

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not mentioned by McCracken, is the infamous eye of the needle and all the interpretations, known by even the most biblically illiterate, which either reduce the size of the camel or enlarge the needle's eye.

By losing the crucial element of scandal, McCracken argues that we exclude the possibility for encountering the truth and rob the gospel of some of its power. The thesis of this book is that "the very notion of biblical truth presupposes and thrives on offense, but, though there is no hiding all of the offense, we as readers are oblivious to much of it." Scandal is a necessary part of encountering the divine and having faith, even though it is an obstacle that may block the way to truth and alienate one from God. It creates a crisis that reveals the hidden desires of the heart. Being offended reveals one's sin, and it can lead one farther away or back toward the God who always resists human aspirations. If one yearns for God, one can work through the offense and come closer to God. If the heart's desires reign supreme, one will be alienated. Consequently, the biblical skandalon must be constantly reintroduced for Bible readers. The scandal is again awakened when we read the Gospels as stories, not as encoded doctrines or messages ("the lesson we learn from this text is. . .").

McCracken boldly unfolds the Gospels as a dangerous landscape filled with traps and land mines. In chapter two, he describes biblical offense at Work and argues that the offenses are created by individuals and responded to individuals. He uses Matthew 15 as the case study. The Pharisees ask Jesus a reasonable question, "Why do your disciples not wash hands?" and Jesus responds, "Why are you a bunch of hypocrites who twist the Scripture?" The Pharisees are offended. Jesus then gives the cold shoulder to a frantic Gentile woman who pleads for her demonized daughter and cornnares her sick child to a do-. But she chooses not to be offended and is praised for her faith. This stark contrast reveals that "the opposite of offense is faith, but the only way to faith is through the possibility of offense." One should note how the offense has been read out of this passage by interpreters in ingenious ways (Jesus spoke with a wink, used the word for puppies, etc.). McCracken argues that this offense (laying verbal traps) springs from the Hebrew Bible that contains images of God laying traps or stumbling blocks in the way of the people, ensnaring them or causing them to trip. In the Hebrew Bible, the skandalon is the people's desire or obsession (idols) that stands between them and God. In the New Testament, Jesus becomes the offense because he challenges those desires (idols). The offensiveness of offense and how it is necessary as a preliminary to faith as it challenges our deepest selves and strongest allegiances is the topic of chapter three. It also deals with the irony that Jesus warns his followers not to be a scandal to others (as does Paul) but is himself a scandal, to the respectable, ordinary world. The fourth chapter shifts the focus to Kierkegaard, the philosopher of offense, and his various dramatic stories that beguile the reader into the truth through absurdity and paradox to show that one best encounters the offense in narrative.

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Part two of the book is directed to the problems of reading biblical narratives. The fifth chapter deals with the purpose of parables in Matthew and Mark and, after a brief foray into parable criticism, argues that parables "are not modes of instruction but rather forms of offense" designed to obstruct the truth. Elements that are odd, fantastic, extravagant, and offensive are crucial to parables that aim at shattering the comfortable world where everything is in its place. For centuries, the church has used parables as convenient pegs on which to hang its theological wardrobe and in the process cloak the offense. In a narrative reading of Matthew 13, McCracken seeks to demonstrate that parables are not invented to convey formulable meanings and information or to express propositions that need to be mined by the interpreter. He argues that parables are empty of meaning and precipitate internal action, forcing the hearer or reader to a crisis or collision that requires movement. In New Testament terms, that crisis is an either/or: either stumbling or changing-and-becoming, either enacting a lie that we want or being transformed. Readers may prefer easy methods of interpretation or to have somebody provide them with "the point." Parables instead are like quicksilver, corroding the silver chalice in which they would be safeguarded or squirting away when one tries to put one's finger on any point.

The last three chapters treat the offensive and inoffensive Jesus in an exegesis of Matthew 17:27-18:35, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and scandal in the Gospel of John in which the theories of Lotman and Kermode, scandal as news and story, are employed. Throughout, the modern theories of Girard, Bakhtin, Lévi-Strauss, Alter, Derrida, and Bloom leaven the discussion.

This is an exciting book that is slow reading for the best of reasons: it sets the reader's mind to racing as it re-encounters the scandal of the Gospels. In other words, it admirably fulfills its purpose. My quibbles are minor. To make the case, there is a tendency to stick to passages where the word group for scandal appears, although the surrounding context is carefully taken into account. The book could therefore have been quite a bit longer by including many other passages where the word does not appear, but it is heuristic. I found myself spotting the scandal value of many other Gospel texts that I was reading and noted that commentaries, almost without exception, sought to defuse it. I should comment, however, that the historical method does not always dilute the text, as one might infer from reading McCracken and other literary theorists. When one removes modern cultural assumptions and uncovers the cultural values and expectations of the first century, new scandals are uncovered. For example, McCracken reads 1 Corinthians 8-10 the way it has been consistently misread by Westerners who have had no experience with idol food as a conflict between the strong and the weak when instead it is a dispute between the Corinthians and Paul. The Corinthians rebutted Paul's prohibitions against eating idol food with clever arguments constructed from distortions of his earlier teachings and emphasized how

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unrealistic these restrictions were. Paul links idol food to idolatry in 10:19-20 and does not permit idol food at all if one knows it to be idol food. He never says eat idol food if the weak are not caused to stumble. He allows one to eat any food bought in the market or offered in another's home without asking its origins or history; but if one knows that the food is idol food, he then insists that one must abstain. Paul does not think that it is matter of indifference. It is just as scandalous to us that Paul is not more liberally open-minded about such things, and we tend to make Paul espouse pragmatic common sense that fits our understanding of the matter.

This original and exciting book is an important and valuable contribution that should help recapture something central to the Gospel narratives and should enrich both the preaching and teaching of the text by whetting its cutting edge and rekindling its explosive power.

David E. Garland
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, KY