Beatitude (Part 4)
“The apparent kindness of the preachers who water down Jesus’ hard sayings is really arrogance. They are like mail carriers who arrogate to themselves the role of editors of the mail that is entrusted to them to deliver intact. Some preachers act as if Jesus had said, ‘Blessed are you when all men speak well of you.’ But the real Jesus said, ‘Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets’ (Luke 6:26). If we never offend anyone, we are not giving them Jesus.
Jesus must offend us, for He tells us not what we want to hear but what we need to hear, and sin has inserted a great gap between our needs and our wants. Jesus must surprise us, for He comes from Heaven; how could Heaven not surprise earth? Earth’s ethical teachers give us what comes from the human heart—fairly familiar territory. The Man from Heaven tells us what ‘eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man’ (1 Cor. 2:9). Most of our ethical teachers give us either old platitudes or new nonsense, safe old truths or dangerous new lies. Confucius is a good example of the former, Nietzsche of the latter. The first type is reliable but dull, the other fascinating but deranged. Jesus is wholly different. He gives us neither old orthodoxies nor new heresies, but the very mind of God, fresh water springing straight from the glacier of God’s heavenly mountain, refreshing the soul and welling up with eternal life. This is the reason that His words are literally inexhaustible. They are so simple that a child can understand them, yet so profound that no sage can exhaust them. They are like a face that way. They are a face: God’s face, God’s will, God’s personality.”
~Peter Kreeft
Jesus must offend us, for He tells us not what we want to hear but what we need to hear, and sin has inserted a great gap between our needs and our wants. Jesus must surprise us, for He comes from Heaven; how could Heaven not surprise earth? Earth’s ethical teachers give us what comes from the human heart—fairly familiar territory. The Man from Heaven tells us what ‘eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man’ (1 Cor. 2:9). Most of our ethical teachers give us either old platitudes or new nonsense, safe old truths or dangerous new lies. Confucius is a good example of the former, Nietzsche of the latter. The first type is reliable but dull, the other fascinating but deranged. Jesus is wholly different. He gives us neither old orthodoxies nor new heresies, but the very mind of God, fresh water springing straight from the glacier of God’s heavenly mountain, refreshing the soul and welling up with eternal life. This is the reason that His words are literally inexhaustible. They are so simple that a child can understand them, yet so profound that no sage can exhaust them. They are like a face that way. They are a face: God’s face, God’s will, God’s personality.”
~Peter Kreeft
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