The Pew Research Center recently found that 53 percent of Americans believe “people saying offensive things” is a major problem in our country. However, Pew also found that another 65 percent of Americans believe “people being too easily offended is a major problem.”
That means a significant number of people think both statements are true; people are too easily offended and too quick to give offense. Talk of offense is everywhere in our culture, from politicians and celebrities to comedians and preachers. It’s hard to turn on the TV and not hear someone claim to be offended.
I recently saw a man at Walmart wearing a t-shirt that read, “I’m Offended That You’re Offended.” That’s the sentiment of our age. Another way to observe the trend is the frequency with which we now claim offense. Google’s database of more than 129 million digitized books can be easily searched for changes in how we use words and phrases. Called the Ngram Viewer, it charts phrases on a line graph to display their frequency across time. Search the phrase “I’m offended” and the resulting trend line is striking. Up until about 1950, the phrase was used sparingly. You can see its gradual growth throughout the late 1900s. But beginning around 2000, the frequency line makes an almost vertical climb. This century, the phrase “I’m offended” has grown in usage by more than 5,600 percent.
Perhaps people have always felt offended, but we certainly seem to be talking more about it. We can’t even agree on whether offense is actually a problem. Some seem determined to double down on offense, offending to prove a broader point about our culture’s sensitivities. Others resolve to show no offense at all and so abandon all distinctions for the sake of vague affirmations and some naively hoped-for agreeableness. What few seem to be doing is asking why. Why are we increasingly sensitive to offense, and why can’t we control it? Perhaps we find being offended easier than the alternative: being honest about its cause.
Offense and the Bible
In 2020, as our nation spiraled downward into what felt like weekly new controversies, I decided our church would take the year to work through John’s gospel. I had the naïve idea that if we just focused on Jesus, we could somehow avoid the proliferating offense. I was wrong. In the gospel, I kept finding a savior who offended people. That’s an uncomfortable realization in a world seeking to avoid offense altogether.
Jesus clearly didn’t share our sensitivity or aversion. No one escaped it. Jesus offended the Pharisees and religious leaders, as well as his own disciples and family. He offended the rich and poor, Jew and gentile, male and female.
Jesus said things most would never dare say from the pulpit. He told the crowd they were an evil generation, and he called the religious leaders snakes. He referred to Peter as Satan and referenced a gentile woman as a dog. Don’t be too quick to explain those hard words away because, often, those same hard words brought out the most exceptional responses of faith. To be clear, I’m not suggesting we rework Jesus into a swaggering, cursing, ill-tempered brawler, as some have attempted to do. We can’t put words in Jesus’s mouth, but neither should we take them away.
The truth is, offense is a far bigger theme in the Bible than most of us have paid attention to. The New Testament mentions offense as many times as salvation. The New Testament’s word for offense is skandalon from which we get the English word scandal, and part of the challenge is translation. Skandalon is used in very different contexts, and translating a word with such a wide range of usage poses a challenge for biblical scholars. While the King James Version often translates the word as “offense,” most modern translations show no clear pattern. Skandalon is translated as “sin,” “fall,” “stumble,” “obstacle,” and even as generically as a “difficulty.” The Revised Standard Version never uses the word offense at all. In The Scandal of the Gospels, David McCracken points out, “With these varied translations, is it any wonder that we fail to recognize a common idea repeatedly surfacing?” But perhaps there’s an even more concerning reason.
The scholar, René Girard suggested an additional problem. He believed our cultural sensitivity to offense had biased our reading toward weaker, lesser offensive words. Girard wrote, “Recent translators, trying to make the Bible psychoanalytically correct, attempt to eliminate all the terms censured by contemporary dogmatism.” Even if such decisions are unintentional, are we conscious of how our growing sensitivities are shaping our reading of the text? Girard feared such decisions have not only obscured the meaning of skandalon but have diminished the teaching of Jesus because of it.
McCracken also acknowledges how our sensitivity to offense has made translators, commentators, and pastors reluctant to recognize it. He writes,
Though there is no hiding all of the offense, we as readers are oblivious to much of it. It is regularly translated out, and interpreted out, of the Bible. And that is a scandal worthy of study, because without the offense a reader has a severe handicap when encountering ideas and characters of the Gospel, especially the hero, Jesus.
How can we learn this lesson if we can no longer see the offense in our own Bibles?
Offense as Revelation
One of the greatest challenges of overlooking offense is overlooking the power of offense to change you. Our culture has come to believe that what makes us feel good must be good, and by that logic, what makes us feel bad must be bad too. Careful never to give offense, we weaken the power of offense to reveal.
I want to suggest something to you that will sound both strange and possibly offensive, especially given our cultural moment. But I am convinced it is true—convinced by both my past experiences and by the consistent witness of Scripture. If you are willing to endure being offended and honestly look at it, what offends you can reveal important characteristics about you. Offense can be a form of revelation. It can shock you into seeing things you’ve overlooked about yourself. Understanding what offends you can even lead you to a deeper faith in Christ. But it will require a willingness to confront Christ’s hard words and not to be offended by them.
Offense is directly connected to insecurity, and we live in a world of increasing insecurity. We have lost all of the traditional markers of identity and belonging. We no longer belong to neighborhoods or communities. We no longer belong to families or history. We no longer identify with religion or tradition. We are each left to construct our own identity and our own framework of morality and meaning. It’s a heavy load that leaves us desperate for affirmation and quick to blame others.
Offense can be revelation, but it can also be a tactic of suppression. Offense is an easy way to avoid facing what is in our own hearts. When a hard word threatens you externally, the last thing you want to acknowledge is that it might be right and that you might be blind to it. You claim offense, partly as a strategy to shield your vulnerability.
The language of offense allows you to object to the threat without the liability of explaining why it hurt so deeply. Claiming to be offended grants you the moral high ground. It is a tactic of defense, just as a king is willing to tear down his whole city to reinforce the walls before an invasion. Offense often hardens the defenses of your heart and focuses your attention on the external threat at the cost of self-awareness. It allows you to respond with outrage rather than humility.
Political cartoonist Tim Kreider explains,
Obviously, some part of us loves feeling 1) right and 2) wronged. But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge it’s a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again.
Being offended is addicting, in part because it shields us from our own sin and insecurity. But it’s a dangerous trick. The more you feel offended, the more you feel justified in it, and the less you care to know why. As you give into the impulse, you become increasingly less aware of the internal mechanisms fueling it. As a result, you become less capable of understanding your own inner life and motivations. Offense always begets more offense. Embracing offense moves you further into the darkness. It makes you less self-aware.
Christ is the Sword
So Jesus risks offending us. He risks offending us to show us the truth. He speaks hard words so that he might reveal the insecurity and need that we are prone to desperately ignore. That idea is foreign to modern faith. We are looking for affirmation and power, not conviction and correction. But Jesus is willing to tell us the truth. As the book of Hebrews describes it, he wields a two-edged sword that cuts deep enough to reveal the secrets of the heart, mind, soul, and spirit. In the book of Revelation, that two-edged sword emerges from his mouth, judging what is true from what is false. His sword is his word, dividing, rebuking, correcting, and revealing. If you come near Christ, if you listen, he will reveal what is in your heart. But only you can decide if that truth will humble you or blind you with offense.
Like antiseptic in a wound, being saved is not always comfortable. Stitches, lances, and reset bones never feel good, but they are the work of healing. The physician must sometimes cut deeply to abstract what ills. So, too, offense is often the heat of Christ’s light shone into our deepest needs, his greatest work done within those secret places of your deepest vulnerabilities.
A Sharp Compassion
I don’t want to offend you, but I do hope this conversation leads you into a moment of crisis, the kind of crisis that strips away the superficial and allows you to sense again those things that matter most. I hope it reveals your heart’s desires and insecurities, and I hope it will enable you to better understand the mechanisms at work in your heart. I hope you come to recognize and appreciate the good but sometimes hard words of Jesus. They are, as C. S. Lewis described them, a “severe mercy,” or, in the words of T. S. Eliot, a “sharp compassion.”
On September 10th, I’m releasing a new book entitled A Sharp Compassion: 7 Hard Words to Heal Our Insecurities and Free Us from Offense. I think it’s an important conversation for learning to recognize the insecurity within our culture and in our own lives. It would mean a lot to me if you would consider buying a copy and recommending it to friends.
Learn More: A Sharp Compassion Book
