SKANDALON 4 the 'Scandal' of Jesus (a): Gethsemane

So for Christians in their daily walk with Jesus, a ‘skandalon’ may be either a temptation or a test; the one is an enticement to turn aside from the path and fall into the trap of sin, while the other is a stumbling-block in our way which trips us up and turns us back. But for the non-Christian, it can be Jesus himself who is the stumbling-block to faith, a possibility we touched on earlier, when the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane were ‘scandalized in’ Jesus at his arrest and fled in panic and despair. In the NT, as we will explore further, Jesus was a stumbling-block for the Jews: today he is often a stumbling-block for the person whose Christianity is a religion of ritual and self-righteousness, as it was for the Pharisees. We will look first at some verses in the OT which predict that the Messiah will be rejected by the Jews, then at passages where these verses are quoted by Peter and Paul in their letters, and finally at some incidents in the gospels where Jesus was a stumbling-block to the Jews.