Whether traversing the streets or worshipping in the synagogue; commanding demons to depart or speaking words of healing over broken lives, He created scandal. At His name, creatures from the pit shuddered in terror while men captured by jealousy and the self-satisfying rites of religion plotted murder.
Friend to the desperate and downtrodden, rescuer of the helpless and abandoned, and miracle-worker in the lives of those considered less than worthy. The untouchables. The unregenerate. The unrighteous. Jesus and scandal were one and the same.
Christ’s love, overwhelming in its mercy, shook culture’s conventions to the core. He ignored–even ridiculed–the rules of religious operation. Disregarding the social importance of who, Christ focused on whose He healed and restored…people with hurting hearts and broken souls in need of Heaven’s Bread to satisfy the craving for something more. Something indeterminate. Something eternal. Something to make all of the jagged edges pressing like glass into tender flesh worth the hard of living.
In His loving-others life, Christ threatened the status quo. He challenged our blind living and selfish, built-on-condition loving by showing us how to do it well–from stepping away from the glory of heaven toward the people and places in need of light…peace…hope.
By giving up personal comfort and moving into the orbit of someone different. Someone with a different faith…different skin…different problems. But, a person whose need for the Savior is the same is your and mine.
The only way we can fulfill the call He has placed on our lives is to live a scandalous love. To reach out to others in such a way that the sinews in our back pull and ache because it stretches us almost too far and we wonder if we can be brave enough–just leaning a bit more into Jesus.
It’s choosing to offer words of affirmation in the face of ridicule or responding with a word of peace and praying for another when the flesh wants only to return evil for evil. Living out love is about giving yourself away–piece by piece. And when you share yourself, your time, your heart then you’ll discover the joy of gaining that which you’d never known had been missing. Tears. Laughter. Relationships. People. 
All because of scandalous Love.
Action Step:
Loving unconditionally and mercifully can be such a challenge. Who in your life does God want for you to love as He might? Perhaps there is a specific person who needs to  experience Christ’s scandalous love (a family member, a co-worker, an enemy).
Or, you might sense the Holy Spirit calling you to love and minister to a specific group of people such as abused children, the homeless, or refugees.
What one step can you take today toward loving that person or people group like Jesus?