The Soft Cudgel

Did you see what I saw, the preacher high and lifted up above the peoples?  He was courteous and even smiled appropriately, but there was a subtle undertone.  He didn’t know us, he just assumed that he did.  As a result he was supercilious, talking down to the gathering before him.  A few were enraptured because they agreed.  A few were enraptured because he was important and they enjoyed his finely judged interjections of humour, after all a preacher needs to be entertaining?  Many were initially open and enquiring, but as he wielded his soft cudgel they drew farther and farther away, and some of them didn’t even realize why.  Some were just angry that he had even been invited to preach.  Perhaps they needed a cudgelling, but one more forthright and planted on the Rock.

The preacher used the gospel instead of preaching the gospel.  He had an agenda that was not the agenda of the living Word but the agenda of the culture that he had adopted as his own spiritual agenda.  Just because something is spiritual doesn’t mean that it represents the balance of the written word of God; even though that is not determinative for those who hold the agenda of whatever is the current culture.  Truly all men before God are equal, and that as a principle is fair enough, but it’s not the whole Truth; there are other truths and only one Truth can govern them all: Jesus Christ is Lord; not the teachings of the current culture.

To be quite fair the preacher was being as honest and as fair with us as he knew how, but a lack self-knowledge is often one of our limitations.  By his own admission the message of the soft cudgel was not the one he grew up with.  He had grown up with the hard cudgel and that was just as bad with its intolerant attitudes.  If you grow up with a hard cudgel it’s hard not to cudgel others even when you reject the hard cudgel . What he didn’t know was that it wasn’t necessary to throw out the baby with the bath water. 

Oh what a style!  No hard cudgel here, not the least, but a cudgel nonetheless, softly cudgelling with a smothering stroke; self-righteous, possessing the only truth, such as it was.  Part of the problem was that he was blind to his audience and couldn’t see that he wasn’t addressing a hard cudgel audience but many moderate, temperate people who would not enjoy being cudgelled with a truth out of the context of the larger Truth.  Such cudgelling polarizes people who don’t even realize they are being cudgelled.  On reflection most thoughtful people can tell when the cudgel is the preacher’s agenda and not an agenda of the Spirit of God. People tend not to like being cudgelled no matter how soft the cudgel.