Heart-sinkers!

Are there any difficult people in your church?

I mean really difficult. The kind that make you flinch inwardly as you see them approaching for a conversation. When I worked in general practice they wrote books about people like that – heart-sink patients they called them. The kind of person that would cause a GP to take a deep breath before ushering them into the consulting room.

Nothing right

Perhaps it would be the endless list of problems – more moans and grumbles than seemed possible to fit into a few minutes of conversation. Or a constant undercurrent of anger – where everything is subjected to an icy stream of withering sarcasm and nothing, it seems, is ever satisfactory.

Or perhaps someone is difficult because they keep making the same mistake over and over again. You spend hours patiently explaining how to do something and still the task is incompetently completed. Or what if the difficulty is moral. The man who has a whole series of affairs in his past yet who still insists it’s other people who are to blame for their moral lapses. That’s difficult to listen to.

There are also some people who are difficult to help. Proud, independent types who won’t agree to a visit, won’t let you do things for them and won’t really admit they need help in the first place. How difficult that is – when you can see an impending crisis brewing.

It’s a good job the Bible has so much to say about difficult people, because we clearly need help here. Two things stand out in the Bible’s teaching – and neither are quite what we expect.

Difficult people get saved

First, we notice a distinctly uncomfortable pattern. For it seems to be the case that it is difficult people who get saved. Think of ‘speak first, think later’ Peter who is always shooting his mouth off. Or Christian-persecuting Paul or ‘so crooked he climbs a tree’ Zacchaeus. In different ways they were all rather difficult to live with, I imagine.

The same was certainly true of ‘don’t call me Naomi, call me Mara’. She certainly had lots to be miserable about and she clearly wasn’t slow to say so. As for moral lapses, the Bible is awash with examples. Drunkenness from Noah, deception from Jacob, adultery and murder from King David and serial adultery from the woman at the well – the Bible can sometimes seem like a rogue’s gallery. Yet these are the very characters who God sees fit to usher into his kingdom. And not sneaked in through the back door, but offered a state reception. ‘I must eat at your house tonight’ seems to be the general rule. God, it would seem, has a particular fondness for difficult people.

Self-righteousness

And if that is a tad unsettling, then our second observation is positively unnerving. For God, it seems, really doesn’t take kindly to the kind of person who thinks well of themselves and poorly of others. The kind of person who identifies ‘those difficult people over there’ while locating themselves in a rather different category of humanity over here. Only that is what we do isn’t it? We, the ‘non-difficult’, presume to offer help to them, ‘the difficult’. Jesus, we discover, has hard words to say about that kind of stuff.

Remember the Pharisee who gazed out across the church foyer at all the difficult people and said: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like them’ (Luke 18.11)? It doesn’t generally end well for the non-difficult does it?

It might be wise, therefore, for us to join the ranks of difficult while we still can. That is, to recover the humility of heart that sees our own level of difficulty for what it is. Because in Jesus’ economy it’s not only that difficult people find grace, it’s also that, having found grace, they generally become the humble, grace-filled servants who are most effective in ministry to others. Being difficult, and knowing it, turns out to be a very important building block for anyone who was thinking of doing ministry with difficult people!