Jesus said that He did not come to bring peace, but rather a sword. He taught that He Himself was the embodiment of scandal, the stone of stumbling, the rock of offense.
This should not be taken as though the Lord Jesus brought scandal with Him in the same way that He brought holiness or light with Him.
The scandal caused by the Incarnation is a derivative scandal, not a primary scandal. The cause of it is not the holiness of Christ, but rather the result of what happens when the holiness of Christ comes into contact with the unholiness of man. On the spiritual plane, you may think of it as a chemical reaction.
Scandal is not a positive attribute of Deity, like love, or justice, or kindness, or mercy, or light. Scandal is the attempt of sinners to change the subject. When holiness arrives in an unholy world, it is not possible for sinners to say, “This is the right and just way. We hate it for being right.” Rather they deliberately misconstrue what God is doing, in order to justify remaining in their sins and emptiness. And so they make a scandal, out of nothing if that is necessary. This is why it was very important to some people to find out if Jesus had really told a healed man to carry his mat on the Sabbath.
So the central offense that causes the reaction of scandal is the “offense” of the Incarnation. And when Christians begin to live incarnationally, in the light of the Incarnation, the same thing happens to them. A servant is not greater than his master. If the world hated Jesus for being like Jesus, what will the world do with us?
This is why we should never be discouraged by scandals of this sort. Rather, we should be discouraged if this sort of thing never happened. If you put these two chemicals together and nothing happens, then something has gone seriously wrong.