Imagine being asked this question by Jesus: “Are you going to leave me, too?” That’s the question that Peter and the rest of the 12 disciples were asked in today’s reading from the 6th chapter of John, and a question that definitely bears further investigation.
We don’t usually picture Jesus pushing
potential disciples away from himself.
He certainly had pointed things to say toward the religious establishment
of his day, and was happy to make a negative example of those who are motivated
by self-service or conceit. He has
challenging things to say about loyalty, declaring that his message will even
divide parents from their children, but most of his challenges are presented to
a group rather than an individual, or are presented in the third person so that
the present crowd wouldn’t need to take it personally. Other than the story of
the Rich Young Ruler, who eagerly asked what he could do to inherit the Kingdom
of Heaven and was told “it’s easy, just sell everything you have,” I can’t
really think of another instance where Jesus so personally and pointedly pushes
potential disciples away. But here,
Jesus just keeps making it harder, and harder, and harder, and the group
surrounding him keeps getting smaller, and smaller and smaller.
One of the difficulties with delving into one
small chunk of scripture on a Sunday morning is that you miss out on the bigger
story that surrounds it. None of us would be too eager to hear 70 verses of
scripture read aloud, so here is the basic structure of the 6th
chapter of John:
·
First, word spreads of Jesus’
power to heal and his amazing interpretation of Hebrew scripture, and a crowd
gathers to hear him teach. With nowhere
near enough food for everyone, Jesus demonstrates his direct connection with
God’s abundance by turning a child’s simple lunch into an abundance of food for
all.
·
Second, this really piques
people’s curiosity, so they follow him to the other side of the lake. Some will be aware of the walking-on-water
incident in the middle of the night, others will not, but they are all eager to
hear him.
·
Third, Jesus refers to himself
as both the bread of life, and the bread of heaven. “Those who are nourished by
this bread will never hunger” he says, and while this deepened the resolve of
some, it started to make many in the crowd wonder if he was mentally
imbalanced. The crowd starts to thin.
·
Fourth, Jesus pushes further
by insisting that those who follow him be nourished by his body and blood. People were already leaving due to his “I am
the bread of heaven” comments, and now, the rest of them head for the exit. Not
many are willing to hang out with a man who would speak this way.
·
Fifth, with only the twelve
remaining, Jesus asks, “are you going to leave me, too?”
It’s not hard to imagine how challenging these
words were to those who had expressed an initial interest in following this
preacher from Galilee. Think of the
responsive Psalm we shared this morning and the passionate love it expresses
for God, the trustworthy one who provides food for his people, the one who is
the source of all grace, mercy and power.
That passionate desire to follow God would have been burning in many of
those who were attracted to Jesus’ teaching, and now Jesus says these things? If
you were a devout Jew in Jesus’ day, his claim to be the bread of heaven would
have been outright insulting. The story
of God providing Manna each morning for the Hebrew people as they wandered
through the wilderness was, and is, a beloved story of God providing for their
every need. Then Jesus says, “I am the
bread of life. I am the bread of heaven.” Was he deluded? Was he an extremist? Was he really claiming to be that closely
linked to the eternal and unknowable God?
And then he makes it worse, my introducing a scene of eating flesh and
drinking blood that, even if taken completely symbolically, would be a bit
nauseating. For those who had been
initially been intrigued by his social teachings and his fresh interpretation
of scripture, Jesus was making increasingly audacious claims, and it’s no
wonder that droves of his followers were looking for a way out.
I keep looking for an appropriate example from
a book or movie that would illustrate this acceleration, but my strange sense
of humour keeps being drawn to an old Monty Python sketch in which there is a
large social gathering at Oscar Wilde’s residence. The guest list includes fellow socialites George
Bernard Shaw and James McNeill Whistler, as well as the Prince of Wales. The three socialites get into a duel of wits,
each one saying something insulting about the Prince, then passing it off to
one of the other guys to explain what was meant. It starts out with Wilde saying, “His Majesty
is like a big jam donut with cream on top” and when the Prince challenges him,
Wilde claims it was one of Whistler’s witticisms and hands it off to him to
explain. Whistler stutters and stammers
and comes up with, “What I mean, your majesty, is that your arrival brings us
pleasure, and your departure merely makes us hungry for more.” Needless to say,
in true Python style the dialogue moves from funny to filthy to outright
raunchy in a big hurry. And that rapid
and ridiculous acceleration, from “engaging but a bit uncomfortable”, to “completely
inappropriate”, must be what the crowd of Jesus’ followers thought was
unfolding in front of them. Even at the
beginning, before Jesus ramped up the pressure, his potential followers knew
that it was going to be challenging to follow him; but then he claimed he was
the bread of heaven which made it sacrilegious, and then he brought gnawing on
his flesh into the equation which made it kinda sick. In a
world that needed his message so desperately, why would Jesus do such a thing?
Whenever trying to figure out this sort of problem
in scripture, we need to realize that the story as written is several decades
removed from the event itself. Most
certainly, John would want to recall the story of Jesus in such a way that it
really spoke to his audience, and we have echoes of that in this chapter: by
John’s day, sharing the body and blood of Christ in communion was already a
well-established, central activity within Christian gatherings, and John wanted
to make sure that the believers of his day knew that Jesus had commanded them
to partake of his body and blood as a tangible sign that their lives are
nourished by him. Also, by the time thi
gospel was written, numerous devout
followers had been put to death for their overt belief in Jesus Christ, and
John’s presentation of the persistent acceleration of Jesus’ demands until only
the most faithful remained, would be so very encouraging to believers who’d had
friends or family members martyred for their faithfulness to Jesus. But even if John tweaked the story for these
purposes, we are still left with an indisputable reality: the longer you spend
with Jesus, the more you realize just how complete a claim he is making
on your life.
17 years ago I was serving a young suburban congregation,
and my predecessor had quite a different take on the gospels than what I was
presenting. After I’d been there for a
few months, a friend confronted me with the difference. “I’m confused” she said. “For the past four years we’ve been told from
the pulpit that Jesus was just a guy with great political ideas that we’re
supposed to follow, but now you’re saying that Jesus was God, and that the
things he said was basically God saying those things. So which is it?” Now, my hunch is that my predecessor and I
weren’t as far apart as it appeared, but we both faced the same challenge with
a young congregation: how to present the
call of Jesus Christ in such a way that it would be relevant, and
life-affirming, and appealing enough to inspire newcomer to come back for more.
My predecessor focused more on the
stories of Jesus, and I guess I focused more on the person of Jesus, but we had
the same basic goal in mind. In many
ways, our task as ministers of that congregation was what Jesus did at the
start of John 6: our hope was to draw people to Jesus so that they could find
out for themselves the changes that he could make in their lives.
That remains a key important task for the
Church: for you, and me, and this congregation’s public witness in the
community, to present our connection with Christ as a source of great,
meaningful things like life and love, invitation and participation, forgiveness
and acceptance, freedom and justice. By presenting
our connection with Christ as something real, and deep, and vibrant, we are
affirming God’s desire to draw people to Christ. But in the same way that Jesus did not hold
back from telling his potential followers about the tough stuff, we also need
to acknowledge that the call of Jesus is not just happy and reassuring and
peripheral. To follow him – to really
follow him – will sometimes involve pain, and confrontation, and
disillusionment, and hardship. It will cause us to open ourselves to God’s
changes. It may cause us to fall out with people we really care for. It will require concrete changes to the way
we think, the way we spend our time, the way we spend our money, the way we
relate to past wrongs in our lives. And to
add to the challenges of discipleship, if we’re truly being faithful we are
virtually guaranteed difficulties because the call of Jesus does not equate
well to the world’s call to popularity and self-centeredness. The deeper we get in our relationship with Christ,
the more aspects of our lives will be called into question, and even when we
are led to positive change, the process is neither easy nor painless.
At the risk of misquoting, I’m going to quote
someone from our own midst. On the
Sunday when I first came here to interview for this interim ministry position,
Mary Shearer said that in her opinion, “there is no such thing as a volunteer
in Church; we are called to be disciples”.
That has really stuck with me, because it’s the move that Jesus is
pushing us to, in today’s gospel reading.
He’s definitely not turning down whatever help we can offer, especially
when we’re new in the walk of faith, but there is a not-so-subtle nudge on his
part, to really grab hold of the fullness being offered, by walking in the
radical ways that he spoke of and embodied.
This past week, elected delegates have gathered
in Ottawa from all parts of this nation for the 41st General Council
of the United Church of Canada. Lay
people and clergy in equal portions have debated a number of resolutions, many
of which are quite internally focused, such as a review of Church structures,
and the decision to formally include a number of our faith statements from the
past 87 years within “official” Church doctrine. Other resolutions have turned their attention
more toward social issues, such as an official acknowledgement of the role of
aboriginal congregations right from the beginning of our denomination, and a
controversial motion calling on United Church members to boycott goods made in
Israeli-occupied settlements in the West Bank.
We elected a new moderator, an inspiring preacher and well-loved pastor
named Gary Paterson, who is the first openly gay person elected to this level
of leadership within a Canadian denomination. I’ve been reading the General
Council news this week through the lens of the 6th chapter of John, and
it has made me awfully proud of the group that gathered in Ottawa. Because in so many of their deliberations,
they GET the fact that the call of Jesus is not easy. Jesus is not calling us to a mild, “if it’s
convenient” form of inclusion, he’s calling us to a radical inclusion of all
who have felt pushed away by society and perhaps pushed away by the
Church. Jesus is not calling us to
forgive our friends and have our little troubles swept away by God, he is calling
us to radical forgiveness of our enemies and to lay our biggest, ugliest
problems at God’s feet so that we may be redeemed. Jesus is not calling us to be swayed by old
friends and family loyalties when his way seems uncompromising, he is calling
us to face ourselves in the mirror and pursue truth. And most of all, Jesus is not calling us to
like one another with an air of pleasantness, he is calling us to love one
another and live life with gusto.
Everything I read and saw and heard from our General Council suggested
that they understood this call to “live large,” to hang in there with Jesus
even when the demands sound too big, to keep living as disciples even when a
substantial portion of former Church folk have already said that they’ve had
enough of this Church thing.
At the start of the sermon, I shared only Jesus’
question, but not the answer. After
pushing and pushing, Jesus said to his 12 remaining disciples, “are you going
to leave me, too?” The answer came from
Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? YOU
have the words of eternal life.” To me,
that closing statement of Peter’s faith says it all. Our lives, and the lives of those who have
inspired our walk with Christ, have had ample evidence of the life-giving power
of Jesus Christ to move us forward in love no matter what the
circumstances. Yes, Christ’s claim on
our lives can be very, very difficult at times – but when God incarnate, the
bread of heaven, has invited us to a life of radical forgiveness, freedom and
grace, where else could we possibly go?
By the grace of God, and with the support of this community of faith
(and the communities of faith that all of you have come from) may we continue
to find life in our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Online references: United Church General
Council, http://www.gc41.ca/
© 2012 Rev Greg Wooley, Ralph Connor Memorial United
Church, Canmore AB
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