Text: John 6:56-69The Message (MSG)
53-58 But Jesus didn’t give an inch. “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you. The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life and will be fit and ready for the Final Day. My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. By eating my flesh and drinking my blood you enter into me and I into you. In the same way that the fully alive Father sent me here and I live because of him, so the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me. This is the Bread from heaven. Your ancestors ate bread and later died. Whoever eats this Bread will live always.”
59 He said these things while teaching in the meeting place in Capernaum.
Too Tough to Swallow
60 Many among his disciples heard this and said, “This is tough teaching, too tough to swallow.”
61-65 Jesus sensed that his disciples were having a hard time with this and said, “Does this throw you completely? What would happen if you saw the Son of Man ascending to where he came from? The Spirit can make life. Sheer muscle and willpower don’t make anything happen. Every word I’ve spoken to you is a Spirit-word, and so it is life-making. But some of you are resisting, refusing to have any part in this.” (Jesus knew from the start that some weren’t going to risk themselves with him. He knew also who would betray him.) He went on to say, “This is why I told you earlier that no one is capable of coming to me on his own. You get to me only as a gift from the Father.”
66-67 After this a lot of his disciples left. They no longer wanted to be associated with him. Then Jesus gave the Twelve their chance: “Do you also want to leave?”
68-69 Peter replied, “Master, to whom would we go? You have the words of real life, eternal life. We’ve already committed ourselves, confident that you are the Holy One of God.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
Avram stomped angrily down the road toward home. His feet fell like trip hammers onto the dirt, causing little puffs of dust to billow up behind him like a wake. His wife, Miriam, tried to her best to keep up with him, but finally she had to call out, “Avram! Slow down and let me catch up!”
Reluctantly, Avram slowed his pace until Miriam, breathless from exertion, was beside him. Though she knew what Avram would say, she asked him, “What’s the matter? What’s got you so upset?”
Avram looked at her in disbelief. “What’s got me upset?” he asked. “Weren’t you just there with me? Didn’t you hear what … that man … just said? How could anyone not be upset? ‘Eat my flesh,’ he said. ‘Drink my blood,’ he said – who did he think he was talking to? A bunch of savages? Unbelievable! And to think we have been his followers, his supporters for the past couple of years! But – no more! Let’s go home.”
And so, side by side, Avram and Miriam trudged off toward home, disillusioned, disappointed, angry, and sad…
“This is tough teaching, too tough to swallow.”
It wasn’t just people like the fictional Avram and Miriam who found this teaching “too tough to swallow”; many people fell away from Jesus at that point. It was pretty much the beginning of the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry. From this point on, the going – not just the words – got tough.
Back in Jerusalem – it seemed like a lifetime ago now – people saw the miracles he worked and believed in his name. Such great numbers of people came to be baptized by his disciples that they were almost embarrassed. Throngs had followed him all around the Sea of Tiberias, had been fed by five loaves and two fish, had wanted to make him king.
But now, these people, these droves of people who had dropped everything in their enthusiasm and followed Jesus hither and yon, all over the country, now left him just as suddenly. No talk of making him a king any more.
It was as if a cosmic switch had been flipped, and all the joy and excitement and growing faith had been instantly turned to contempt, revulsion, and hatred. The shadow of the Cross begins to darken the daylight…
Avram sat scowling into his cooling bowl of soup, fingers drumming on the table. “How,” he thought, “could it have come to this?” He had been sure that this Nazarene was The One to save Israel. For the last year or so, he had told everyone who’d wanted to hear – any many who hadn’t – about what he had heard from others regarding this Rabbi from Nowhere. He’d gone ‘way out on a limb, trying to convince people that this earnest young man was the real thing. He could just hear them all laughing now – “That old Avram, man does he have egg on his face now! Can’t believe a word he says anymore! The old guy’s past it, for sure!”
One thing we learn here this morning is that not all of the people who claimed to be Jesus’ followers had what my Dad used to call “stick-to-itiveness.” When the going got tough, the “fair weather friends” got going – but in the opposite direction from where Jesus was going! “This talk is right out of left field,” they say. “We can’t even listen to such nonsense!”
People drifted away from Jesus for various reasons. That was one of them – it just sounded too much like the talk of a crazy man.
Others, like Avram and Miriam, rejected Jesus because what he said about eating his body and drinking his blood just went too much against the grain of their lifetime’s worth of learning about God. God just didn’t work that way! It hit them like a verbal two-by-four up against their heads and they just couldn’t, wouldn’t, deal with it.
Still others heard what Jesus said all too clearly, and made a beeline for the nearest exit, because they knew it was not possible to go head to head with the Powers That Be for long before you paid the highest possible price. Crosses with the rotting corpses of those who’d bucked the system were arrayed before every gate of Jerusalem, so nobody harbored any illusions about what the Romans did to those who displeased them. So, for these folks, that price was ‘way too high. So away they went, and denied up and down for the rest of their lives that they’d ever had anything at all to do with that Nazarene radical! They remind me of the erstwhile 60s hippies who, by the time 1970 rolled around, were kitted out in three piece suits and climbing the corporate ladder on Wall Street.
Yet others found the challenge to follow Jesus just too big a challenge. It was simply too much work. Besides, they’d come to him to get something; when they discovered that they’d also have to give something, and not just “something,” but their all, they raised their hands and said, “Oh, no thanks! We’ll just go on our way now.” Those who would follow Jesus can never forget that in following him there is always that Cross looming over all.
Then there was among still others a condition that we can only describe as deterioration. As David Lose writes, “The people in today’s reading who now desert Jesus … are precisely those who had, in fact, believed in Jesus, those who had followed him and had given up much to do so. But now, finally, after all their waiting and watching and wondering and worrying, they have grown tired, and they can no longer see clearly what it was about Jesus that attracted them to him in the first place, and so they leave.
And who can blame them? More to the point, are we really all that different? I mean, who here has not at one time or another wondered whether you have believed in vain? During the dark of the night, perhaps, watching and praying by the bedside of a child or grandchild in the hospital, wondering why he or she is so sick. Or in the early part of the morning, maybe, waking up alone and wondering why your spouse has left you. Or in the latter part of the afternoon, perhaps, while cooking supper and thinking about your family – so full of ill-will toward each other – and wondering why things have not turned out the way you hoped and whether they ever will.
At these times … if we’re honest we must admit that there are so many of them in this life that we lead – at these times [we] are looking for God, for some sense that there is a God, and [we] can have such a hard time seeing God that we also are tempted to conclude that the promises we trusted were empty and the faith we once held was misplaced?”[1]
There is no sadder person on God’s green earth than one whose hope has died, whose dreams have turned to ash, who figures that there’s nothing left…
To these people, Jesus has something to say: Two words – “Hang on.”
It must have been a trick of the light, because Avram could see himself reflected in his soup. He saw a man well past his prime, a man whose face was marred by all the years of toil, a man who…had nothing left to lose.
And then, unbidden, the thought came to him: What if this Jesus is right? What if what he says is true? What if he really is who he says he is? What then? Suddenly, Avram’s disappointment and his anger melted away and were replaced by a renewed excitement, an enthusiasm that he could not contain…
There is one other attitude recorded in this passage: Determination.
When Jesus turns to the disciples and asks, rather plaintively, “Do you also want to leave?” Peter answers, “Master, to whom would we go?”
Where indeed?
There is a pivotal scene in the 1982 movie “An Officer and a Gentleman,” where the main character, played by Richard Gere, is doing set after set of grueling exercises under orders from his drill sergeant – who’s trying his absolute best to get the recruit to go ring the bell in the middle of the courtyard to signify that he admits defeat and is going home, tail between his legs, a failure. But he just won’t do it. Despite the drill sergeant shouting in his ear, despite the verbal and physical abuse, despite the horrendous conditions, despite everything, he won’t give up. Finally, in total exasperation, the drill sergeant barks at him, “Why don’t you just quit?”
And Gere’s character answers, “Because I have nowhere else to go!”
Avram jumped up from the table so suddenly he almost knocked it over. Miriam, startled, looked up from her supper and saw that Avram was, of all things, smiling! His whole demeanor had changed – it was as if this whole day had never happened!
“Avram, what’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Avram actually roared with laughter! “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong! But we must go!”
“Go? Go where?”
“Back to that man who has changed our lives! Back to hear more of what he says! Back to learn more about God from his lips! Come!”
And, trembling with both excitement and a little anxiety, Miriam stood up and followed Avram out the door….
So it is with us, too. At the end of the say, we have nowhere else to go, because nowhere else can we find those words of eternal life, nowhere else can we be strengthened by the awesome grace and love of God.
With those hard words “eat my flesh and drink my blood,” Jesus asks us, calls us, invites us, into life, real life, with him.
As our friend, William Barclay, puts it: “Peter’s loyalty was based on a personal relationship to Jesus Christ. There were many things he did not understand; he was just as bewildered and puzzled as anyone else. But there was something about Jesus for which he would willingly die. In the last analysis, Christianity is not a philosophy which we accept, nor a theory to which we give allegiance. It is a personal response to Jesus Christ. It is the allegiance and the love which we give because our hearts will not allow us to do anything else.”[2]
All we have to do is say, once again with feeling – “Yes!”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Lose, David, “Pentecost 13 B: Looking for God,” “In the Meantime,” August 17, 2015, http://www.davidlose.net/2015/08/pentecost-13-b/
[2] Barclay, William, The Gospel of John, The New Daily Study Bible, Volume I, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, p. 268