Reflection -- This Teaching Is Difficult

The story of Jesus is at the same time very simple and very difficult. 

The basic concept is very simple.  It is summed up in the message of John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that God gave God's only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."

But moving on past the basics can be very difficult, because it demands of us a whole new way of thinking.  We see examples of how hard this can be in the gospel of John.  Time and again as John's gospel unfolds we see Jesus and the crowds who followed him “talking past each other,” with many never coming to understand him.  Jesus teaches deep spiritual truths using abstractions and symbols while his hearers try to make literal sense of it from their experience in their everyday world.

We have a clear example of this is today's gospel lesson.  Jesus uses many references in John 6 that come out of Israel’s ancient faith story.  Here he refers to the manna that God sent from heaven to feed the people in the wilderness after they escaped from Egypt.  That was physical food God provided to get them through the day.  But God has now done something new with eternal dimensions.  Jesus is to our spirits as bread is to our bodies, but this spiritual bread is far richer.  It brings life that lasts forever; a deep, rich, vibrant life connected with the power at the core of the universe.

But the vision Jesus' words brought to the minds of many of the people who heard him was too literal, so they took offense.  Jesus pointed to God, but all they could see was the local carpenter’s son standing before them speaking to them about being bread they should eat.  One of the wild rumors about Christianity in its early days among people outside the faith was that it had a secret rite involving cannibalism.  That seems to be what was going on here.  Those listening to Jesus took the “eating my body and drinking my blood” literally.  Even many of Jesus’ long-time followers misunderstood and left him.  They missed the invitation to take his words and his example of how to live a God-filled life into themselves so deeply that they could be transformed.

And like physical bread that must be broken apart to sustain us, Jesus too was to be broken.  Wendy Wirth-Brock, writing on this passage, had some powerful words about all of this: 

“In speaking of his broken body, Jesus is predicting that the maw of fearful human denial will consume him.  He knows what’s coming:  the ultimate denial of our brokenness and limits, the denial of our need for transformation through relationship with … God.

“And yet, Jesus irrevocably changes the rules … by offering himself as the main course … desiring so much to get near us that he’s willing to be consumed by our fear, our pain, our rage -- so that he can transform us from the inside out.  He lets himself be consumed so that he can feed us with life not cannibalized from others but created new out of God’s love.

“… Breaking himself, he shows us how to let our lives be broken open so that they can be shared.”

In one sense we have a much easier time of it now.  Unlike the people who first heard Jesus, we have the huge advantage of being able to call upon centuries of Christian thought about the meaning of the things Jesus taught.  Even so, learning from Jesus still requires thinking out of the box and some of his teaching is still difficult. 

But it is still very much worth the effort to dig deeper, rather than just to pass on by saying, as the people of old did, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”  The struggle with digging for the truth is how spiritual growth happens. 

Peter understood the high stakes.  "Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

revclay

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John 6:47-69

[Jesus said] “Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life.  I am the bread of life.  Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.  This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 

They disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.  Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.  Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.  “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” 

He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.  When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”

But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you?  Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?  It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.  The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.  But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him.  And he said, "For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father." 

Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.  So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” 

Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

 [NRSV]