Sticking with Jesus- John 6.56-69
There are some really hard sayings here in today’s gospel.
The writer of this John’s gospel, is renowned for being quite poetic, and re-arranging huge chunks of history just so and interlacing them with amazing snippets in the voice of his current community. It’s a little bit like a movie character talking through a memory, and then the movie goers getting to see that memory, that flash back, as screenplay. It’s hard stuff. And we’re dealing with things that allude to the happenings in ancient cultures that Jesus’ own listeners wouldn’t have been able to fully appreciate, let alone ourselves who would readily see Jesus’ own culture as fairly ancient in itself now.
Here Jesus is alluding to the wonderings in the desert made by the Hebrews who followed Moses out of Egypt. They moaned that God had deserted them, and with several miracles God provided for them, trying to lead them through a time of learning how to trust. They didn’t do very well. However, they did experience the dividing of seas, water pouring from rocks, the provision of quail for meat, and the most well known of all, bread from heaven, as it were, a sort of coriander like substance that they couldn’t figure and which had mysterious properties.
Jesus was saying never mind all that history and the drama they went through, the real bread from heaven, the real sustenance is here. I’m the strangely sustaining coriander like bread, if you like, I am the source of life in a desert. However, all this is so deeply coded into John-like speak, that even the disciples were banging their heads over it, with many giving up.
If you feel a certain sympathy with them, both here in today’s text and also more generally when moments come along that say, sigh this Christianity lark, its all too hard, I cant do this, my head hurts, why are the sermons so long and hard? Couldn’t they have written this bible a bit more easily?, you’re in good company.
I looked at the text for today and my heart sank as it almost flirted with language that looks like cannibalism, thinking, how on earth do I speak into this today?
Of course that bit is one of the John-shockers, a way of writing to make you sit bolt upright that leaves you floundering for a while until you make the allegorical connection to Jesus giving his body on the cross, and of the last supper with his disciples, and of God’s provision in the desert to those ancient hebrews. Good old John, he must have been really fun at a party!
If you’re feeling like your mind is boggled by today’s gospel words. Here is the bit of hope you need to hear: No one listening to Jesus that day got it... not one. Some gave up and went home. Others however had a different response.
‘What about you,’ Jesus said, ‘Are you going to leave too?’
Just 12, those who knew him from the beginning were left standing with him. Just 12. And when Peter spoke on behalf of them, he lets out just how clueless they were too with Jesus’ speech.
‘Lord, to whom can we go?’ Not ‘Don’t worry Jesus, we know what you mean.’ No, there was none of that. They too felt so uncomfortable that Peter almost says they’d like to go but something is holding them there. ‘You have the words of eternal life. And we have come to believe it, and we have come to know that you are the Holy One of God.’
Sometimes faith does have hard things in it. Sometimes, God will want to try and say some of those hard things, to lift us on a step. “Ok, you’ve got Christianity 101 under your belt, let’s try class 102.” And so they take us a bit further. Sometimes, its too far and just like a class teacher is always on the look out for where the further edge is in what the children can bear, God is also tentatively stretching us to help us grow.
A different kind of growing had been happening for those original 12. They had been with Jesus all the time. They’d seen his handling of others; the outcast, the leaders, and they had quizzed him and mused over the way he saw things in the world. They were saturated with Jesus’ worldview over all the months they knew him. And somehow that made the difference. So when Jesus spoke with more depth about some of the way his purposes lined up with ancient scripture, even though they just didn’t get it, they knew him well enough to know they could trust him.
‘We have come to believe,’ they said. It wasn’t instant for them. Those words belie the reality that this belief they have, this trust, is the result of being on the road with him for months, watching, building an opinion on him. That lot that had walked off in a huff, they hadn’t done that, they had no idea of the real person of Jesus. They didn’t know how he liked his fish cooked. They didn’t know how he embraced the fallen and lashed out on their behalf to those who held on to power. They knew about wondrous things, they knew about pizazz and were looking for some Marvel like superhero perhaps, as if Jesus’ whole intention was to be a spectacular firework display and nothing more.
No, Jesus’ purpose is deeply woven into the fabric of an ancient culture and the way they made sense of the world. And it was deeply woven into the lives of the people he walked amongst, and his purpose reaches out threads that are woven into the fabric of our society today. With so much connected to his purposes, is it any wonder that sometimes the explainers for what he was here for are all a bit too much for us?
We need to be like the 12. The ones he called early on, who saw how he camped on his travels, who knew how he washed his robes, ate his breakfast, the way he observed the world and made allegories of them. Who knew that he’d have time for the lost whether it was an over-eager crowd on the shore of lake Galilee, taking away even their time for leisure, or a woman alone at a well struggling to draw water in the heat of the day because she was too ashamed to come with others in the cool of the evening. We need to be like those 12, who actually knew how well he could turn a bit of dry wood into something fabulous.
We need to be with Jesus as a person. When the harder to hear heavenly stuff is shared with us, we will know him well enough to respond as honestly as Peter did: ‘I don’t know what you mean Jesus, but if it means staying close to you, we’ve learnt to trust you.’