So. We come to the last of five examinations of John’s remarkable sixth chapter. In the course of them, we’ve seen movement, both physical—after the feeding of the 5,000 they cross the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum—as well as pedagogical, as Jesus’ teaching moves from group to group. He arrives in Capernaum, maybe staying with Peter’s folks, and soon the people he’d fed—whom John dubs “the crowd”—show up looking for him, which prompts a sermon from Jesus about how he’s the bread of life. Then the scene switches to the synagogue and his teaching to the authorities there, whom John calls “the Jews.” And at first they complain, muttering amongst themselves, because they just can’t get their heads around how Jesus could be human, the son of Mary and Joseph, and the bread come down from heaven at the same time. Then, they begin to dispute amongst themselves, squabbling over how in the name of all that’s holy Jesus could possibly give them his flesh to eat. Gross!
Now we come down to the response of the disciples, those people who’d been following Jesus since the beginning. And it's important to consider the differences in the three groups . . . The crowd has followed him across the sea because, as Jesus himself put it, they “ate [their] fill of the loaves.” And they are irritated that he’d given them the slip, presumably because they wanted some more bread. But Jesus tells them not to work for the bread that perishes, like that which he fed them across the sea, but for the bread that never perishes, that leads to eternal life.
Next up are the religious authorities, the experts in theology and the law, and they’re grumbling and disputing, as theologians are wont to do, and it's clear that where the crowd wants physical sustenance from Jesus, they’re after something else. They’re after theological acquiescence, they desire that he fit in their little theological boxes, the boxes over which—not incidentally—they have control. They react as if he’s an affront to their sense of power . . . After all, they are the ones who—in the name of God, of course!—determine who’s in and who’s out, who’s clean and who’s unclean, who was holy and who was profane. And In answering their grumbling, Jesus threatens the status quo: the life of the world is his flesh, not in their rituals and observances, and no one may come to that life unless drawn by God—not by them, but by God.
And his followers, the disciples who—at this point, are many more than twelve—have heard and seen all of this. They’ve heard his teaching to the crowd. They’ve witnessed the grumbling of the rabbis and scribes, and listened to his disturbing reply, they’ve seen his feeding the 5,000 and walking on the sea, they’ve been there for the whole thing, and now they’re the ones doing the complaining, doing the grumbling, and they collectively express these sentiments: “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And though it’s tempting to read this comically, like they’re not the brightest bulbs in the old marquee, I think that they’re irritated, like the crowd, like the complaining Jewish authorities. Here they’ve been following him around for months, they’ve given up their ordinary lives for him, their families and settled homes and occupations, and all of a sudden, here he is, spouting the most ridiculous-sounding nonsense that they’ve ever heard.
This teaching is difficult . . . who can accept it? Well, a lot of modern day Christians can’t, for one thing . . . It offends a lot of us to say at communion “the body of Christ, broken for you” and “the blood of Christ, shed for you.” So we substitute stuff like “the bread of life, food for the road” and “the cup of the new covenant” without the “in Christ’s blood” part. And that’s ok, but I think Jesus asks us the same question he asked the followers of his day: “does that offend you? Does that scandalize you? Does it cause you to lose your faith, to stay away from the church and the life-giving sacraments? Well, what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?”
He is ascending to the spiritual realm, to a realm that is not fleshly, that is not made of what we call matter . . . “It’s the spirit that gives life,” he tells them “the flesh is useless.” And it’s important not to read this as a dualistic “flesh bad . . . spirit good” dualism, kind of thing . . . many Christians have, after reading verses like this, and it has led to all manner of depredations, all kinds of abuse of the body to save one’s immortal soul . . . conquistadors had no problem murdering their conquests, sometimes even baptizing them beforehand, because after all, the spirit is life, the flesh of no account . . . People have been encouraged to endure tremendous suffering, because things of the flesh are of no account, the spirit gives life . . .
Jesus didn’t mean the flesh was evil, that it was bad . . . All you have to do is look at his life: he spent it cherishing human life, healing human bodies, feeding human stomachs . . . He is directing their minds away from temporal things. The flesh is temporary, the spirit eternal . . . as Isaiah said, “the grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.”
And guess who, in John at least, is the Word of God? When we—or anybody else—pretty up the faith, however well-meaning it is, we rob the Gospel of a lot of its symbolic power. When we ingest the word made flesh, we are commissioned—like the prophets of old—to proclaim that word. Further, when we talk on the eternal word, he abides in us, and we in it . . . the word dwells within us, it nourishes us, powers us, it gives us life, and that eternal.
Well. Jesus knows, of course, that he is speaking symbolically, he says as much right then and there: “the words I speak to you are spirit and life” . . . It is because he is the word of God that he is able to say that he is life as well, and here he speaks of a fusion, an inseparability of life and spirit . . . Life is infused with spirit, and spirit with life . . . They are unified on the words he speaks, and the Word he is . . . He is the very model of a complete human being, a perfect wedding of spirit and life, so that, in the end, there is no difference between them.
Jesus also knows that there are some who don’t believe, who don't understand that he is that, that the very, living Word of God has been made flesh, has been incarnated, and stands among them. And he takes their objection—and how it is phrased—seriously: who can accept it, they ask, as in who is able to accept it, and he answers them when he tells them, once again, that no one can come to him, no one can believe in him, unless it is granted by God. Who can accept it? Only those to whom it is granted by God.
And it's at that moment when John says many of them abandon ship . . . not when he tells them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood, but when he tells them it's God who does all the work. Interesting, isn’t it . . . that kind of reminds me of the so-called original sin itself . . . Human beings trying to be like God, trying to do it all themselves. Kind of reminds me as well of a lot of modern day Christian communities, who insist on doing it all themselves, who insist on trying to save themselves, to grow themselves . . . Jesus' teaching, no one can come to him unless drawn, unless granted by God, is difficult, at least as much so as eating his flesh! And it's especially hard in the modern, individualist, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture in which we live. Who, indeed, can accept it?
Apparently, on that long-ago day in the hot Capernaum sun, only the twelve. Jesus asks them: “Do you also wish to go?” And Peter, always the spokesman, comes back with “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.” Believe and know. Belief and knowledge . . . It's both. They know that he’s the Holy One of God, and they believe it, they accept it. They don’t understand it, necessarily, but they have faith that it is so. One day, perhaps, they will understand it as well: Paul certainly thought so, that one day we will “know fully,” that we will understand, but that's kind of what faith isn’t it? A being open to the revelation of God, accepting that Jesus is the Word of God, and we will continue to hear it, continue to be puzzled by it, continue to consume it.
Christianity is difficult, it is a mystery, much of it seems to go against the grain of who we are as people . . . How can we eat of Jesus' flesh and drink of his blood? I don't know, but I do know that we do, that we must . . . I know that Jesus has the words of eternal life . . . To whom else can we go? Amen.
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