14 PENTECOST

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: 14 PENTECOST
PROPER: 16 B
PLACE: ST. JOHN’S, KINGSVILLE
DATE: AUGUST 24, 1997

TEXT: John 6:60-69 - Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” . . . . . . 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.”

ISSUE: As Jesus addresses the people of his own time he gives them some “hard sayings.” Accepting him as the Bread of Life and that they are to drink his blood is certainly one of those hard sayings which is a startling statement that he is God’s son. There are many other statements that challenge people. Many people turn away from him. Peter remains loyal, seeing Jesus as the bearer of the words of eternal life, that is, quality of life. In the world today, the words of Christ Jesus are every bit as challenging. We must make the decision to be faithful, or choose other values. Either we serve God through the ways and teaching of Christ, or we serve ourselves to our own selfish demise.

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In recent weeks we have had a running account from the Gospel of John of how Jesus was seen as the Son of the Living God. More specifically, Jesus is the word of what God has to say to the world. He is the spiritual bread of life. In a startling and compelling statement, Jesus says from last week’s gospel reading, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” To people who had an abhorrence for consuming the blood of anything, even in their meat dishes, these saying were extraordinarily difficult. Jesus’ repeated use of the I Am statements were unacceptable, such as I am the Good Shepherd, I am the Light of the world. I am the Vine. I am the way, the truth, and the life. All of these statements using “I Am” were associating himself with the divine, the sacred, the holy with the very name of God itself. These saying were astonishing and hard for many of the people who had been attracted to him to accept. According to the passage today, there were many who did, in fact, abandon him.
However, the difficult statements of Jesus’ teaching are not limited to just his own association with the holy. Throughout the gospel narratives there are other difficult sayings and teachings with which many people are not at all comfortable. Some examples:
From Mark 10:21, Jesus says to the rich young man who wants to know what he must do to receive eternal life: “Go and sell all that you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven; then come and follow me.”
In Mark 10:2, Pharisees come to Jesus asking him if a person may divorce his wife to which Jesus replies: “A man who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against his wife. In the same way, a woman who divorces her husband and marries antoher man commits adultery.” And of course in our modern age, there is discomfort with the passage in the Epistle reading today from Ephesians (5:21-33) in which wives are instructed to be subject to their husbands. People miss however that the passage also says that men are to be everybit as subject and devoted to their wives and that all people out of reverence for Christ are to be subject to one another. Caught up in our racial and socio-economic prejudices we often miss this point of being subject to one another as human beings. This saying is a hard and difficult one for overly individualistic and competitive societies.
Luke 14:26, goes on to write that Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
From Matthew 18:13, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. To become like a child meant to give up all your status and honor in the society.
It is not only the sayings of Jesus that are sometimes that are hard to accept. It is also some of the teachings, his parables, and things that Jesus did. In Matt. 21: 18, Jesus sees the fig tree which has no fruit on it. He curses the tree and it dries up. Jesus enters the temple in Jerusalem, (Matt. 21:12 also Mark, Luke, and John) goes into the temple and seeing the normal and routine market place insinuates that those people gathered there are little more than bandits and thieves. He overturns the tables, and throws out the people whose family businesses may have been there for long periods of time.
Parables of Jesus like the Prodigal Son expressed a forgiveness of a delinquent son that was unacceptable. People still challenge it. In the Vineyard parable where laborers came at the end of the day and received the same amount of money as those who bore the heat of the day, this concept and the meaning were, and still is, hard to discern. Considering all of these teaching, sayings, and parables, it is not hard to appreciate that Jesus lost disciples and was in fact ultimately crucified. He called for some tough hard looking at life and life’s values relative to our relationship with God and with one another.
Eventually, there were those who could not follow Jesus and remain in a committed, faithful, and loyal relationship with him. They are essentially dismissed. The inner core, the twelve disciples are also offered that option to leave him. Peter answers him with the words of genuine faith, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know tht you ar ethe Holy One of God.
What God has done in Jesus is to reveal what a son, a child, or a daughter, or person of God looks like. In the life and ministry of Jesus there is the devotion to revealing through his life what God is like. God is love. That love is no more romantic easy affection. It is a profound servanthood. Jesus’ love is sacrificial. He expresses the forgivingness of God who by the very fact of the presence of Jesus Christ is the recalling of faithless, rebellious, and fallen human nature. God in Christ is showing the way to the re-establishment of the Garden, or the Promised Land, or the Kingdom of God. It is hard to believe, to trust, to have faith in the fact that God loves the world so much as express such passion and compassionate love and acceptance. It is offered as a gift and is not forced. Accepting, receiving, embracing, consuming the way and teaching of Jesus Christ is to enter into relationship with him and be a disciple, a child a son, a daughter of the living God.
What this passage lays before us is the fact that we all as at least nominal Christians need to examine our own set of values and our allegiances. Just as in the Old Testament Lesson, or reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Joshua challenges the tribes of Israel. It is a time of reckoning. Joshua calls for their allegiance at a ritual of renewal. The people declare their faithfulness in Jahweh. We are attracted, if not seduced by the world’s values. We become locked into our racial prejudices. The mass media leads us to believe that violence and sexual promiscuity are the overall way of life to be accepted and endured. Occasional and subtle dishonesty doesn’t really matter, if it gets us what we want easily. Human relationships are only valuable in so far as we get what we want out of them. An occasional relationship with Holiness is more than sufficient. The basic religious relationship with God is to get things to be and run the way we want them to be and run. We want rain. And when we don’t get what we want we get angry with God and abandon God or see God as useless to our needs. The culture avoids words like sacrifice, commitment, faithfulness. People offer themselves minimally. Our hesitnacy, our rebelliousness, our trivial commitments, our holding back are all contrasted to Christ the bread of life and the out pouring blood of salvation.
The faith and the scriptures hold up Christ as the Bread of Life, the real presence and sustenance of what really counts and matters. In Christ we see sacrifice and giving. In him we see endurance and patience with the poor and the afflicted, with foolish and hardhearted people and disciples. In him we see profound compassion like a unique father’s love for a wayward son. In him we see a devotion to God and Godliness that comes first and foremost, a deep spirited commitment spiritual thanksgiving for blessings. In him we see a delight in being fruitful and giving. And for those who will allow it, they will see in him an enduring quality of life that is indeed precious. It is indeed an enduring quality of life that makes world standards and values often empty and meaningless. The Way of God is narrow, and sometimes just plain hard, but meaningful and enduring. The ways of the world are described as fun, happy, joyful, leading to success and without restraint. Yet they are often shallow, meaningless, trivial and destructive to people and their relationships. The Bread of Life, which is Jesus, is food and meaning for the human spirit. It is indeed the way of the cross. It is also the way of God that leads to deeper joys and appreciations of the true wonderfulness of life. May God help us to make the right choices, to long for Christ as our way, our truth, our life. That with all of our poor choices and inadequacies we who embrace him as Lord shall share in his way of love and enter into God’s Kingdom.