A sermon by The Rev. Gene Tucker, given at: Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; Sunday, August 23, 2009
Proper 16 -- Joshua 24: 1 – 2a, 14 – 25; Psalm 34: 15 – 22; Ephesians 5: 21 – 33; John 6: 60 – 69
We begin today with a musical joke: “How many sopranos (higher voiced women singers) does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: One to get on a ladder to change the light bulb, and six others to stand there, watching, and whining all the while, ‘But it’s too high!’”
Maybe that’s how the disciples who heard Jesus in our gospel text today responded…maybe they whined, “But it’s too hard!”
Meaning, of course, that the demand that Jesus had made about the necessity of eating His flesh and drinking His blood was too hard for them to accept or to understand.
Or, perhaps their response, “This is a hard saying,” was said to the accompaniment of them stroking their beards, as if to say, “We have to think about what you’ve said – for a long, long time.”
But maybe their response was more of the character of “This is nuts!”
Unfortunately, we can’t know exactly the tone of voice that those who responded by saying “This is a hard saying, who can listen to it,” used.
But we do know that John tells us that, “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.”
Before we analyze some of the implications of Jesus’ teaching with respect to the bread of life, heard throughout the sixth chapter of John’s gospel account, we ought to pause long enough to recall where we’ve been in the past three Sundays, as we’ve spent time in this marvelous chapter:
Three weeks ago, we noted that Jesus was trying to get the crowd of 5,000 people that had been fed by Him in the multiplication of the five loaves to see that doing the will of God was not a matter of doing something, but it was a matter of believing on the one who was sent by God. We summarized this concept by saying that doing the will of God is a matter of the heart, not of the hands.
Then, two weeks ago, we we remarked that, in Jesus Christ, God was calling a new people to Himself, to be His unique possession. God forms a people, and then saves and sustains them, (in this case, by the provision of the bread of life, Jesus) we noticed.
Last week, we considered the matter of truth. With respect to the Eucharist, truth goes far beyond the merely physical, observable aspect of the heavenly bread with which we are fed in the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Far more is involved than the mere eating of bread. For in the Sacrament, we receive the Lord Himself into us, that we may abide in Him, and He in us.
And now, today, we encounter the aftermath of Jesus’ saying, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” (Verse 56). It is to this statement that some of the larger crowd of disciples (notice that it is not the Twelve, but a larger group) say, “This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?”
In fact, their reaction is not only one of “murmuring” (verse 61), but of “grumbling”, for that is an accurate translation of the Greek. (One gets the impression that the people gathered around Jesus begin to grumble back and forth among themselves until one or more of them work up the nerve to sum up the sense of what the grumbling is all about in the statement, “This is a hard saying.” At least that’s how I picture the development of the reaction to Jesus’ statement.)
Remember that, last week, remarked that we shouldn’t be too hard on the people who had heard Jesus. After all, they were – as we said last week – on the far side of Good Friday, of Easter Sunday, and of Ascension Day. All of these great events had not yet happened. Moreover, the Sacrament of Holy Communion hadn’t happened, either. God’s plan of salvation hadn’t unfolded in its fullness.
But that cannot be said about us. We have seen:
- The reality of death in the events of Good Friday.
- We have witnessed the fact of life after death by the rising of Jesus Christ from the dead.
- We know that there is a place prepared for us after death by Jesus’ ascension into heaven 40 days after Easter.
God’s plan makes a whole lot more sense to us than it did to Jesus’ original audience.
But, does God’s plan make total, complete sense, in the way we human beings normally think of things?
The answer has to be “No”.
For, you see, when we are speaking of the things of God, there will always be a part of what God is doing that we cannot understand, for God is God, and we are not.
So, we can understand in part, we know in part. St. Paul summarizes this well in I Corinthians 13: 12, where we read, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.”
You see, involved here is the process of believing – knowing – knowing – believing.
Perhaps I’d better explain what I mean by this phrase: Said another way, it is this: “I believe in order to know, and I know in order to believe.”
We see Peter’s response, which incorporates both words, “believing” and “knowing”. Let’s look at his response to Jesus, “…we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” (Verse 69)
The first step toward knowing is believing….we must take this first step, which removes us from the comfort of our current level of understanding, our world of facts as we understand them at this very moment.
We make this step in faith, but it is not a leap of faith, but rather it is a forward step into the demonstrated acts of God. We do not step out into a void, but into the reality of God’s acting on our behalf and for our redemption.
You see, this level of understanding of God’s saving acts in the person and work of Jesus Christ is what separates us from Jesus’ audience, as we said a minute ago. They had not yet witnessed the cross, the empty tomb, and the ascending into heaven. We have.
We can make better sense of God’s work on this side of the cross, the tomb and the ascending into heaven, for we have witnessed God’s power to save. We have seen it in the real lives of real people, people with whom we have associated and with whom we have walked along with the Lord.
Consider the proof of God’s acting among us: Last Wednesday, we heard several people at our Informal Discussion Group relate how God had healed them of various conditions, through the power of prayer and the laying on of hands. Several shared their deliverance. Here, among us at Trinity, is proof of God’s power to save.
So what lessons might we draw from the reaction of the disciples, those who ultimately decided not to follow Jesus anymore. What benefit can we gain from their objections to Jesus’ teaching?
Offered for your consideration and for your benefit are the following:
God’s ways always involve some sense of mystery: This truth is related to our earlier statement that God is God, and we are not, for the simply fact that we are humans. God’s ways are higher, wiser, and deeper than our ways are. We can understand God in part on this side of heaven, but we cannot understand Him fully on this side of death.
God’s plans and saving acts require patience to understand: Here, we come to the major failing of those disciples who said, “This is a hard saying.” In essence, they are saying, “We don’t understand, we don’t ‘get it’, so please explain what you are saying right now.” The reaction of the crowd strikes me as a demand for an immediate, full explanation. But oftentimes, what God is doing in their lives and in ours can’t be understood immediately. Often, it takes time. Quite often, we can understand more fully in retrospect, as we meditate on what God has done, and as we see His plan working itself out in our lives, and in the lives of others.
For the goal of God’s working is summed up in Peter’s response. Hear it again, as he says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
So may it be for us!
AMEN.
