John 6:56-69
“Eat My Words”
August 26, 2012 - Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

         My bagel got harder to chew with every bite. It was growing tougher every second. It was 30 years ago and my first encounter with a microwave. I nuked that poor bagel for about a minute. Beth and I were babysitting for the three children of a well-off family in our church, and I had not believed their five year old when he told me ten seconds or so was enough. Now I was trying to eat bread that rapidly turned to stone as it cooled.

         Jesus’ own disciples finding it pretty hard to chew and swallow the message He cooked up in Capernaum, the Bread of Life sermon we’ve followed now for five weeks. One more time, we backed up and repeated the end of last week’s text in order to set the stage for how the disciples responded in verse 60, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”

         Literally they said, “This is a hard word; who can hear it?” Did they just mean the final bit we repeated, about eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking His blood? Or did the whole sermon offend them, with Jesus claiming to be the Bread of Life, to have come down from heaven, to be better than Moses, capped off by the business by inviting them to eat His flesh and drink His blood? It’s hard to say, but we know the synagogue crowd in Capernaum was offended by it all. Now even some of the disciples struggled to choke it down.

         In a political campaign, as we’ve been hearing for weeks, parties just can’t wait to hear an opponent make some remark, some gaffe that’s hard to swallow. If you can just catch the opposition saying something stupid, offensive, false, deceptive or insensitive, you’re half way to victory. And of course, the media eats it all up.

         The worst situation for a candidate is to be forced to retract what he said, to take it back, to apologize, to “eat his words,” as they say. That’s what the disciples wanted from Jesus. He confused and embarrassed them. His words were too hard, too tough to chew, like that microwaved bagel. A week or so ago one of you said to me that perhaps Judas was standing in the back of the synagogue giving Jesus the “cut it” sign, like some campaign manager or political handler listening to his candidate go off the rails. Maybe, but not just Judas. As we’ll see in a moment, a number of disciples weren’t happy.

         Jesus heard their grumbling, knew what they were thinking and asked them in verse 61, “Does this offend you?” “Are you scandalized by what I’ve said?” They were, of course, scandalized by Jesus. It was all too much. They wanted Jesus to eat His words, to retract, apologize get back on message with a sweeter, gentler approach than this talk of dying and flesh being eaten like bread. But Jesus wouldn’t take it back. He would not eat His words.

         With total disregard for public opinion or for the personal feelings of His disciples, Jesus kept pushing it. Back in verse 42 the Jews were offended at Jesus’ claim to be bread that came down from heaven. So Jesus responded with verse 62, “Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” In other words, as they grumble about Him saying He came down from heaven, He asked what they’d think if they saw Him go back up to heaven.

         That’s a summary of John’s Gospel, you know. John wanted to show us how the Word, the Son of God, came down from heaven and went back up. “The Word became flesh,” John said in his first chapter; He came down. Then John showed us that Jesus dying on the Cross, being lifted up to die, is just a step on His way back up to heaven through His resurrection and ascension. When Jesus adds ascending to heaven to coming down from heaven, it makes perfect sense in the way John is preaching the Gospel.

         Verse 63 is a surprise, especially after what we heard Jesus say last week. Answering disciples offended about the idea of eating His flesh and drinking His blood, He told them, “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” Remember that Jesus just said in verse 53, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” In other words, the flesh, His flesh is absolutely necessary for life. Now He says the flesh is useless. What gives?

         This is no excuse to be gnostic, to fall into an ancient heresy that thought the human body and everything physical is evil, and that the goal of faith is pure spiritual life. Gnostics wanted to get rid of flesh and escape into a heaven where there would be no bodies. But Jesus was no gnostic. How could He be? He is the Word who became flesh. He was giving His flesh for the life of the world. So why would He say now that the flesh is useless?

         The church fathers understood this text. St. Augustine says Jesus was “talking there about that flesh that is alone by itself. Let spirit be added to flesh… and it profits very much.”[1] Jesus is balancing what He said about the necessity of Holy Communion, about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, with the necessity of the Word, of listening to His teaching and doing what He says. That’s why verse 63 continues, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

         Jesus wasn’t going to eat His words. He would not retract all that hard teaching about coming down from heaven and giving His flesh to eat. Instead, He told those who didn’t like it to eat His words, to chew hard and swallow it. Along with being nourished by the gift of His life and flesh, they needed to fed by His word, by His teaching.

         This is the heart of Christian worship. It’s why we do what we do. The Protestant reformers taught that the marks of a true church are Word and Sacrament. Flesh comes together with the Holy Spirit of God speaking the Word. John Calvin famously said, “For whenever we find the word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a Church of God.”[2]

         Jesus knew these folks were already on the wrong track. They came to Him looking for more magic bread to feed their stomachs. He responded as we’ve heard for three weeks now, telling them that it wasn’t bread they needed, but Him. His own life and flesh would be for them the food of eternal life.

         But it wasn’t just physical, it wasn’t just about flesh and blood. Jesus wasn’t a salesman for the best of all diet plans to keep you physically healthy forever. No, Jesus was the life-giving Word of God walking around in the flesh to show us that God’s plan is for us to enjoy a life that combines spirit and flesh, that puts those two basic elements of our being back into harmony.

         Think about common table salt. Chemically it’s sodium chloride, a combination of two elements that normally don’t occur by themselves. But rip them apart and chlorine is a deadly gas. As a weapon it was part of the horrors of World War I. Sodium by itself is a soft, highly reactive metal. It’s dangerous and not much use. But let that gas of death combine with the explosive soft metal, and you get salt. Chlorine without sodium is death, but in combination we have a compound our bodies need for life, and the basic flavoring of most of our food. The flesh by itself is dead, but with the Spirit there is life.

         So spirit and flesh together, Word and Sacrament together, is the foundation of Christian life, of Christian worship. They’re like peanut butter and jelly, like bacon and eggs, like milk and cookies, like love and marriage and a horse and carriage in the old song. The flesh is useless by itself. But together with the Word as it is in Jesus Himself, then the flesh is glorious and full of life.

         If you come to eat the body of Christ and drink His blood at Holy Communion, but don’t believe His Word, all you’re going to get is bread and grape juice. That’s what Jesus is trying to tell us here. If you want to truly eat His flesh, then you also need to believe His Word, to receive His Spirit.

         That was the problem for some of those disciples. Jesus looked right at them and said verse 64, “But among you there are some who do not believe.” John goes on to tell us that Jesus was speaking specifically of Judas, “the one who would betray him.” But there were others who didn’t believe, as we’ll hear in a moment.

         At this point, Jesus repeats in verse 65 what He said back in the synagogue in verse 44, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” There’s more to say about this than I can now, but God knows who will believe and who will not. For some He knows that no matter what He does, they will not believe. For them it’s not granted because God knows it won’t do any good anyway.

         Verse 66 has to be one of the saddest verses in the whole Bible, “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Think about it. You and I in our daydreams imagine what it would have been like to be there, to walk with Jesus in the flesh, to see the miracles, to listen to teaching straight from our Lord’s own mouth. How much stronger, how much better our faith would be if that were only true for us.

         But it doesn’t work that way. For some people it doesn’t matter what they hear, what they see, they turn back and won’t believe. So the Father doesn’t, the Father can’t grant them to come to Jesus. Like those unnamed and lost would-be followers back then, they simply refuse. Like stubborn children sitting at the table with perfectly good food in front of them, they won’t eat, even if they go to bed hungry, even, in the spiritual case, if they starve to death.

         Picture that scene for a moment, a little group of followers gathered around Jesus, sitting on the ground in a grassy field, listening. Then Jesus makes that pointed remark about not believing, and there’s little stir. One gets up, brushes off the back of his clothes and walks away. Then another rises, and another, and then two or three together, then more. We watch them go, muttering to each other, going back to villages, to homes. Then finally we look around and see there are twelve still left, watching the backs of those leaving, looking at each other, looking at Jesus.

         Then verse 67. Jesus asked them what He still asks His disciples, still asks you and me, “Do you also wish to go away?” That’s the question, you know. Do we want to stay, do we want to stick with this, even when it’s tough, even when it’s hard to swallow?

         I’m sad to say I’ve known people who’ve walked away from Jesus like the disciples in verse 66. Beth and I have a friend we met on-line several years ago when he returned to Christian faith. He was raised in a Christian home, went to a Christian college. Then he grew discouraged by the hypocrisy he saw and became an atheist. But when Beth and I met him and got to know him, he was coming back. He had returned saying he believed and He was going to follow Jesus again.

         But then he lost his job. Then his wife got sick. And he prayed about those things and didn’t get the immediate answers he wanted. He didn’t get a good job right away. His wife’s health problems were permanent. So he concluded that the whole Jesus thing wasn’t true after all. Now he’s gone back to his atheism.

         That’s what happens if we think it’s all about bread, all about the flesh. Miracles of feeding and healing are not the whole story. If you build your Christian faith solely on the flesh and what God is doing for you in the flesh, then one of these days you’ll walk away.

         Jesus invites us to follow Him with a faith, a belief, a commitment that learns to keep chewing, keep digesting, keep being nourished even when the food is tough. He invites you to a faith that discovers what Peter confessed in verse 68, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

         We are here, we believe in Jesus, we eat His words, because there is nowhere else to go. Lee was telling me Friday about how people who’ve suffered as children, who’ve lost a parent or been abused or had a disability or suffered some other childhood trauma can turn in all sorts of wrong directions to deal with it. A study shows that a person with a certain level of childhood trauma will do things like self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, or have multiple sexual partners, or eat too much, all trying to compensate in some way for the pain they experienced. And all of it leads to a shortened life span, by an average of maybe twenty years. They go the wrong directions and it ends in death.

         Peter knew that the only place to go for life, for real life, was to Jesus. He and the others weren’t going to leave because they realized that no matter how hard it was to stick with Him, to think about suffering with Him, there was no better direction. They weren’t going to walk away because in the end they would walk with Him right through the Cross and death and into resurrection and life.

         Believing in Jesus can be a hard word. Ask anyone here who’s been a Christian for awhile, “Did believing in Jesus make everything easy for you? Did it keep you from losing a job, or from ending a marriage? Did it keep your income strong during the recession? Did it keep you healthy? Did it make your children behave?” I think the answers you will hear, the answers you give, will be, “No,” “No, but… but where else would we turn? Who else would we come to when those things happened, when living was difficult, when our own way of handling things only made it worse? Where else would we go?”

         Peter continued in verse 69, “We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” That’s it. Jesus is the One, the One Savior, the One Lord, the One help, the One hope there is when there’s nowhere else to go. So we stick with Him, we listen to Him.

         That’s why you’re here, you know, listening to Scripture being read and this text being preached, to stick with Jesus, to keep eating His words. That’s why we’re starting Sunday School again in a few weeks. We believe there is life in Jesus and in what He teaches. It can’t be found anywhere else. So we want to feed on that life, to be nourished by Him.

         That’s the message we also share with everyone who doesn’t yet know where to turn. That’s why we will invite our neighborhood to join us in eating hamburgers and hot dogs in a couple weeks. Ultimately, we’d like them to join us in eating the words of Jesus, being fed by His life, and coming to believe with us that He is the Holy One of God, the One who can be their hope and life as well as ours. Let’s keep eating His words and sharing that precious food.

         Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj