Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, rcl yr b, 20211
KINGS 8:22-30, 41-43; PSALM 84; EPHESIANS 6:10-20; JOHN 6:56-69
Lord, to whom can we go?
Jesus, it seems, is more than a little bit grumpy in our passage from John’s Gospel. It’s a post-sermon grumpiness. The kind of grumpiness a preacher gets when the point doesn’t quite get across. So there’s a sermon to talk about first today, a sermon, a teaching that Jesus offers in the Capernaum synagogue.
And, to be fair, the teaching is rather complex, abstract, and even a bit weird. Jesus speaks about his flesh and his blood, and Jesus speaks about eating this flesh and blood, eating Jesus himself. And that must have been difficult to understand. And a bit gross, too. And then he says if we eat him, we will live. So difficult and a bit gross and now getting a bit weird. And then he gets even more abstract, saying that the flesh and blood that is Jesus, the flesh and blood that is Jesus that we would eat and drink, the flesh and blood that is Jesus that we would eat and drink because it gives us life, he says that the flesh and blood that is Jesus that we would eat and drink because it gives us life is not flesh and blood after all but the bread that fell from the sky when the Israelites wandered the desert?
“He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum,” says John. And that after he said these things, and when his disciples heard it they said “This teaching is difficult.” Well, that’s both obvious, and an understatement. It’s difficult and abstract a bit gross and a bit weird. And so some of them said, “who can accept it.”
Now we’ve become accustomed to this language because it’s clearly, to us, eucharistic. It’s about the communion that so many of us are so ready to take part in in a couple of weeks. And while we might be accustomed to it as eucharistic language, let’s also be clear that it’s still really really really weird stuff? And that it is a hard teaching—it’s hard for a newcomer who might think we’re all some variation of a ritualistic club of cannibals.
But even for us, even in the knowledge that Jesus is speaking eucharistically, it does need a whole lot of thought and reflection before we can begin to make sense of it. It has given the church centuries of opportunity for reflection. And if that’s true for us—that we have the benefit of centuries of theological reflection on communion, imagine what it would’ve been like for those first disciples, the ones who found it hard. The disciples just wanted a glint, a wisp; a mote would have been more than enough. But for some of them, it was like asking for a light, and being given the sky. Or like asking for a drink, and being given the sea.
And so some of the disciples complain, as disciples often do; and Jesus gets grumpy, as Jesus often does; and as a result of his grumpiness at the disciples complaining Jesus just lets them have it: “Does this offend you,” he says; if you think this is like asking for a drink and getting the sea, or asking for a light and getting the sky, listen to this: “what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” Try to understand that, says Jesus. But some didn’t believe. And so “because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”
Let’s take a moment for some sympathy for those disciples that turned away. I’m with the disciples here, at least if we think they wanted a bit of information about God’s way in the world in Christ? It’s too much. And there’s some truth, isn’t there, to the fact that a lot of Christian teaching is bizarre, and weird, and sometimes even incomprehensible.
But my question at this juncture? I wonder, is that a good reason to turn away from Jesus, or the church for that matter? If we don’t have enough comprehensible information about God and Jesus?
And more importantly, is that what’s really going on in this Scripture passage? That Jesus offers some incomprehensible teaching, and the only options are 1. taking in all this information in, as information about God and Jesus, or 2. to turn away?
Mark Oakley, the dean of St. John’s College, Cambridge, has a wonderful book called A Splash of Words. He shares a couple dozen poems, and writes a bit about what they might mean, from his perspective as a Christian and an accomplished theologian.
There’s a poem in the book by a Norwegian poet named Olaf Hauge. (I’ve already stolen from it in my sermon.) The poem is short, so I’m going to read it through to you. It’s called “Don’t Give me the Whole Truth.”
Don’t give me the whole truth,
don’t give me the sky when I ask for light,
but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote
as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing
and the wind a grain of salt.
Oakley then speaks quite eloquently about how, as creatures, we are limited; we simply can’t bear all the knowledge in the universe, information about everything, either at once or throughout our lives. There’s just too much. For Oakley, this poem expresses that sort of creaturely limitation. To give a person the whole truth of God the world and everything, would be like giving someone an ocean when they’re thirsty; don’t give the whole ocean, give just a “dewy wisp” that would begin to quench your thirst; don’t give a person the whole truth; that’s like giving the whole sky when we ask for a light. Give us, rather, a glint, a mote, as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt.
So I have some sympathy for those disciples who walked away; Jesus really was, for them, giving them something like the sea for their thirst, and the sky when they asked for light. But only. though, if we think that Jesus was giving them information to learn. Stuff to understand, fully and completely and all at once. Divine facts to comprehend.
But that’s not what Jesus was offering, even as he spoke in that synagogue in Capernaum.
Oakley points this out when he responds to this lovely little poem. What he says is that the Christian faith is not about receiving information, or seeking complete comprehension, but it’s about what Jesus actually does, even in that teaching he gave in that Capernaum synagogue. Even from there, Jesus is inviting us into his presence.
And it’s right in that teaching, packed as it is with so many strange and potentially gross things (if we misunderstand them). “Abide in me,” says Jesus in Capernaum. (And he’s saying it to you.) Hang out with him, spend time with him. Abide. Be present to Jesus, and he will be present to you, and abide with you.
And in the end, the disciples that stay with Jesus are not interested primarily in information about God the universe and everything. Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” And what Simon Peter says to him, is “Lord, to whom can we go?”
To whom can we go, but to Jesus. To abide, to live, to be present to him and he to us. Not because Jesus informs us about things about God, but because abiding with him, remaining with him, hanging out with him—in prayer, in devotion, in worship, in reading Scripture, very soon in the eucharist, in service to others (because to hang out with Jesus, is to hang out with the people that Jesus loves, right? The otherwise forgotten and the dispossessed … )
To abide with Jesus is to come close to the one who has “the words of eternal life.” And it’s through this, this abiding, this time spent in the presence of Jesus, time spent in the presence of those that Jesus loves, it’s there that we are drawn deeper into the mystery of life with him. And this does include deep and sustained theological reflection, as we understand and come to greater clarity, refining our understanding of God.
But the Christian life does not begin or end with information and facts, but with an abiding that puts us in a place where we can hear the one who has the words of eternal life, and “come to believe and know that [Jesus is] the Holy One of God.”