MAKING HARD CHOICES
Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.
Jesus’s words, as conveyed by John at the end of his long sixth chapter, give a strikingly literalistic view of what we do in holy communion. Jesus’s language is direct, crude almost; it makes the Eucharistic feast sound almost like a form of cannibalism. We find Jesus’s words rather shocking, and many of the first disciples found them shocking too.
In this passage, John is wanting to bring out as clearly as possible the fleshliness of Jesus. For John, Jesus is above all “the Word made flesh”, the One who has come down from heaven and lived among us. And in saying that we drink Jesus’s blood, John is picking up the Jewish language of sacrifice: it is through the shedding of his blood, the lifeblood, that Jesus’s death becomes a sacrifice that saves us from our sins and brings us eternal life.
So the language of John chapter 6 is carefully chosen to bring out deep theological truths about Jesus’s life and his death.
But, John tells us, when many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
And the result was that some of Jesus’s disciples decided to part company with him. As John puts it, because of this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.
It’s a striking turnaround. At the beginning of this passage, jsut after the Feeding of the 5000, Jesus is being acclaimed as a popular hero: they were about to come and take him by force to make him king. And to avoid this happening, he had to make a quick getaway into the mountains.
But now, so soon after, large numbers are turning away because they find his teaching too hard to take.
It’s a kind of prefiguring of the events of the Passion, when the acclamation of the crowds on Palm Sunday turns into the cries of “Crucify him” on Good Friday.
I’d like to highlight two aspects of this striking episode.
First, the words: this teaching is difficult. Up to now, the crowd has been having a great time with Jesus, but now they feel a sense almost of let-down. It’s all been great fun, but now Jesus is starting to go more deeply into his teaching, and the going is starting to get tough. So, almost reproachfully, they say: but this is beginning to get difficult, we hadn’t bargained for that.
John wants us to realise that following Christ is not always easy. Jesus never promises us an easy life: he promises abundant life, eternal life even, but not necessarily an easy life.
“Jesus is the answer”, we are sometimes told. And of course that is true, but not in the sense that he provides us with an easy way out of our problems. It often seems to be quite the reverse in fact: following Jesus often seems to make our lives more difficult and more complicated because we have to try and live up to the impossible demands that he makes of us.
And we want life to be easy. We live in a world where we are led to believe that everything can be made easy. In the consumer society, huge efforts are put into making and advertising products and techniques that will make our lives easier.
So we’re lulled into thinking that we ought to be able to sail through life without difficulty, and we shy away from endeavours that involve effort, inconvenience, struggle, risk.
A few years ago everyone was reading a very profound book about how to live called The road less travelled. And I always remember the opening sentence of the book. It had just three words: Life is difficult.
And that is a truth which becomes even more explicit in a Christian context. The Christian pilgrim’s progress through life is a struggle. It is a hard road to tread, being of course the way of the cross.
The rewards, we believe, make the effort infinitely worthwhile – already now, and even more for the sake of the glory that lies ahead. But it is not surprising that many find the road too hard, and decide to turn back and look for an easier way.
The other thing I want to highlight, which is closely related, is that following Jesus involves us in making some hard choices.
When many of the disciples decide to give up following Jesus, he turns to the Twelve, the inner core of his disciples, and puts them on the spot: So what about you? Are you going to leave too?
We can imagine that there was a lot of embarrassed shuffling at this point, as they all tried desperately to avoid Jesus’s eye. But thank God for Peter, who had the courage to say:
Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.
This doesn’t mean that Peter understands all that Jesus is saying; he also finds his teaching difficult; but he is able to recognise the Truth that is in Jesus, and to see that this is the way to life as God intends, the life we were made for.
And sometimes Jesus puts us on the spot too. Much of the time we are able to muddle along without really having to make clear choices, but then sometimes Jesus puts us in a situation, some kind of crisis perhaps, or some kind of urgent need, where we just have to make a decision one way or the other. In a conflict perhaps, we cannot avoid deciding which side we are on; we have to choose.
Because God has given us human beings free will, the ability to make choices. He has given us the knowledge of good and evil, and so there are times when we are forced to choose between right and wrong. Or to put it another way, there are times when we have to choose whether to go on following Jesus or to turn back because the road is getting too difficult.
Mind you, we do have to be a bit careful when talking about our free will, our freedom to choose. Because, as John Calvin would certainly have wanted to point out, we do not operate on a level playing field. Our free will is not as free as we think it is because all our choices and all our decisions are distorted by sin. We may think we are making a fair, honest and objective assessment of the the options that lie before us, but actually our judgment is not as objective as we think it is because we always have this fatal tendency (what theologians call original sin) to put our own interests first, or to go for the easy way out.
So following Christ inevitably involves us in struggle. Not that that should surprise us particularly because Jesus himself had to struggle. He had to struggle against the devil who was urging him to take an easier road, and to turn back fromfollowing the road of his Father’s will, a road which led to a cross. And in so far as we try to follow Jesus along that same road, we shall find ourselves involved in struggle too.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy
23 August 2009, Year B, Proper 16
Gospel: John 6.56-69
