Proper 16B 2009
John 6:56-69
“When many of his disciples
heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it.’”
Thus the NRSV; the new English Bible is more direct: “This is more
than we can stomach! Why listen to such talk?”
This is the original hard saying
of Jesus in the scriptural witness. In fact most of this 6th Chapter
of Saint John’s Gospel is filled with difficult sayings in this “I am the Bread of Life” chapter.
It’s really characteristic
of all of the Fourth Gospel, these powerful “I am” statements uttered by Jesus:
I am the door to the sheepfold; I am the Good Shepherd; I am the true Vine, I am the Light of the world; I am the I am the way, the truth, and the life; I am the resurrection and the life; I am the Bread of Life. Difficult sayings, difficult to be believed by the disciples 20 centuries ago, difficult
to believe by many modern disciples 20 centuries later. (1)
It reminds me of someone years ago
who told me that she didn’t and couldn’t believe many things in the Nicene Creed, but she said it any way. When I asked her how she managed the cognitive dissonance, she told me that she crossed
her fingers when she came to the difficult parts she couldn’t believe that day – and that some days she kept her
fingers crossed the entire time that the Creed was being said.
The Fourth Gospel does present us
with difficulties, not least because it is essentially different in so many ways from the three synoptic gospels, Matthew,
Mark, and Luke, in its depiction of Jesus. The great Archbishop of Canterbury
William Temple wrote that the synoptic gospels may give us something like a photograph of Jesus but that “Saint John
gives us the more perfect portrait.” (2)
But at the same time, when the Region
2 clergy gathered at Saint Hon’s West Point for clericus last Tuesday, there was a general feeling of relief that this
Sunday today was the last of the four Sundays in a row that were focused on Jesus’ declaration, “I am the bread
of Life.”
Those I am declarations have called forth interesting reactions: The great
Christian social activist and pacifist Dorothy Day said that “Christ is God or He is the world's greatest liar and impostor.”
(3)
Phillips Brooks, the renowned Bishop of Massachusetts observed that “In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical....His religion has so long been identified with conservatism...that
it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him; that it was the
young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him. “
(4)
And the ever astute George Bernard Shaw noted that “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd either be a lunatic –– on the level with a man who says he's a poached
egg –– or else he'd be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. "Gentle
Jesus, meek and mild" is a sniveling modern invention, with no warrant in the Gospels.
(5)
Even if later generations of Christians
haven’t reacted as strongly as Jesus disciples who couldn’t stomach such talk, they -- and we as well -- have
remained perplexed by these “I am” sayings of Jesus – and many other difficult things Jesus said. In part the difficulty stems from their rigor. They set forth
higher standards or faith and practice than human beings seem able to meet in each and every instance and case. In part it is because the precise meaning of these difficult statements escapes us as we become farther
and farther removed from Jesus in time and culture.
And in part, still other statements
seem to clash with what Jesus said elsewhere or with our own interpretations
of what Scripture can legitimately expect of us and what virtues, practice, and behavior it ought to stress and demand of
us. (6)
Jesus never said it would be easy.
AMEN
1. William
Neal, The Difficult Sayings of Jesus, Eerdman’s, 1975, p. 97
2.
Neill, 97-98; William Temple, Readings in St. John’s Gospel, Morehouse
Barlowe, 1985 reprint, p. xix
3.
Dorothy Day, as quoted in SermonWriter for
Proper 16B 2009
4.
Phillips Brooks, as quoted in SermonWriter
for Proper 16B 2009
5.
George Bernard Shaw, as quoted in SermonWriter
for Proper 16B 2009
6.
Neil, flyleaf cover
