John 6:56-69

Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "Difficult"

Every time this story comes around I can’t help but think of the famous scene from the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. If you don’t know it, it’s the story of a man named Zack Mayo who enrolls in Aviation Officer Candidate School in the hopes of becoming a Navy flier. Mayo is a hustler and at one point he gets caught by his gunnery sergeant in a scheme to sell pre-shined belt buckles and shoes to his fellow trainees. As punishment the sergeant tries to break him with unrelenting physical training one weekend, demanding his DOR, trying to get him to drop out. In one of the more dramatic moments of the film the sergeant insists that he’s going to have him kicked out when Mayo screams, “don’t you do it. I got nowhere else to go.”  

While it isn’t quite that dramatic, that is what Peter insists after Jesus asks the disciples if they too wish to go away. But let’s back up. In fact, it might be helpful to recap the sequence of events that lead up to this moment, because in some ways the life of faith is a series of choices like this one about whether to stay, or to simply walk away. 

The beginning of this chapter tells a familiar story about Jesus feeding a crowd of people. There are several of these stories across the gospels, each one with slightly different details. This one takes place during the festival of the Passover, so it’s a least a year before his final Passover meal with his disciples in Jerusalem. And as the crowd gathers, it’s Jesus who asks his disciples where they could buy some bread for all the people. It’s a seemingly impossible task, but then Andrew discovers that there’s a boy in the crowd with five barley loaves and two fish. It’s not nearly enough for a few people, let alone a huge crowd. But when the lord is your shepherd there is nothing you shall want. He makes them sit down in the green pasture and everyone has enough. And when they see it and realize the sign that he’s performed they’re so convinced that Jesus is something special that he has to slip away before they try to make him king. The disciples can’t find him and cross the lake without him only to see him walking on the water toward them. But it doesn’t take long for the hungry crowd to go looking for Jesus. And when they find him, he starts to talk to them about the difference between eating your fill, and something that will sustain you forever. There’s a whole back and forth. Honestly as you read the exchange it feels like they are talking past each other.  It’s at this point that Jesus says the thing that causes all the fuss. They’ve steered onto the subject of the manna God sent to the Hebrews in the wilderness, which makes sense given that this whole sequence is taking place against the backdrop of the Passover feast, the celebration of the people’s liberation from slavery and their escape into the wilderness where they were also fed. He says, “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They reply, “give us this bread always.” And that’s when he says, “I am the bread of life.” Now, if you’re following along on your gospel of John Bingo card, this is the first of the seven I AM statements that Jesus makes in this gospel.  I AM, of course, is the name that God gives Moses at the burning bush. It doesn’t count on the bingo card, but technically when Jesus comes to them on the water and they’re scared out of their wits, he tells them not to be afraid, ego eimi. I AM. As you can imagine, invoking the name of God for himself creates quite the stir. Some of the people in the crowd that day were from Nazareth and wondered aloud if Mr. Bread from Heaven might not be getting a little too full of himself. They knew who his mom and dad were, he wasn’t all that. But he doesn’t stop there. He talks about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. If that sounds grotesque to you, imagine what it might sound like to a first century Jewish audience. That’s certainly no way to keep Kosher. But that isn’t even the biggest problem with what he’s saying. Not it’s when he describes himself as having come down from heaven, sent by God, just like the manna that sustained the people in the wilderness. Not sent by God like Moses, but sent by God as someone whose flesh and blood itself offers those who eat and drink of it a new kind of life. 

Right away, he hears the grumbles. “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” That really is the question, isn’t it? And maybe you’re thinking, “but I don’t want it to be difficult. I want the easy button like they used to advertise in those commercials. I want to sing ‘Jesus Loves Me,’ and be done with it.” Leave it to the preacher to make things complicated. Listen, I would love to stand up here and tell you exactly what you want to hear. I could parrot the line about God and country and how we’re a blessed nation and never once challenge us to consider all the other difficult teachings that Jesus has to offer. Teachings like, “you lack one thing, sell everything you own, give the money to the poor and then come and follow me,” or “whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” or “whatsoever you do (or don’t do) for the least of these- the addict, the sex worker, the undocumented immigrant, or the trans teenager- you do (or fail to do) for me.” It would make talking about the gospel so much easier if it really were just about how much God wants to bless our finances and make us all rich. Who knows, if we were to start talking like that we might have to build an auditorium with a jumbotron and satellite locations just so all the people could have their consumer-driven lives blessed by God. But Jesus doesn’t talk about any of that. And it’s difficult. Isn’t it? Maybe these words about eating flesh and drinking blood aren’t difficult. But is any of it? Because I’ll be honest with you. It’s difficult for me. There are plenty of days that I’d rather have it my way than God’s way, days when the junk food that gets peddled as religion looks a whole lot more appetizing than the flesh and blood of Jesus sacrificed on a Roman cross. And there are plenty of other days when I feel like I’ve had my fill of religion altogether and could just go for a cheeseburger, metaphorically speaking. 

I may have mentioned before that when I was twenty years old I participated in what was called the Ocean City Beach Project. It was sponsored by a reformed, but evangelically minded campus ministry organization in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan known as the Coalition for Christian Outreach. Twenty college students and four campus ministers lived in a house in Ocean City, New Jersey for the summer. We weren’t handing out tracks on the boardwalk and trying to convert people. We were learning to live in Christian community while we worked and studied. But we got to the house several weeks after the season had begun and many of the good jobs were already taken. So, I parlayed my summer working for Wendy’s as a teenager into a kitchen job at a 24 hour restaurant called The Chatterbox. My shift was from 11 at night to 7 in the morning. By the end of the summer I could make a pretty good authentic cheesesteak sandwich. Most of my co-workers were my age, but they were having a decidedly different summer experience on the Jersey shore- long before it was an MTV reality show. One night I was talking to my small group leader, Lew, about it, about how what they were doing looked so much easier, and so much more fun than what we were doing. I told him it made me want to go and see for myself. He thought for a moment and then he said, “you could do that.” I was kind of shocked, to be honest. Wasn’t he supposed to tell me all the reasons why I shouldn’t? Wasn’t he supposed to be disappointed that’s I’d even suggest such a thing? But then he added, “do you really think that God is going to let you go.” 

Do you also wish to go away, asks Jesus. Will you give your DOR? Will you join the party because it’s easier than following in the way of self-sacrificial love for neighbors who may not love you back? Will you fill yourselves with food that perishes? Wealth, status, work, achievement, entertainment, diversion, things that may demand more of your time but less of your soul? Will you walk away when things get hard, or tense, or don’t go the way you think they should; or when the words of Jesus just feel like too much? There are plenty of other places we could go. Places that feel alive with all kinds of ways to occupy our time and attention. Places that allow us to surround ourselves with like-minded people who won’t ever challenge us and will rarely offend our sensibilities. But it may be that the very thing that makes Jesus’ words so difficult to hear is also what makes them so essential and irreplaceable, the food of eternal life that sustains us like nothing else can. Because it is in the impossibility of those words, in the shadow of doubt that they often create that our salvation begins. We are saved in that place of human vulnerability where we stand at the crossroads thinking that we have a choice, but knowing that no matter which direction we go, or what we choose, the goodness and mercy of the Holy One of God whom we have come to know as the bread of life will follow us and find us, no matter what.