Emma and I ate some amazing bread recently. It was still warm. It was a multigrain bread that had molasses in it, so it gave off this rich, wonderful scent. It had this great texture and taste. It was bread that was eminently satisfying. These are the kinds of associations I have with bread, maybe many of us do, with the bread that we eat around our own tables. Then there’s the bread we eat around this table, which I hope you have positive and warm associations with too.
In the gospel lessons recently bread does not have those kinds of warm associations. We’ve been working our way through the sixth chapter of the gospel of John, listening to an extended conversation that Jesus has been having with the disciples, with his followers, with his detractors, and with us. Jesus has been speaking of himself as the bread of life. Now this is a familiar image to us; it’s an important image in our tradition; we pretty much get it when Jesus talks about himself as bread. But this was more puzzling to his followers, partly because they didn’t have the same big picture about Jesus as we do, the whole story, from life to death to resurrection, and they don’t have the Last Supper to put this bread language in conxtext. But they took in these words of Jesus, to puzzle over. I am the bread of life. Okay, maybe. But that’s not all Jesus says. Jesus starts talking about his body and his blood, using this metaphor of bread. Again, this is familiar language for us, but for his listeners it was even harder to understand. We understand Jesus to be talking about the central act of our worship together – sharing bread and wine around the altar, the body and the blood being language that we’re mostly comfortable with. Not so for his listeners then, and it has gotten progressively worse: first, he says, I am the bread of life; then he talks of bread and wine, body and blood. Now, worst of all: Jesus starts talking to his followers and others about his flesh – not his body, but his flesh. Eating my flesh and drinking my blood will give you eternal life, he tells them. Now, we may be okay with the blood part – it’s wine, we drink it every time we share holy communion – but the word flesh may start to make us somewhat uncomfortable. Body is easier; flesh though. . . a little more out there. But for Jesus’ contemporaries, all of this language was frankly horrifying. Jesus’ words were shocking. And disgusting. And a violation of their religious tradition. We don’t quite get the shock value, but if we take Jesus’ words at face value – if someone else were talking about eating human flesh and drinking human blood, it would sound to us not like theology, but cannibalism. That’s what his followers and those listening in the synagogues were hearing in what Jesus says in our gospel this morning. Bread of life is one thing; eating flesh is another thing completely. So we can see why his disciples say to him, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’
Now I don’t know if they were asking Jesus a rhetorical question or not. But he answers them as if they were asking a real question. But they don’t get warm fuzzy pastoral Jesus telling them not to worry, his words didn’t mean what they thought they did, that it was metaphorical, and that he was talking theology to them, not biology. No. Instead, he says to them, ‘does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?’ That is, if you can’t accept what I have to say to you about bread and wine, flesh and blood, what makes you think it will get easier? What if I told you that there is more to come, much harder to understand and accept than this? Now I’m guessing that this was not the response that the disciples were hoping for. Instead of an explanation they could live with, they get more they don’t understand, and probably can’t accept.
And it’s very interesting, what happens next. Scripture tells us, ‘Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.’ We know that Jesus had a number of followers, and we have this idea, I think, that the crowds only went in one direction – that is, more and more people learned about him, witnessed his miracles, experienced his teaching and his healing, and followed him. We tend to think that he started out with no disciples and ended up with large numbers of them. Which is true enough. But today’s lesson reminds us that just as disciples followed him, other disciples also left him. That’s what we witness in today’s lesson: they get to a teaching that they deem too difficult, and many turn back. They no longer follow him. They can’t go where he is. It’s too hard to take, what he’s telling them. Some of them just can’t do it.
So Jesus sees this, and then he turns to his inner core, the twelve, his closest friends, the ones he depends on most. He watches the others go, and then asks the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ It’s time to make measure of them. Are you in, or are you out, he wants to know. Are you in this all the way, or are you more faint of heart than that? If it’s time to choose, which way are you going to go?
It’s Peter who speaks for the group in this instance. He looks at Jesus, and he says this: ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ I find this a very poignant exchange, what Peter says to Jesus. I don’t think it’s desperation we hear from Peter at this point; he’ll get there later, when he’s desperate and scared enough to deny Jesus. I’m not sure it’s resignation either, though there may be a little bit of that, some sense of, what else are we supposed to do? In a few weeks we’ll hear a rich young man ask Jesus what he has to do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus will tell him he should sell all he has and follow Jesus. The young man will go away grieving – turning back, like the disciples today – because he has many possessions and does not want to part with them. Jesus will say some difficult things about wealth and heaven, and Peter – it’s always Peter, have you noticed that? He’s the impulsive one, the one lacking a filter between brain and mouth. The very flawed and human one. Peter will say to Jesus, Lord, we have left everything we had and followed you. The implication being, I think, a question – is it going to be worth our while? Is it going to be worth it? We’ve given up an awful lot, Jesus – our livelihoods, our families, our old lives – all for you. Are we going to get anything back? There’s a little of that going on here, I think, in this question, Lord, to whom can we go? But I also think that there’s a realization that we are witness to, as Peter and the other eleven make it clear that they are in for the long haul. Lord, to whom can we go? You are the one who has words of eternal life. We’ve been out there; we’ve seen what else our society and our world have to offer, Peter is saying. And there isn’t anything more life-giving than what you have. That’s why we’re not leaving. That’s why we’re in this for good, for real. That’s why we’re all in. Because, Peter tells Jesus, ‘we have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’ You have to appreciate Peter – his honesty, his mistakes, his willingness to say what’s in his head, even when he’s wrong. Though in this instance, it isn’t a matter of right or wrong. In this instance, it’s a nakedly honest statement of faith. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.
This particular teaching of Jesus that precipitates this whole thing – Jesus talking about the bread of life, his own flesh and blood, what we understand as Eucharist – that’s not what’s hard for us. It doesn’t strike us as foreign or as odd as it does the disciples, because it has been the teaching of our church for two thousand years. We experience the body and the blood each week, in the bread and wine which we share together. This teaching is not going to cause us to turn back. And maybe none of Jesus’ teachings will have this affect on us – but that might be because we don’t take them that seriously. I don’t know how honestly each of us could say the words that Peter says to Jesus – Lord, to whom can we go? Because the truth is, we have any number of choices about whom we could go to. We have any number of options of where to put our selves, our time, our hearts, our values. We can go to the values of our culture – like money, or possessions, or technology. We can go to accumulation of stuff. We can go to highest value on education, or highest value on physical appearance. We can go other places too – we can go to ‘I’m spiritual but not religious – an easy excuse to be where nothing is asked of us. We can decide to pick and choose bits and pieces from religious traditions we like, never fully committing to any one. We can choose. We have not left everything to follow Jesus, not in the way the disciples did. But if we make these other choices, here’s what we can’t do: we can’t say about any of the other choices we could make, other things to place our values in or other places to put ourselves – we can’t say that any of those other options has the words of eternal life. We can’t say about money, or possessions, or accumulation, or education, or physical appearance, or a flighty, uncommitted spirituality that any of that is the Holy One of God. We can choose to serve other gods, as Joshua gives the option to the people Israel in this morning’s lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures. We can choose – as Joshua says, ‘choose this day whom you will serve.’ But we can’t say of those other choices, that they are the path to eternal life, or that anything else is the Holy One of God. For us, who have chosen the Christian way, who know God through Jesus, the Christ – in Christ is where we find the words of eternal life. Christ is the Holy One of God, offering more to us by far than we could ever give up to follow him.
This bread and wine that we share around the altar is many things to us. It is the body and blood of Christ. It is, as one of our prayers says, the pledge of our redemption. It is a sign of our community life. It is a sign of our connection to God, an outward sign of an inward grace. It is all of this, and much more. And it is also a reminder of the sometimes difficult teachings of Jesus that, by our participating in this sacrament, we promise to wrestle with, puzzle over, argue about, be in conversation with. So that we aren’t the ones who say, this teaching is too difficult, and turn back. But rather, so that we are the ones who say, Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.
Amen.