John 6:60-71

05/17/09
John 6:60-71
Hudson UMC

I get the feeling, from time to time, that the church has not always done a good job of portraying Jesus as the Gospel accounts show Him. What I mean is that I think that we have romanticized Jesus into some bizarre character who has very little to do with the Jesus that actually walked the earth. In many movies about the life of Jesus, the actors portraying the Son of God intentionally don’t blink while the camera is on them, so He might be seen as somehow different than the other people. We tend to see Him with nice, clean garments, with well-kept hair and a soft voice. He just kind of stares at people and doesn’t get too upset about anything.

I wonder where we got this idea that Jesus was such a weirdo in this way. The church has always claimed that He is a real human being, with a nature like ours. For some reason, we just don’t like that idea. We don’t like to think that the God of the universe could show up and not be like our imaginations tell us He should be. Was Jesus different than other people? Of course, but it was because He lived with righteousness and spoke as one with authority who stood up to the leaders of the day. We never read that he had a glassy stare or that He was always very soft-spoken. In fact, we read that He got mad every once in a while and raised His voice from time to time.

All of this is to say that we tend to think that, just because Jesus had a crowd following Him around for much of His ministry, everybody who saw Him understood who He was and lived the kind of life that Jesus was calling them to. In reality, this was not the case. In fact, even the disciples, who end up being the leaders of the church, don’t really get who Jesus is until Pentecost. Sure, say the right thing every once in a while, but, if you really read the text carefully, you begin to realize that, even when they get it, they still don’t get it.

Our passage starts off today with many of the people who were following Jesus saying, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Jesus goes on and says a few more difficult things. Then we read that, “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” This would be interesting enough if we didn’t view it in context, but it is even more significant when we remember that this was a crowd that, only the day before, wanted to take Jesus away by force and make Him their king. Oh, how much of a difference twenty-four hours can make. Yesterday, they want to follow Jesus so badly that they want to make Him their king, even if He doesn’t want to be king. Today, they have lost their confidence in Him. They don’t want anything to do with Him.

I don’t know about you, but if something this drastic has just happened, I would want to know what in the world caused it. How could so many people change their mind in such a short period of time? I think that the reason that the people followed Jesus is because they had an image of who He was in their minds that they liked and wanted to follow. After hearing what He had to say, they realized that the real Jesus was not anything like the Jesus they wanted.

What did the people want? The people wanted someone who was going to provide for them. They wanted Jesus to give them bread to eat and take care of their physical needs so they would not have to. They wanted Jesus to be a prophet who could be on their side and give them the word of the Lord and stand against the oppressive religious leaders of the day. Most importantly, they wanted Jesus to be a king. When the people of the time heard the word “Christ” or “Messiah” they didn’t think about it like we often do. When the people thought about the coming Messiah, they thought that it was going to be a Davidic king who was going to come in, organize the Israelites, overthrow the Roman government and re-establish the nation as a military power in the world. They expected the Messiah to be a mighty and conquering king who would lead them into a golden age of prosperity.

If that is what the people wanted, what did they actually get? They got a man who runs away from political power, who had no interest in sitting on an earthly throne. They got a man who basically calls them a bunch of hypocrites when He said, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” He called their motives into question and challenged their devotion. They got a man who insisted that what the people wanted was not necessarily what they really needed and that, if they got what they wanted, it might hinder them from ever getting what they need. They got a man who continually talked about how Moses and their ancestors weren’t as good as they thought. What is worse, they got a man who said crazy things like “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

As different as the world might be today, I do not think that we are all that different from the crowd at the time. What do the people of today’s America want from Jesus? Do we not want someone who can teach us how to be good people? Do we not want someone who we can look to in order to support our particular political and social beliefs? Do we not want someone who we can call on when we are sick or when times are bad and have Him simply wave His magic wand and make everything better? And to top it all off, do we not want a Jesus who will do all these things and then leave the rest of our lives alone?

And yet, when we read the Gospels, what do we get in Jesus? We get a man who tells us that we are not as good as we think we are. We get a man who says that, unless we are continually being united to Him in the Spirit, we have no real life in us. We will read later that Jesus is a man who tells us that, if we really loved Him, we would obey His commands. We get a man who challenges every political and social structure that does not put God at the center and calls into question a lot of the structures that we think are godly and exposes them as self-centered. We get a man who is so far from leaving our lives alone that He insists that He be lord over every aspect of our lives. We have a Jesus who insists that we give Him the right to meddle. If we do not want anyone, even Jesus, to tell us what to do and how to live, then we are not Christians.

I can imagine what the disciples could have said at this point. Basically, because Jesus insisted on being stubborn, their fellowship dropped from about five thousand people, to twelve. If American Christians were the ones who were left, we might say things like, “Oh my goodness, Jesus, why did you have to go and say that? That isn’t very open-minded. How are we ever going to get more members if you keep driving people away? Tell you what; just chill out a bit and we’ll get more people to come and be with us. After they’ve been around a bit, like we have, then you can tell them the rest.”

As amazing as it might seem to us today, Jesus did not seem to be very excited about numerical growth. If Jesus was mostly concerned about how many followers He had, He certainly wouldn’t have said the kinds of things that He said. He wouldn’t challenge the people, He wouldn’t tell them that their lifestyles were destructive, He wouldn’t tell them that their traditions and how they have always done things are contrary to the word of God. He wouldn’t do a lot of things. It seems that, for Jesus, the numbers didn’t matter at all. He didn’t need thousands of people who were willing to follow Him as long as things were easy. It seems that He would much rather have only twelve who were committed, even when Jesus did the unexpected. After all, He took twelve people and sent them out, and the world has never been the same since.

After the crowd left, Jesus turned to the twelve that stayed and said, “Do you also wish to go away?” It is as if He was saying, “I say a lot of weird things. I am not changing my mind and I am not going to ease up. In fact, things are going to get harder. Are you sure you don’t want to leave?” It is actually a very courteous thing to do. He wanted to give them warning that following Him was not going to be easy. The disciples responded, “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.”

We can tell that, even though Peter is giving a correct answer, he doesn’t really understand what he has just said. After all, this is the same Peter that denies Christ three times in only a few hours after he pledged his undying loyalty to Him. And yet, though their knowledge is imperfect, though their faith is still weak, they have made a decision. They said, “We know it is going to be tough, we know that most people are going to think we’re pretty weird, but we are going to stick with it the best we can.” The same words that the rest of the crowd said were “hard to accept,” are called “the words of eternal life” by the disciples.

Isn’t it amazing how our perspective changes everything? Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, is talking about how, as preachers of the Gospel, he and his associates have been spreading the “sweet aroma of the knowledge of” Christ everywhere they go. He then goes on to say that, as such preachers, they are a “fragrance of God to those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.” Though they are sharing the same good news, he says that some people think that they are an aroma of life and others think they are an aroma of death. Who can understand how this can be? How can the same news be the best thing in the world to one group of people and the worst thing in the world to another?

The question we need to reflect on is not how the different people in the text react to the words of Christ, but how we react to them. Are they the words of eternal life or are they simply difficult to accept? Are we the kind of people who want to make Christ the king of our lives one day, only to run away from Him when things turn out to be somewhat different than we thought? Is the idea of a painful and difficult road a discouragement that makes us want to give up, or have we been waiting for a chance to give everything we have and everything we are to the Lord?

Which is better, to have five thousand people who show up to church because it seems like a neat place to be or have a church of only twelve people who are committed to follow on the road of hardship and trials? There are many churches who would say that more is always better. I disagree. I think that our first priority as the people of God is not so much to get a bunch of new people, though outreach is very important. Our first priority needs to be us making sure that we are falling more in love with the Lord every day. We need to be focused outside our doors and offer the good news of Jesus Christ to those who do not yet know, but we have to make sure that we are offering something that we think is good news. Jesus Himself was hated because of the things He said. We will endure some of that same hatred, but it is worth it; so worth it. Jesus took twelve weak, broken people like you and me, people who didn’t really understand what was going on, who didn’t have the faith they should have, who didn’t have the Bible knowledge they should have, who didn’t pray like they should have, and transformed them into the most powerful messengers of the Gospel the world has ever seen. Surely, He can do the same with us.

Today, we recognize high school graduates. We only have one with us today, but let me give you a word of encouragement as you enter the next period of your life. The words of Christ are indeed difficult. You will struggle to live by them every day of your life. However, they are also indeed the words of eternal life and you can find them nowhere else. The good life is not found in college parties or lucrative careers or even (forgive me, parents,) in getting good grades, but in living every moment in light of what God has done, is doing, and will do. No one but Christ can show you the truth because there is no God other than the God revealed in Jesus. He has the words of eternal life and they are for you. Even if you are not graduating from high school today, those words are for you, too. Though we graduate from schools and we retire from our jobs, we never graduate, never retire, from being Christians. We never grow in the Lord so much that we do not need to stay connected to Him. May each of us live as people who go to Jesus, not because it seems like a good thing to do, not because our parents did it, but because we realize that, as difficult as His words are, they are the words of eternal life. Let us pray.

AMEN