John 6:56-69
56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me lives because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. It isn’t like the bread your ancestors ate, and then they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. ” 59 Jesus said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
60 Many of his disciples who heard this said, “ This message is harsh. Who can hear it? ”
61 Jesus knew that the disciples were grumbling about this and he said to them, “ Does this offend you? 62 What if you were to see the Human One u going up where he was before? 63 The Spirit is the one who gives life and the flesh doesn’t help at all. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 Yet some of you don’t believe. ” Jesus knew from the beginning who wouldn’t believe and the one who would betray him. 65 He said, “ For this reason I said to you that none can come to me unless the Father enables them to do so. ” 66 At this, many of his disciples turned away and no longer accompanied him.
67 Jesus asked the Twelve, “ Do you also want to leave? ”
68 Simon Peter answered, “ Lord, where would we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We believe and know that you are God’s holy one. ”
Let the words of my mouth
and the meditations of my heart
be pleasing to you,
LORD , my rock and my redeemer.
Are y’all tired of hearing about bread?
The last time I went through this series of texts in John, I preached the entire five weeks on Holy Communion, and we broke bread every week.
Some of you are glad I didn’t do that. Some of you wish we had.
Yeah, me too.
On the other hand, some of you probably haven’t realized that’s been happening.
<sigh>
Well, this week is the last, and John is finally shifting out of this obsessive conversation and talking about spirit and life instead of bread, and when they’re not hearing what they want to hear any more, the crowd disperses.
Good thing that doesn’t happen in our churches today. We would never come to church to feel comfortable and good about ourselves.
That Jesus’ words are spirit and life doesn’t mean, after all, that they are always - or even often - a pat on the back or a nice warm hug. If that’s your impression, I encourage you to read the gospels again. Take Jesus’ message seriously, and see just how comfortable and warm and fuzzy it makes you feel.
The funny thing is that the crowds are reacting to something we generally take for granted today: that body-and-blood argument, that life comes only from Christ. We may not take the time to think about it much today, but we take it for granted. We generally get that what Jesus is saying here reflects the modern phrase, “You are what you eat.” How much we take Jesus in - how much of his teaching and his model and his very life we ingest - is directly proportional to the degree we become like him and become remade into the image of God.
And I’m going to differentiate again here. We are talking about the living word of Christ, and I don’t just say out of redundancy. It’s not just because Jesus says, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” I’m saying that because the word Jesus says here isn’t the word John uses to describe Jesus when he opens his narrative. This isn’t the λογος of creation. Jesus is referring to the words he is breathing, the present, Spirit-inspired ρημα that is proclamation, announcement, immediate and vital right here and right now.
And that is the same word that Paul is using. Truth as your belt; righteousness, more well-known as justice, to protect your soft, gushy bits; “shoes on your feet so that you are ready to spread the good news of peace”; faith or trust as your shield; God’s saving power to protect your brain; and the sword of the Spirit, God’s word.
The sword of the Spirit. The sword that is the very breath of God. That πνευμα that inspires us, fills our lungs with good news. That Spirit is the still-speaking word of God.
Next time you read this bit - and I know it’s a popular paragraph - remember that. The word of God Paul is talking about, that Jesus is talking about, isn’t that handy reference text that some of you bring to worship. The word of God is more alive, more vibrant, more present than that. The word of God is…
Noah told me the other day that God didn’t talk to him.
I told him, basically, that he needed to learn to listen.
The question caught me off guard. I tried to offer him the hope that everyone can hear God, that we just have to learn how. But when all the stories he hears are of people who seem to be physically receiving the sound of God’s voice vibrating the air around them, how do I tell him that God almost never does that? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means listening carefully for the words of hope and grace from our neighbor? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means observing or receiving a gesture of mercy, even if no word is spoken? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means sitting on the bank of a creek and watching the wonder of nature changing and reshaping herself?
How do I tell him that God is everywhere, if we only learn to look?
We have to experience that. We have to still ourselves, to calm the plethora of other voices in our heads and around us, to focus in on where blessing and redemption are.
The word of God is being spoken all around us. No book can contain it. No church or idea can restrain God’s ability to speak Spirit everywhere we turn.
Solomon, in his wisdom, began to understand that the temple he built would never really be a resting place for God. It was only ever an homage, a gift to recognize how good God had been to him.
But how could God possibly live on earth? If heaven, even the highest heaven, can’t contain you, how can this temple that I’ve built contain you?
Oh, I say this to you all the time. We try so hard to fit God in a box, to conform the Holy Spirit to our own ideology, our own ethical system. And we’re in plentiful company to do so. Our own scriptures are full, chock full of people who tried very hard to fit God into a box. And occasionally we have a wonderfully redemptive story of someone whose conception of God got stretched when the epiphany came that God was much, much bigger than what they thought.
Solomon understands that.
The crowds following Jesus began to understand that. But instead of bowing in wonder and awe, they thought it was too much for them right then, and they left.
The word God proclaims threatens to change us. It threatens to transform us at a fundamental level, and it is just as threatening to those who have never tried to be in relationship with Christ as it is to those who were baptized decades ago and have spent all our lives trying to live into that relationship. Because the righteousness of God is so incredibly distant from our human experience! It is an ideal we can never reach; it is infinitely far away.
The spoken, still-spoken word of God is dangerous and uncomfortable. God is guiding the Church, which is not a building or a structure or a denomination, but rather is everyone who would be in relationship with Christ; God is guiding that Church into strange and new places, into ideas that don’t jive with what we are often willing to accept in our fervent religiosity.
And God is guiding us there not to wage battle with people, but to nurture them, to love them into relationship with Jesus.
Because the word of God isn’t a weapon of war; it’s a proclamation of peace.
We spend a lot of our conversation thinking that Paul is telling us to wage war with people who don’t represent what we expect of God’s will. But that’s an impoverished interpretation of Paul’s words.
Paul is being far more straightforward than that, I think. He specifically, concretely says:
We aren’t fighting against human enemies
but against rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens.
So let’s set aside our bitter, belligerent words that we reserve for our “enemies” and try speaking the word, the ρημα of God instead. A word that is peace, that is hope, that is love for each other. A word that is spirit and truth. A word that is praise of God, thankfulness and blessing. A word that is only threatening because of how powerful it is and how different it is from the human word.
Let us surrender our human words. Let us let God speak a word through us, and all our words shall be like the psalmist:
How lovely is your dwelling place,
LORD of heavenly forces!
Better is a single day in your courtyards
than a thousand days anywhere else!
My heart and my body
will rejoice out loud to the living God!
LORD of heavenly forces,
those who trust in you are truly happy!
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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