Three offensive things before breakfast

John 6:56-69

I cannot begin to tell you how much I love today's scripture passage.

Chris Haslam, who writes an online scripture guide, lines the situation out pretty well, I think. Jesus has done three offensive things before breakfast, as it were.

1. When Jesus calls himself the "bread of life," he identifies himself with God. He says, after all, that "the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." So if he is the bread of life, he must have come down from heaven and be also therefore the bread of God. That's sacrilege.
2. To suggest feeding on human flesh and blood was as disgusting in Jesus' day as it is in our own.
3. To say that Jesus can give life assigns to him a job that belongs to God and God alone.

The wonder in this story isn't that the crowds deserted him, it's that anyone stayed at all. If I tried to tell you that I was God's only Son, or that you could find eternal life by eating my body and drinking my blood, you'd laugh me out of the pulpit. Either that, or you'd take me up on the offer, and nobody wants that. Nobody!

Not surprisingly, many of Jesus' followers walk. They cannot hang with this. No way, no how. So he turns to his inner circle and wants to know if they intend to do the same. Again, Chris Haslam says it well: "If what I just said gives you trouble," Jesus tells the twelve disciples, "This whole Easter thing is really going to blow your mind."

So how about it: are you going to cool it, or are you going to blow?

Peter's response to Jesus is the part I just love about this text:

"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."

This is so honest, so direct. You can almost smell the desperation coming up off the page. Lord, we are up the crick without a paddle without you. What else are we going to do?

It reminds me of a story just a few chapters down the line in John. Jesus announces that he's going back to Judea, where people tried to stone him the last time he showed up. Thomas says to the other disciples, "Let us go with him, so we can die with him." You can almost see Thomas and Peter's heads hanging down when they speak, almost hear the Eeyore voice they use. They are resigned to their fate.

I like Peter's response for three reasons.

First, it reflects the human situation perfectly. We come to Jesus so often because we have nowhere else to go, nobody else to turn to. I may or may not have shared with you how I came to faith. After college, I was a mess, to put it bluntly. I smoked too much, I drank too much, I broke up with my girlfriend, I lost my job, I had no idea where I was going in life or what I wanted to do when I got there. And in the midst of that mess, on a whim, I went to a church that firmly welcomed and validated me, even as imperfect as I was. That was enough.

You might have a story like mine, or something similar. We all know what it's like to fail and need some help to get ourselves out of a jam.

More generally, most people begin to develop faith when they are weak, not when they're strong. We start to ask why questions when we are presented with some grief or illness or death. Events like that cause us to consider our priorities, what's important in our lives, what's not. We tend to look for meaning when we are faced with a problem, in other words, not when we are happy and content.

I read once that people who have not been religiously active and then go on to join a church often do so within six months of a major life change: moving, retiring, a job change, a divorce, a death, having kids or seeing the kids move out of the house. Some of those changes are mostly pleasant developments, of course. But they also often come mixed with some loss, some grief. And even when they are only happy occasions, they sometimes prompt people to wonder what it's all about.

Many people these days are happy to rummage about in two or three different faiths, even more, before they finally settle on one they can abide by. Either that, or they combine elements of all those religions to cobble together their own personal belief system.

Christians will cycle through different congregations or different denominations. The point is, you always find faith in the last place you look for it, as they say. The gospel properly understood is so demanding that many of us only really embrace the faith when we've scratched off all the other options available to us. That is the case for many converts and even for those who grew up in, or returned to, the church.

You may have been raised in your faith and kept with it across the course of your life. Me? I had to paint myself into a corner before I recognized that I had faith, and then paint myself into another corner before I understood that I needed to act on that faith.

Faith for most of us develops haltingly, a little at a time. That is my second point. Peter doesn't tell Jesus that he and his friends have accepted the bread of life message already. He says, "We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God." That is, we know enough about you to trust you…but we're not all the way there yet.

The disciples won't be, of course, until after Easter. That is to say, after Jesus' death on the cross and his being raised on the third day. Even then, it's not until he breathes the Holy Spirit on them and shows himself to Thomas that they can fully trust him. John consistently understands Jesus, the word of God, to confront the world with a truth it is not prepared to handle. In return for his efforts to bring to the world the message of God's love, it is Jesus' lot to be misunderstood, unappreciated, and rejected.

It takes disciples a long time to fully appreciate the love of God in Christ Jesus. The outsiders, the non-believers, the people who walk away from Jesus when he refuses to show them a cheap sign to prove his authenticity — they never do get it.

But for us? For us, it can take a lifetime of study, prayer, and self-reflection. We come to believe and know that Jesus is the Holy One of God…and then what? It takes a long time for the reality of that belief to sink in, for us to understand what it means and what it demands of us. This deepening of our faith doesn't happen unless we work on it intentionally. So: keep pushing, all of you. There is yet more to learn and to grow into. Or as they say on the Congregationalist side of the UCC, "God has yet more truth and light to show."

I of course am on the same journey as you. Please don't think that I am speaking down to you from the mountaintop. I too am learning what it means to be a Christian, inch by inch, day by day. I too only come to believe when I have no other choice sometimes.

In a way, the best analogy to faith development is marriage. Some people are lucky enough to fall deeply in love and remain that way throughout their married lives. Most of us, however, have to work to overcome the conflict, the ambivalence, the realization that no partner is ever perfect, before we can fully commit ourselves to another person, before we can truly love them with our whole heart.

And that brings us to point number three. 

It is exactly in the character of Jesus to accept disciples with conflicted feelings and half-formed faith and belief. Jesus hears from every Christian every day "I believe; help thou my unbelief!" He is perfectly content with Peter's decision to stay with him, even if that decision limps across the finish line with three horseshoes, no rider and a bobbed tail.

Jesus more than accepts the half-hearted. He welcomes them. Because half a heart can be nursed back to health. Half a heart can grow again. Half a heart can sing and look to the future. Half a heart can give — and more importantly, receive — love.

Most important of all, half a heart is weak, and therefore open. Jesus doesn't want your whole heart, he doesn't care about getting the whole thing. People are conflicted creatures, which makes capturing the entirety difficult, for one thing. For another, whenever our hearts get full, we have a tendency to get a little proud, a little self-assured. We tend to forget that we need God, and God needs us.

So when we are weak or vulnerable, we are most open to hearing God's call. Opponents of Christianity might say that we take advantage of people at their lowest moment to sell them our faith-based snake oil. In fact, they do say exactly that. But really to have an open heart simply means that when we are weak, we often want a friend, and Jesus is always there to take the call.

Jesus always picks up the phone. He never lets it ring to voicemail.

Jesus is faithful to us, even when we're not faithful to him, and he welcomes us and all our ambivalence into his life. But why? Why should Jesus stay faithful to us? Why should he welcome us when we don't even know if we want to be welcomed?

Because Jesus' heart is open to us, always. Jesus' heart is weak, vulnerable to us, always. Peter could have said, "Yes, Lord, we're out of here," and it would have broken Jesus' heart. But he would have accepted it and found another way to demonstrate God's love.

What I am trying to say, badly, is that Peter's question, "To whom can we go?" is in its own way a far better statement of faith than his declaration "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." It exposes Peter's real vulnerability and so mirrors Jesus' vulnerability to us, the weakness he is forever inviting us into. He is the living bread, the bread of life. He is the one who has the words of eternal life. The primary word of eternal life is love: love without hesitation, love without reservation, love without protection, love without power, love simply because he can, and because we are the weak-kneed, stumble-prone, two-minded halfwits that we are, who want to love others but only if we can be in charge and unhurt while we do it.

In the moment Peter has to admit his weakness, his heart is open to Jesus, and that's what Jesus wants. Go and have all the doubts you want. It is pretty strange after all to follow a man who calls himself God, who wants you to feed on his flesh and blood. So go and think it's strange and offensive all you want! Jesus doesn't mind. Just: when you've scratched all the other options off your list, and you have got nowhere else to go, be big enough to admit it to him. He'll welcome you anyway, and then he will give you eternal life. Amen.