At the end of the Bread of Life discourse in John 6, his disciples abandon him. Not because the road is hard, but because Jesus told them the truth.
We want to be more effective. Jesus would rather be honest.
Proper 16B | John 6:56-69
You’ve heard of reverse psychology. It’s a simple idea that sometimes, the best way to get someone to do something is to make them think you don’t want them to.
It’s a trick, like a slight-of-hand with the mind.
And we know this works because we are so convinced we’re always right. Which means the other person is always convinced that they are right, too.
For years scientists have investigated this phenomenon. Humans are deeply irrational. Even to the point of doubling-down on being wrong rather than accept when something different is true.
Our minds are not rational. We aren’t convinced by evidence, we are swayed by our emotions.
All of this research in brain science is leading us to a really important conclusion about people: To influence others, you will have to trick them into listening to you.
So, given all that we know about the human mind and effective communication, how is it that Jesus never tries to trick people into believing? With Jesus, there are no tricks, though he displays an uncanny awareness of how our minds work.
Jesus insists on and persists in telling the truth.
Bread of Life
All this talk of bread and eternal life has gotten his hearers tangled in Jesus’s theological convictions.
- He is from heaven.
- And is bread.
- Eating him will bring eternal life
- Eternal life is present.
And then, in the end,
- God is offering us something new our ancestors didn’t get.
And here, John has cleverly transported us and all those people, in the middle of the conversation from the shore at Capernaum to a synagogue in the city. They have come, as if without even knowing it, to the Sabbath, to be taught by God.
And here Jesus resumes his role as a teacher.
All the questioning and weirdness we’ve covered the last four weeks comes to this moment — a breaking point — the crowds disappeared somewhere, the skeptics are scheming somewhere off the page, and now it’s just the disciples. They walk away from Jesus.
And finally, the teacher sits down.
Only 12 remain. The ones Jesus chose. The rest, seduced by spectacle and demanding what they believe devotion will yield, take off. They’re done. They all quit.
“This teaching is difficult!”
We saw this coming last week, didn’t we? When we wondered if Jesus was going too far, getting too gross, too literal (!), we asked if this were the last straw.
And now we know that it was. Almost all of Jesus’s followers walk away from him. No doubt blaming him for their leaving. That is, after all, what we do.
But they don’t go because he grossed them out or got “too political”.
“This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” They ask.
He says that God’s word and spirit have come in the flesh, among them, teaching them. But not everyone believes. And because of that, it’s God who brings us to the truth. God brings us on this journey.
And when they hear this?
“Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”
They Turn Away
Notice how they turn away. It’s not only because following Jesus is hard, but because Jesus teaches them that it would be. It’s a lot like saying “Did he really just say that? I’m outta here!”
But there’s another, more challenging dimension. One that neither they nor we, want to explore. That God is already working in the world and it isn’t all up to them. Apparently, they didn’t like hearing that.
And apparently, God didn’t want them there.
Seeing nearly everyone abandon Jesus is a devastating thought. Especially because this is the one thing we don’t want to face about Jesus: that he wasn’t some magical unifier. Or that the great number of the world that truly believed counted no more than 12.
And like a shot to the gut, twice in these few verses, Jesus refers to the one who will betray him. Even this 12 isn’t really 12.
Abandoning Christ
How easily we divide. How easily we abandon the way of Christ because it’s hard or because Jesus is telling us something we don’t want to hear. We count ourselves disciples and then check out when we’re challenged.
More troubling still to think that God does this.
Maybe.
Or perhaps, we flip this perspective on its head.
That perhaps it isn’t God sorting the people, but that God invites us. God provokes us. God pulled these people out of their ordinary lives to witness the very divine in their midst.
And when God came, she came as a man from a poor family, to teach and heal and love the world into a new order. And we, the students were too afraid, too selfish, too full of ourselves to see it or hear it.
Too full of certainty and our own convictions to hear the truth.
So we turned our backs on him. And blamed him for it.
But we couldn’t leave it that.
No, that wouldn’t do. We have to prove how right we were/are. So we doubled down on divinity and God’s power. We built theology which argued that we didn’t abandon Jesus, God made it so Jesus had to die! Check the ledger! That totally gets us off the hook!
Then from generation to generation, we passed on more and more justification. Our favorite, of course, is that old Augustinian chestnut of original sin. An idea Calvin loved so much because it somehow manages to take the blame off of God and the people at the same time! We’re just bad!
We turned away from Jesus because following him is hard and we’ve spent 2000 years deluding ourselves to suggest we wouldn’t.
We’re all just like Peter, saying I’d never do that to you, Jesus! until the cock crows.
The One Good Option
This isn’t the end of the story in John, but it has a finality to it. It’s a lot like the end of The Fellowship of the Ring where they know they have to keep moving, but they don’t know how. They’re all scattered.
But the beautiful turn is easily missed by the magnitude of the pain. Even as Jesus knows who will leave him, he still asks those who stayed if they’re really staying.
And Peter’s “to whom could we go” isn’t fatalistic to my ears, though I know why one might read it that way. Who would take them on now that they’ve got the taint of Jesus on them?
But he says instead that there was always only one choice. He’s showing them the way to God. How could they want anything else? This is the fulfillment of belief.
Action Learning
The Bread of Life Discourse in John begins way back with the Feeding of the Multitudes. A miracle moment which weds the heavenly and earthly. It is both miraculous multiplication by God and faithful service by the 12 disciples which feed thousands of people.
And this moment is defining and unifying — as followers of Christ and as servants of Christ. They become disciples to learn and apostles to do; both. Always both. Learning and acting. Acting and learning.
So this Bread of Life Discourse culminates, in a mass exodus for most of the disciples and a true come to Jesus moment for the twelve. Because what all those other disciples thought they were doing was following someone who was taking them to God and these 12 were learning where to look for God.
They didn’t just carry baskets of bread, they became the baskets for bread. They knew where to look!
Martin Luther wrote that we shouldn’t just
“grope for [God] everywhere. Grope, rather, where the Word is.”
Blessed
God didn’t come to us to trick us into believing. No need for reverse psychology or puffery to distort the message.
But that’s what we’ve been doing for thousands of years. We get in the way of it. We make it easier to communicate. Easier to hear. Perhaps even easier to follow Jesus. But it’s all a justification for what we don’t want to face.
Our certainty and traditions all come out as bigotry and pain; our justifications and exclusions all come out as cover-up and scandal. The brokenness of humanity is an excuse to abandon the blessedness given by God.
Blessed to serve and give and share. Blessed to gather around a table and to eat together as one. We are blessed to know God in the flesh and blessed to serve God in ways that help others know God in the flesh.
We are truly blessed. Blessed with the invitation to follow Jesus, blessed to work with the Holy Spirit to make this community the manifestation of God’s great kin-dom. Blessed to make this church a learning lab for love.
We are blessed! Ditch those old excuses; the manipulation to build unity. We don’t need that junk. But we need Jesus. Don’t turn your back on him. Or each other. Follow him. Be blessed by him.
Because we are. We are blessed by him and blessed with him.
We’re blessed with Jesus who doesn’t tell us what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.
We’re blessed with the truth. And may we continue to be blessed to hear it.