This Week: Proper 15B
Gospel: John 6:51-58
Spending the last several weeks in John 6, we get a sense of the fallout from the great miracle, the feeding of the multitudes. This is good and all, but people aren’t following Jesus for the right reasons and some are super critical of what he is up to. This isn’t merely a sign of Jesus’s greatness, but of human confusion.
My own experience of this is as a needed corrective to our own adoration of the miracle. We need to spend time with the confused and the misunderstanding masses, the mean-spirited critics, and even our own potential to misunderstand what is happening.
One thing that has put a clever spin on this whole sequence for me is to look at what we would have read if we stayed in Mark. We would have had a slightly different version of the miracle and the horror of Jesus walking on the water afterward. But we would have had a wonderful snippet about the disciples misunderstanding the bread. In that gospel, it is Jesus’s closest followers who show their misunderstanding of the miracle isn’t about wanting more bread, but fearing/forgetting the power of God in Jesus.
For me, I love these points of entry because it makes it easier for me to go we screw up here rather than put the misunderstanding on others: they screwed up by not following Jesus for the right reasons, for example.
What this helps me do for this week, however, is to place these religious leaders who are criticizing Jesus’s leadership in a position of being genuine leaders. Not heretics. Or the wrong kind—those people. Pharisees or Evangelicals. No, faithful people who love God and want to do what’s right are misunderstanding what Jesus is up to.
And guess what they do instead of trying to understand: they mock him.
A new spin on an ongoing debate
This brings up something I described in my reflections this week, which is to name that mocking and saying Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we should try to understand them better. I want to name a specific example of what I’m not saying by this.
If you’ve followed the Hillbilly Elegy discourse recently (and remember it from when the book was released), we probably encountered a similar spirit to this gospel—many sought to understand other people rather than mock them, so they read a book that could humanize an “other”. It was a virtuous move and one that I think was built on the right reasoning. And besides, it was super Jesusy to do that.
It also was contrived. Books like Hillbilly Elegy exploited sympathy to offer gross generalizations about people from different parts of the country like they are rare species of humans totally forgotten by civilization. It allowed some in power to paint them as “the real Americans” and “coastal elites” as fake.
In short, people got snookered. Real people existing in the world, changing with the world and influencing the world aren’t a lost civilization to discover. They vote in elections and influence politics and build businesses like those “fake” coastal elites.
But that being snookered isn’t the issue I’m taking with it. It is the idea that many of us were encouraged to understand other people and they chose to offer a fictionalized reality in response. It isn’t that our response was wrong, but that it didn’t get us better information.
Here, I need to say that the problem isn’t with Jesus’s teaching. At all. It is in the idea that we should blame ourselves for misunderstanding someone or for getting fed bad intel—that we are the only participants in a dialogue.
What I get from this gospel is not “you should feel bad for laughing at jokes that mock people of a different political position,” for example. It is that seeking to understand is so important that we should keep trying to understand when people’s actual responses don’t cut it.
Here’s an example
How often do you see a politician offer a predictable position on something only to offer a seemingly contradictory position on another? I suspect you’ll answer All the time.
People like to ask me why I think that is. I think because “we’re all hypocrites” doesn’t seem to cut it.
Sometimes it is just convenience. Or binary politics (they’re for that, so I’m against it). But usually the real answer can be found when we stop focusing on the particular of the arguments and think about emotions, vibes, and story. What is the story that people are trying to offer the world?
Often it is simply “I’m strong and I can protect you.” Or it is something like “I don’t want to think my Grandparents were bigots.”
When we realize that people have ulterior motives of protecting their own ideologies, cultural conclusions, or thinking processes from introspection, we find that the response the critics offer Jesus isn’t just mockery. It is an attempt to discredit him and demean him because they are worried he’ll destroy everything they care about. And given that, should we take their words literally?
Here are some ways I approach this text:
- Reflection
- Reflection on misunderstanding
- in-between