PRAYER: Savior of our lives, we often find ourselves at a point at which we must make a choice. In following you, we’ve made a choice. Be among us this day as we renew our pledge to be your followers. Strengthen and affirm us in our faith, and may the words offered here bring glory to your name alone, for we choose to be your children. Amen.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I love the movie A League of Their Own. It’s a great movie – somewhat fictionalized and romanticized about the real life All Girls Professional Baseball League that came into being during World War II. There’s a line in the movie that is – in my humble opinion – one of the best movie lines of all time, and no, I don’t mean “There’s no crying in baseball!”
Towards the end of the movie, Dotty, the main character played by Gina Davis is leaving the team when her husband comes home from the war. As she’s getting into the car, the manager – the Tom Hanks character – comes over to confront her because she didn’t tell him she was leaving. He asks her why and she tells him, “It just got too hard.” And Tom Hanks replies, “It’s supposed to be hard. Hard is what makes it great. If it were easy, everyone would do it.” What a great line! I think one of my proudest moments as a parent was when one of my daughters was struggling to accomplish something – I don’t even remember what it was anymore – but to demonstrate her determination to accomplish her goal, she quoted that line from A League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard. Hard is what makes it great. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”
For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been in the sixth chapter of John. This chapter has been challenging for disciples of Jesus for a very long time. The language Jesus uses here pushes us to the edge of – if not beyond – our comfort zones.
In calling himself the Bread of Life, Jesus makes very clear that he comes from God. As followers of Jesus, we are God’s children; we also come from God. The Bread of Life as the gift of life here and now and the promise of life in a resurrected and ascended future makes a statement about our past, not with the intent to expunge the past, rewrite its truth, or beg its forgiveness but to see it for what it was, to tell its truth, and to lean into the possibility that it can see a new truth about our own origins in light of our present and promised future. It leans into the hard part of our faith, recognizing the difficult truths that we must face both individually and collectively.
And as he calls himself the Bread of Life, Jesus’ words remind us of the Last Supper, and that when we take the bread of life into our selves, we are choosing community over isolation. The act of taking the bread of life into our very DNA is the act of taking on the love that God has for all of humanity as our own. It is something that we have to claim as our own, while holding aside a piece of that for others – to be used to make another batch of bread – eternal life – for others to take into themselves. It’s part of the reason why, in the United Methodist Church, the sacraments of Baptism and Communion are always done in community. These are not acts accomplished alone.
The first few verses of our reading this week are actually an overlap from last week, verses 56-58: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
Those verses that overlap from last week are the end of the Bread of Life discourse from Jesus. Without those three verses at the beginning, bread isn’t even a topic of conversation in these concluding verses of today’s reading. That should be a big clue that something else is going on here, something that should make us reread the entire chapter with new eyes, something that might just elicit a response like that of the disciples. Because what comes next beginning in verse 59 – this is where it all comes to fruition for us. This is where many of Christ’s disciples, as we see in the midst of this, decide that this whole ‘following Jesus’ thing… it’s just too hard.
Jesus finishes his discourse and then, the author of John reveals – maybe just as an aside – that Jesus had said all of this while he was teaching in a synagogue. This chapter started on the side of a hill, and now we’re in a synagogue!
In one paragraph, he’s on the side of a mountain feeding thousands of people, on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, and now he’s in a synagogue, a prayer center… a church. And this is the point in the story that everyone there, at the end of the message has a choice: to heed the words spoken… or not. The Rabbi finished teaching and a group of his own disciples got up and left because, as it says in verse 60, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” It just got too hard.
I remember a time in a church that Anna and I attended for a while when our two eldest were still toddlers. Our pastor at the time wrote a liturgy that did not sit well with one of our fellow church members. It was a liturgy of confession addressing a particular systemic issue that, frankly has existed since the beginning of time and has always been a source of dehumanization of others: war. One member of the church took issue with the wording in this liturgy. He stood up at the conclusion of the prayer, spoke out against it and left the church. His point was understandable perhaps but narrow in scope. You see, he was looking at this confession and taking issue that he personally had nothing to atone for. He couldn’t see the bigger picture of community, of a cultural connection with others. He only saw his own actions or lack thereof and saw himself blameless. The lesson of the prayer of confession was too hard for him. It was too broad for him in his narrow margins, where he couldn’t see beyond his own personal borders. It was too hard.
Hard is what makes our faith worth having. If it were easy, don’t you think we would all have it? Faith is hard. It’s hard for us to see beyond our own selves and into the despair of others. It’s hard for us to lift our heads up and confess to that which hurts others – especially if we, as individuals, were not active participants in the dehumanization of others. But worshipping Jesus means that we must recognize our connection with the rest of creation and acknowledge – faithfully acknowledge where we all have fallen short of the glory of God.
We know that many of Jesus’ followers believed that Jesus was going to overthrow the Roman occupiers and install himself as King. They were counting on that. They saw him as a political leader who would forge a great victory over the Roman oppressors. We know that Judas made some references to that very expectation. And there are many who believe that Judas set in motion the events that led to Jesus’ crucifixion, not to get rid of him, but as a way to get Jesus to hurry up the timetable of him taking over as king.
This moment in the synagogue was – perhaps for many of Jesus’ followers – an awakening. Wait a minute, this teaching is difficult. This isn’t what we thought we were getting into. This is much harder. We want Jesus to do the heavy lifting of getting rid of Pilate so that we can take it easy and have everything we want.
And so they left. They left! This wasn’t what they thought it was… It’s too hard, and they left!
Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. He taught the people in the synagogue that he is the bread of life. The Word made flesh is the Bread of Life. The flesh of Jesus was bound up in the life-giving Spirit-filled words – the Word of God. The followers of God were being invited to receive God’s offer of Spirit-filled bread that endures. That invitation to a spirit-filled bread that endures is much harder to comprehend than a political victory or a victory based in violence.
The flesh without the Spirit dies. The Spirit without the flesh denies the incarnation. But together, they create life. The entire gospel of John proclaims that a divine Jesus became flesh, died, was resurrected, and returned to God. It seems so simple, and yet it can be too hard for some.
Jesus knew that not all of his followers would accept his teachings. A recurring theme within chapter 6 of John is that God offers life, but people have a choice. The divine Jesus, the word made flesh, offered himself as the Bread of Life. Some people remained faithful. Others found the offer to be too hard to accept. Jesus asked the twelve if they too would leave. Peter responded, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” So Peter and the others chose to remain faithful. And I’ll point out here that Judas was one of them. He chose to remain.
Our life of faith, living as disciples of Jesus, re-presenting Jesus to the world is often difficult. We’d like to think it’s something as easy as believing in our hearts and minds in the truth of Jesus as savior, without the part about Jesus the bread of life being a part of who we are, being engrained into our DNA as a people, changing the trajectory of our lives, and inspiring us to seek God’s justice for others. It’s easy when our faith is about us… me. But when our faith becomes about helping others, recognizing the communal sin of racism, war, economic disparity, hate… it can get pretty hard. When we have to live as Christ’s disciples, offering Jesus’ compassion and solidarity to those people that don’t live the way we do. That’s when we fall off. That’s often when we say, “This is too hard.”
Think about what sin was committed by those followers of Jesus who had decided that his teachings were too hard. What was their particular sin? It was the same sin that would eventually be committed by Judas. And Peter. And frankly, all of us at one time or another. They – we – abandoned Jesus. We often reject Jesus – the Jord made flesh that is the bread of life, and we abandon Jesus just as those followers did. Often because being a disciple of Jesus – living and leaning into the Beatitudes, offering of ourselves fully as Jesus did as the bread of life, living the way of the cross… is just too hard.
Jesus calls us all – as one community – to risk leaving our comfort zones for a chance at rising to new life. He’s calling us to follow the living Word into places and situations that we might not want to go, to risk having our hearts broken by the same things that break God’s heart. We find the Promised Land when we risk the wilderness. How can we possibly have victory in Jesus if we’re not also experiencing the risk of loss? When we decide it’s too hard, we return to stagnation and slavery to sin and death.
Remember that movie line? “It’s supposed to be hard. Hard is what makes it great. If it were easy, everyone would do it.” Well, maybe that line doesn’t completely fit within the framework of Christian theology, but I can promise you this: Faith is hard. But with Christ, we never walk alone. It may be the hard choice to follow Christ, but we NEVER walk alone. Maybe when we recognize that following the way of compassion and love leads to a fuller life, then we can be able to respond as Peter did, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words to eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
In our life of faith, we seek to build community because community is what the lifeblood of church is. We seek to build community because the alternative is unacceptable to us. If you want to call that hard, I won’t argue with you. Perhaps another word would be ‘obedient’.
In the life of faith, we constantly have a choice to make. “It’s just too hard.” Or “You, Jesus, have the words to eternal life, to whom can we go?” I can tell you that God has chosen you. You’re invited to choose Greatness because the hard is what makes it great. Choose the Bread of Life. It’s really not a hard choice.
To God be the glory.