How Much Jesus Can You Take?

John 6:56-69

Several months ago at St. Andrew’s Chatsworth we had a movie night.  Le film du jour was A Case for Christ in which Christian writer Lee Strobel tells the story of how he and his wife, Leslie, became followers of Jesus.  Strobel was an award winning investigative journalist with the Chicago Tribune in the early 1970’s.  He was also an atheist.  That changed.  Today he stands as the author of many best-selling books written from the perspective of an investigative journalist concerning the factual proof of biblical things.

The change begins one evening when Lee, Leslie, and their daughter were at a restaurant celebrating an award he had just received when their daughter began to choke on a gumball.  A woman, an off-duty nurse, rushed to their aid and dislodged the gumball.  Afterwards she tells Leslie that she and her husband had every intention of going to a different restaurant that night but the Lord had compelled her to go to this one and now she knew why.

The experience really moved Leslie and so she sought the woman out and began to attend church with her.  The next thing you know Leslie is all in.  She’s in church every Sunday morning and mid-week Bible study every week.  She reads the Bible daily taking notes and prays.  She starts to change. 

Lee, on the other hand, he thinks Leslie has gone off the deep end.  So, he decides to use his skills as an investigative journalist to debunk the Jesus story and get his wife and life as he knew it back.  He goes all in on aggressively pursuing every angle he could think of.  Did Jesus really live?  Did he really die by crucifixion?  Was he raised from the dead?  Is the Bible historically reliable?  Every question he could think of he investigated thoroughly only to find that it was he himself who was getting uprooted and debunked by Jesus.  He began drinking heavily and skipping out on work to go interview people he thought could prove his case…historians, doctors, psychologists, Bible scholars…only to find that when you consider the evidence, the case “for” Christ is stronger than the case “against” Christ.  Finally, after the death of his own father, with whom he had a strained relationship, Strobel himself started to pray.  The evidence awakened him to faith and he came alive in Christ.

There’s one scene in the movie that sticks out to me.  One morning while Leslie was having her devotional time the Lord gave her a Scripture that gave her hope that Lee would come around.  Lee was gone a lot in his crusade against Jesus and when he was around he was drunk and belligerent towards her.  It is often the case that those who are closest to new Christians will emotionally and psychologically persecute new believers because they don’t understand what is happening and don’t want to lose what they got.  Yet, Leslie stood on that word, did her best to reach out to Lee, and as we know he eventually came around.

I can relate to Leslie.  When I was 19, I went all in like she did.  I went to church Sunday morning and evening and Bible Study on Wednesday.  I read the Bible a lot and took notes.  There were times I sensed God was speaking to me.  I started talking about going into the ministry.  My parents, siblings, and grandparents all thought I was going crazy.  One day my father pulled me aside to have a talk with me and intimated that I might be a little too much into this and advised me that if I ever felt like it was getting to be too much, it was okay if I stepped back from it. 

Culturally, I had crossed a line in the sand as to how much Jesus one can partake.  Had it been that I was into making a buck and started working three jobs so that I was working all the time nobody would have said a thing.  But since I was putting the same effort towards Jesus, people were “concerned”.  Back then, culturally speaking, belief in God and going to church was something “good” people should do.  Yet, there was this line in the sand that if you cross it, people viewed your faithfulness as a psychological weakness.

 I crossed that line.  I knew Jesus was my only hope in life.  I was just being as faithful as I could be. Through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, I had met Jesus and in him I felt God the Father’s love.  Only months before God, Jesus and church and all that were just beliefs to me, but through the course of certain events all of a sudden I knew that God is real and living and that Jesus is the way to true life just as Jesus says in our passage from John: “Just as the ‘living’ Father sent me, and I ‘live’ because of the Father, so whoever eats me will ‘live’ because of me.”  Call it psychological weakness if you like, but I know what it is to stand in the grace and power of the living God and live.

Looking further at our reading from John, Jesus is working the line in the sand as to how much of him God’s people were willing to take.  He drew the line with that miraculous feeding the day before when he fed roughly 15,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish.  That feeding demonstrated he was Israel’s Messiah and somehow God in their midst and now they had to respond. 

To the synagogue authorities, the bastions of cultural religion in Israel, who weren’t there at the feeding but have since shown up to pass judgement on Jesus, Jesus said to them that he is their Manna in the wilderness that’s going to sustain them.  He is the Passover lamb that’s going to save them.  But they were too entrenched in the power they had over people through enforcing cultural religion and norms to stand on true faith in God by going all in with Jesus.  They wouldn’t cross the line and accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

Then, there was the crowd of disciples who were following Jesus all over to see what he would do next.  The crowd of followers saw reason to hope in him.  They had been expecting one whom the prophet Daniel had called the Son of Man who sat at the right hand of God to come and deliver them from foreign oppressors and set up the kingdom of God.  They were the great multitude who ate the loaves and fish, but this Bread of Life discourse Jesus was spouting off – eat my flesh, drink his blood – was just a bit crazy to them.  They weren’t getting the metaphor.  Then Jesus calls himself the Son of Man and the realization hits them that they really are going to have to live for Jesus if they are going to have the Holy Spit-filled life of God’s Kingdom.  Oddly, they can’t cross that line, it’s too costly and seems crazy to accept that their God was really in their midst in Jesus keeping the promises he made to his people through his prophets.  So, they go back to the security of life as they are comfortable with it.  Jesus cuts his loses and says no one is able to come to him unless the Father grants it.

Jesus then turned the Twelve – Peter, James, John, Andrew (the Presbyterian), etc. – who had left everything to follow him and had been with him night and day for a couple of years.  He said to them, “Do you also wish to go away?” “Et tu, Brutus”.  (You need to know some Shakespeare to understand the Bible.)  Well, the Twelve had already crossed the line.  They know Jesus is the Holy One of God and their allegiance is totally to him.  We can’t say they understood Jesus or fully grasped what he was up to, but as Peter says where else could they turn for “life” – life made full by the Spirit of God.  They want the life Jesus has to offer.  There’s some intense devotion, allegiance to Jesus in these men.

But what about us?  What about each of us?  There is true life, eternal life, life-giving relationship with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.  Yet, how much Jesus can we take?  Can we cross that line in the sand that requires singular devotion to Jesus?  Can we cross over even if it means that those closest to us will think we’re crazy?  Will we cross the line and give Jesus the time of day to sit with him and the Scriptures and other disciples and let him speak to us and actually believe that he is speaking to us?  Will we believe him rather than simply beliefs about him?  Will we cross the line and live according to Jesus’ standards rather than just being good people who go to church because that’s what good people do to check their moral compasses?  Or, will we keep our distance because this word is to hard only to find our hearts hardened?  How much Jesus can you take?  Amen.

The Feast of Eternal Life

John 6:51-58

Can you think of a highpoint experience in your life when you felt most fully alive and engaged?  I can think of a few.  Two were travel seminars.  In university got to take a study tour Mexico to study and experience the culture.  In Seminary I went to the Middle East, and saw more than just Israel.  I got to experience Syria, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula, and Greece as well. 

These trips were invigorating for me and life changing.  I got to see, taste, smell, touch, and hear the sights, tastes, smells, textures, and sounds of people and cultures very different from my own.  The size of the groups I went with was small so that new friendships formed and I discovered that people actually liked me.  That’s good news for a guy who is otherwise quite shy.  For some odd reason I got asked to preach while on these trips.  I’ve preached in rural Mexico and I’ve preached in Damascus in the house of Ananias, the man the Lord sent to open Paul’s eyes.  I got to ride a camel up Mt. Sinai at four in the morning to watch the sun come up.

Those two study trips were times when I felt fully alive and engaged. Yet, as good as those experiences were for me that kind of feeling fully alive is not what Jesus meant when he said, “Those who gnaw on my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life and I will raise them up on the last day.”

Before saying anything more here, I have to clarify a few of things.  First, Jesus is not suggesting we literally eat his flesh and drink his blood.  He’s rather using an offensive analogy to make his point to the Jewish religious authorities who hate him anyway.  Yes, Jesus has lost his patience and is being rude.  This long speech Jesus is giving about him being the Bread of Life comes right after he fed over 15,000 with five loves of bread and two fish.  He proved himself to be Israel’s Messiah, indeed God in their midst, but the religious authorities just could not let go of their religious power and accept him as the One.  So, Jesus is going all out here to get under their skin.  “I’m to food of life.  Gnaw on my flesh like your trying to get to those tiny little bits of meat tucked away in the nooks and crannies of a T-bone steak.  Drink my blood like a Pagan.  Only those who cannibalize me can have the eternal life that is mine to give…MINE to give”

The analogy Jesus is creating here definitely points to animal sacrifice in general and the Passover sacrifice in particular.  In ancient Israel you only ate meat that was taken to the priest and sacrificed to God in thanks or in repentance.  You didn’t just kill it and eat it.  Taking life of an animal was a sacred thing.  You took it to the priest.  The priest offered it up and of course kept a portion.  Then you took it home and shared it among the extended family in a celebratory meal, a feast.  Eating flesh was a sacred, communal thing. Passover is the best example of this and Passover is important in John’s Gospel because Jesus dies during Passover.  Everyone in a household ate the meat of the Passover sacrifice.  It was something families did together.  To this day the Passover meal is the most important meal Jewish families share together.

Drinking blood, on the other hand, was something you never did in ancient Israel.  Pagans did it, but not the people of God.  Israelites believed that the blood was the life of the animal and so they priest burned it on the altar to return it to God.  On Passover, of course we know that they painted the blood of the sacrifice on their doorposts so that the angel of death would pass over their houses and only strike the Egyptian firstborn.   When Jesus says “drink my blood” he means taking his very life, his saving life into one self.  The only reasonable thing he can be referring to here is the presence of the Holy Spirit in, with, and among us.  Being personally filled with the Holy Spirit was what the Jews were expecting in the age to come when the Messiah returned and established the Kingdom of God and put the world to right.

A second thing to clarify is that this life filled with the Holy Spirit in the Age to Come in which God has put things to right is part of what Jesus means when he says “eternal life” which we can have a taste of now in him instead of having to wait for him to return to receive it.  Unfortunately, the church over the centuries has totally bought its definition of the word “eternal” from the Greek philosophers rather than the Hebrew writers of the Bible.  We like to think of eternal in terms of time so that eternal means timeless and eternal life simply means entering into a timeless, spiritual, disembodied realm after we die.  That’s not biblical.  In fact, in John 17:3 Jesus defines eternal life.  He says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus the Christ whom you have sent.”  He says this after just a few paragraphs before talking about sending the Holy Spirit to his disciples. Eternal life is not timeless existence.  It is knowing God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ whom we encounter in the presence of the Holy Spirit whom he has sent who is with, among, and in us right now.  The eternal life of the Age to Come is with us now – life filled with knowing God, healed of Sin and Death, and put right.

To patch all this together I would like to revisit my original question.  I asked can you think of a highpoint experience in your life when you felt most fully alive and engaged?  Let me ask this question in a different way – Can you think of times in your life when you have felt most full of eternal life, when you’ve known God was with you, healing your brokenness, and putting things right in your life?  To put it in the offensive terms Jesus used – Can you think of times in your life when you were eating Jesus flesh and drinking his blood?

I first experienced this feast of eternal life back in my university days in what we called discipleship groups.  I met together weekly with five other students.  We had Bible study, shared what was going on with us each – our struggles and hurts, and we prayed for each other.  The presence of the Holy Spirit was with us in those meetings.  You could feel Him.  Over the course of a few months we all found ourselves being healed of deep hurts and our lives falling into order.

Over the years I’ve learned to abide in Jesus and to know that he abides in me.  It is somewhat easier for ministers in this respect.  Having to prepare a weekly sermon I really get to gnaw on the Scriptures.  I get to gather with you folks and worship every week.  I get to visit and pray with and for you folks.  I get to see our Lord be remarkably faithful to you.  Church isn’t just something I come to because I’m a good person and this is what good people do to be better.  Church is the context of eternal life for me.  My life in Christ ministering with and among you even though we would appear to be dying institution is a taste of eternal life.  

The feast of eternal life is in each of our churches.  When have you felt most full of eternal life, when you’ve known God was with you, healing your brokenness, and putting things to right in you life?  Amen.