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.
