We have come to believe and know.....
The Fourteenth Sunday
after Pentecost
Proper 16 - Year B
John 6:56-69
… Jesus asked the
twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom
can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know
that you are the Holy One of God.”
Do you remember “One
Way - Jesus” T shirts? Did
you ever own one? I might have, back in the day.
If not, I owned other
equally enthusiastic proclamations of my new found Christian
faith. I certainly had friends who wore those T shirts emblazoned
with a hand with a single finger pointing to the sky and the words “One
Way” and “Jesus” written around it.
We were converts on a
narrow road. It said more about us, though, than it did about Jesus.
The 1970’s were an
interesting decade of spiritual enterprise on the west coast of North America –
incense sticks, patchouli oil, LSD, Maharishis and blacklight
posters. The West Coast was full of hippies, even long after
hippiedom had begun to wane elsewhere. Some hippies became Jesus
People. Some Jesus People fell away from the Christian tradition
completely. Some of them moved into rigorous Baptist or Pentecostal
churches. Some of those Jesus People gravitated to traditional
churches in time and developed a love of historic liturgy and a more nuanced
approach to the outside world. There are now bishops in the Anglican
tradition who, if persuaded, might dig around in their boxes of old photos and
find one of some long-haired teenager, or young adult, sitting around with his
chums on a Vancouver or Seattle park bench in 1974 and wearing a “one
way - Jesus” T shirt.
One way. One
thing to do. One road in or out. One tool in the
toolbox. One answer to any question.
You’d do your level best
to avoid being in a situation like that. If one of your adult
children were to phone you and say “Dad, I’m in a situation where there
appears to be only one thing I can do” you’d later grumble (out loud
or to yourself) that this was clearly a result of bad planning. In a
perfect world we keep our options open: right or left, basic or enhanced, paper
or plastic, manual or automatic. We sit back. We choose.
If the religious
offering is one of ideas, then yes. You pick and
choose. You bash ideas around. The Gospel is proclaimed
in a marketplace, cheek to jowl with other ideas about divinity and morality. Christian
preaching can, and has been over the years, threatening and manipulative – this
must be both resisted and repented of. We deny men and women the
integrity of choosing. Christian "belonging" has often, at the
same time, been a matter of following in the footsteps of clan or family.
No choice is ever made.
The treasure in the Gospel message is not the path taken by men and women and their proud ownership of that bit of trail but what God has offered which is, in fact, God and his Kingdom. The leading edge of what God is doing is the offering of a person, who is, in real terms, God’s own self. Our Gospel reading this afternoon ends with the smallest subset of Jesus’ hearers – his own twelve disciples - who have not drifted away when the words of Jesus became difficult.
The person of Jesus – their road.
The Body and Blood of Christ – their nourishment.
His death and resurrection – their future.
There is much here to question
and much to be troubled about but they remain persuaded. Their certainty
is not that of a newcomer and their presence beside him is no family tradition. Jesus
can see the struggle on their faces and so he asks them a question which points
to the ever-open exit door.
“Do you also wish to go away?” he asks. And yet they remain.
“We have come to
believe” they say.
There is no easy
answer. The disciples have struggled and that struggle has been
answered positively by experience.
You men and women here
this afternoon deserve the very same space. Use it well.
