When I was little, I stayed with Mrs. Carolyn Evans during the summer while my dad traveled as a welder and my mom worked as a secretary at a trucking company. Mrs. Evans had a green station wagon, and Jason Knecht and I and a couple of other kids rode in the back facing out that window as she took us to the movies and to Dairy Queen and to the pool at the high school in my little hometown. She took us to the pool one hot summer day, and I’d went to the end of the pool at the corner and walked down the stairs into the pool. Jason asked me why I didn’t jump in and I said I liked going in slowly because the water was too shockingly cold. The truth was I didn’t know how. I was terrified watching other kids jump in because they always went under. Sure, they’d bob back up. But they went under! What if I went under and didn’t come back up? So I’d trot (we couldn’t run) to the corner and go in slowly.
In our gospel passage this morning, Jesus is engaging with the crowds of people who are following him, as he has been doing for many, many weeks. But today, in this reading, something changes. There is a response on the part of those following Jesus. Listen to what one of the followers says: “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
So, the followers who struggle with the behaviors of Jesus feel that these teachings are too difficult to accept, they turn away and leave. But their leaving is much more profound than the fear of jumping into the swimming pool for a 6 year old. As far as we know, they turned away from Jesus.
Imagine…. These followers have been with Jesus as he fed the 5,000, as he healed the woman of her bleeding illness, as he raised the Roman soldier’s daughter from death. These followers have seen it ALL. They’ve talked to the Savior of the world, the very Son of God. And they walk away!
But before we dive into (see what I did there… “dive into” LOL), we need to look at the words of Jesus for a minute. Jesus says “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood…” Remember that for the Jewish faith, a dead body is corruption. A dead body is unclean. A dead body is vile. So, when Jesus says that they need to eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to live is absolutely contradictory to what they have been taught. And then Jesus comes back by saying that his words he has spoken are spirit and life. Given these two opposing ideas, we can absolutely understand why the people are saying that this teaching is difficult!
Those that stay are drawn together as a community of faith. It isn’t a creed or a mission statement or a building or a history in their community that connects them and commits them. Instead, it is their belief in something too incredible to explain and in a man too mysterious and beautiful to reject that draws them into community.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder what happened to those who turned away. What was the final straw in their minds that made them leave? I ask this question of them as I look up into my own world in this moment. There is so much pain and fear and grief. Refugees fleeing their homes and countries because of war and environmental disasters. Friends and families sick with illness and dying in isolation. Parents sending children to school with school shootings on the rise. Loved ones who choose addiction over grace. A man wanting to lead a country while choosing deception and misogyny and yet the people follow. A woman wanting to lead a country choosing war and genocide and yet the people follow. This teaching is difficult; who can accept it. There is so much that could draw us away, draw us apart from one another.
I did jump in the pool. It wasn’t graceful like Esther Williams. I bobbed back up to the surface. And I was so excited! I did it! I made it back up alive!
And no one noticed. No one cheered for me.
In our own grief or pain or anger or fear, we could stop. We could resist. We could reject. Life, especially life in these current days, is uncertain enough. We turn on the news or scroll through the internet and see much that can overshadow our hope. As NT Wright says regarding those who turned away, “It was more that what he had said made a huge hole in their world-view, and when that happens some people prefer not to think about it anymore.”
There’s a podcast that I’ve been listening to called Science and Non-Duality. Stephen Jenkinson called what many of us have “hydroponic spirituality.” Spirituality without the depth, the dirt, the awareness of and experience with the micro-deaths of life. As Dawn Wilhelm says, “The more we realize that faith calls us to consume the body and blood of Christ, to embrace his death and resurrection and to emulate his manner of living and dying for others, the more difficult the journey of faith becomes.” When we partake of the body and blood, we must die to that within us that not of love, not of grace, not of truth, not of compassionate relationship.
Jesus has been teaching and showing them that it is the marginalized who will be raised up, the last will be first, the rich man must give up everything he finds precious in order to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. The men must put down their stones because the woman was most certainly not in the bed by herself. The followers want the reward without the work. They want the rules because they can control the rules, and it enables them to use the rules to oppress. It’s much easier to follow the reliability of rules than it is to live in compassion and forgiveness and empathy and vulnerability because the membrane between law and love is permeable. But, ultimately, as Jesus both teaches and shows, love supersedes law. Jesus teaches this truth time and time and time again. Love over law
And yet, each one of us here continues to be present. Continues to show up. Continues to join. And I have to ask the question that only you, within your own heart, can answer. Why are you here? Why do you stay? Why do you pray? Why do you believe? Why do you keep showing up when sometimes no one cheers for you…when no one gives you what you really wish you could receive?
CS Lewis said in A Grief Observed, “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the city of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.” Jesus isn’t Episcopalian. He isn’t Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran or any other religion. Jesus isn’t this building of All Saints Episcopal Church in McAlester. Jesus isn’t a demure dogma, a set of rules or doctrine that is undeniably true. Instead, Jesus is Truth. For each of us, the answer to the questions I asked just now could be something different. But the core of our response is Jesus. His actions, his behaviors, his compassion and love and purity are what draws us to him and what keeps us together. And, as NT Wright continued to offer, “Jesus is the Word made flesh, and it is his body and blood that are the vehicles of the inner life of the Word.”
As we sit in the presence of pain and uncertainty, we do have hope. We do have the fact of love. And, as we look around, we are not alone.
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