JOHN 6:56-69
56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 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.” 59 He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.
The Words of Eternal Life
60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” 61 But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. 65 And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.”
66 Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. 67 So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”[a]
The wonderful thing about John’s gospel is that it is so descriptive and so, explanatory that you know exactly what is going on. But it does… go on a bit! If you have one of those ‘Red Letter’ bibles that prints all the words that Jesus says in red ink rather than black, you can see just how much Jesus talks in John’s gospel, sometimes it’s pages at a time!
Once again in the reading for today we hear of Jesus being the bread of life, and that we are to eat his flesh and drink his blood. We saw in previous weeks how difficult others found this teaching… how can Jesus make such crazy claims, by what authority does he do it; And we see that here as well, many choose to leave him, rather than find out the answer; And not just the pharisees, or the general populace, but some of his own followers decide to leave him.
Jesus uses these defections to ask of his very own twelve apostles, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ and Peter replies with those profound words “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
These words are some of the most profound declarations of faith that we have in the scriptures. They don’t just mean, ‘Jesus you’re really special you are,’ No. In the Old Testament God himself is described as, ‘The Holy One of Israel.’ And so, Peter in acknowledging Jesus when he says ‘[w]e have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God’ he is saying that the person of Jesus belongs in the same category as God. He is… God himself! Peter knows in his heart, that there is nowhere else he can go to find God, there is nowhere else he can go to know God’s salvation. And yet, we need to remember that in his human weakness that we all share, when push came to shove came and Jesus was arrested, he himself denies that he ever knew him. We need to remember that, that even in the presence of God incarnate, we can still say, ‘I don’t know you.’
In the churches tradition passed down to us, we know that most of the disciples were killed for their faith. They believed, they truly believed, that Jesus was who he said he was, that in him was salvation. And from the small beginnings of a Jewish sect in first century Palestine, that faith has become the largest faith in the world for hundreds and hundreds of years.
According to the church’s tradition, Peter was crucified upside down. In the West these days, it’s quite difficult to think of somebody believing in something so strongly that they are willing to die for it. In our ‘live and let live’ moral landscape we hold things quite lightly. Any claims of exclusivity are met with charges of bigotry. Yet notice that these are not in the sphere of the sciences, there is not ‘I have my physics and you have your physics,’ but it is in the moral sphere and the faith sphere, ‘you have your beliefs and I have my believes. We can’t criticise each other’s beliefs, each are equally valid.
This is especially true of morality, we live in a society today where, “I have my morals, and you have your morals and there is no way to distinguish which ones are right and which ones are wrong, it is all down to personal opinion.” I have had conversations with people who, when I said that what the Nazis did to the Jews and Slavs, and Gypsies, gay people and all the others that they killed, no not killed, murdered. And the response was ‘well they thought it was right,’ as if that is an acceptable answer! This is the moral landscape that we inhabit.
To all this, Peter’s words ring like the sound of a great bell echoing through the ages, we are hearing the faintest echoes of right now. The tolling that says, ‘God is real, and Jesus Christ his son is the way to the salvation of our souls, we owe him our allegiance; he is the Holy One of God. The Christian confession, and that is what it is, it’s a confession, is that this man Jesus, who lived and walked about among us; who died, and was risen from the dead, who ascended into heaven, his is the Lord, God himself. What he says, goes; what he does, goes. We don’t know best, he knows best, we don’t just him, it is he who judges us, it is he that finds us wanting, not the other way around.
I’m reminded of the famous quote from C S Lewis the great writer and Christian thinker of the twentieth century and author of the Narnia series. He says this when he speaks about Jesus.
‘“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Now, there are criticisms of this statement, some would say that it’s a ‘false trilemma’ giving only three potential answers to who Jesus is when others are available. Others would say, well Jesus didn’t actually say that he was God in the bible. But again, when we see the words of Peter to Jesus, we see that he did understand. He understands that Jesus is the whole story.
What is that story?
Jesus claimed to be Israel’s messiah, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He did things which others said that only God should be able to do. He looked into Israel’s past and the promises of God to bring salvation and righteousness not just to Israel but to the whole world and saw it fulfilled not just in his teachings, not just in his miracles, but in his whole person, in his very being. Jesus saw in himself, the fulfilment of the promises that God made to his people, that David’s throne will have a king, who will rule forever, whose kingdom will have no end. he doesn’t rule just for a time, nor does he just rule on earth, but for all time, and for everybody everywhere. In other words, he reigns as the divine would reign, for he himself is indeed, divine.
If you have ever been to a baptism, a wedding or a funeral recently, you will have noticed that we talk an awful lot about Jesus Christ in all three of them. Yes, in a funeral, there is a eulogy to the person who has passed away, but the main focus, is the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. In a wedding, yes the couple come together in marriage, but that is only because God married his people in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In baptism, where we welcome new members into the Christian family, we do so acknowledging that Jesus is the light of the world, and in baptism as faithful believers, we have the forgiveness of our sins.
Jesus really is the whole story.
My invitation to you all, is to know this… really know who Jesus Christ is in your heart. Perhaps you have gone to church for years, and it hasn’t quite ‘clicked’ yet. Perhaps you feel that you need to recommit your allegiance to God, just as Peter did after he denied Jesus three times. Perhaps you are curious and want to know more. I invite you to open your heart and let Jesus in. Maybe you have felt your faith going stale, ask Jesus to reinvigorate you with a living faith.
Maybe you think that this is all nonsense, and that Jesus can’t be the way to God. If that is the case, I invite you to keep searching, and follow the footsteps of some of my great spiritual teachers C S Lewis and G K Chesterton, two of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, who were both Christians. Or even better, keep reading about Jesus in the bible. Look at what he says about himself, look at the impact he had on others. Look at his life, death and resurrection and make the decision for yourself. Is he your God?
May God bless you all in the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, the Holy One of God.
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