This Sunday in our morning worship, using John 6:60-69, we see Jesus answering questions from the crowds and disciples in the wake of his radical statements about who he is after feeding the 5,000.
Fifty-one years ago, the day after Britain joined the European Economic Community, Edward Heath, the Prime Minister at the time, made a speech at a banquet held in celebration of the event, with the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting by his side.
(In case you’re worried, let me say that I am not telling this story in order to make any kind of political point. Bear with me on this one – I am only telling this story to shed light on the Bible passage we have just read, John chapter 6 verses 60 to 69, and to introduce three questions and three answers contained in that reading.)
And this is part of what the Prime Minister said back then:
“Today we … have achieved a fresh unity in Europe, a unity for which humankind craves. Whether it is that unity that leads eventually to the nation-state, it is still something greater, something greater than themselves which humanity wants, something in which they themselves can share, which gives them their ultimate goal. And so we are creating a unity of a new kind.”(1)
I said I was not going to be making any kind of political point, and I genuinely mean it, I won’t. We must leave that to the politicians. Yet in speaking about “something greater than themselves which humanity wants, something in which they themselves can share, which gives them their ultimate goal”, the Prime Minister himself seems to have stopped talking politics and started talking theology, as if he were less P.M., more archbishop. At that very point in the speech, the actual Archbishop of Canterbury interjects by saying “hear, hear”. You can see it all on YouTube.
Whatever view we take of the last fifty years of European history, whether we are pro or anti, and whether or not we have a view at all, surely we should all be able to agree that the Prime Minister was claiming far too much in this speech. If it is the case that human beings in their very essence crave something greater than themselves, in which they themselves can share, which gives them their ultimate goal – if that is the case, then it was far and away too much for the Prime Minister to promise that European co-operation would provide the answer to that desire. That would be to turn politics into theology, and to make a man, or a movement, into a Messiah.
In the Bible reading we heard in church last week, a great crowd of people, having been fed by Jesus with bread and fish, start chasing him around in anticipation of obtaining more. He tells the crowd in John chapter 6 verse 33 that “the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world”, and then in verse 35 that he is the bread of life, and that anyone who comes to him will never go hungry, and anyone who believes in him will never be thirsty. Finally Jesus says, in verses 53 to 56, that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.”
What does Jesus mean by saying all this? Well, for one thing, he cannot be talking about receiving his body and blood in the Lord’s Supper, for the very good reason that Holy Communion had not yet been instituted. If he had been talking about Holy Communion, something that no-one knew anything about at that time, you might expect people in the crowd to respond by saying ‘This is a hard saying. Who can understand it?’ Yet that is not what they said. They appear to have understood all too well what Jesus was saying. Their response, and the first question of three I want to highlight from our Bible reading today, was in verse 60: ‘This is a hard saying. Who can accept it?’
So what did Jesus mean in saying “I am the bread of life – eat my flesh and drink my blood”? He meant essentially this: There is a unity for which humankind in its very essence needs … a need for something greater than themselves, something in which they themselves can share, which gives them their ultimate goal. That unity is to be found, and that goal is to be reached, by one means and by one means only, which is by being united to Christ. — Hear, hear! — ‘I am the bread of life. Eat my flesh and drink my blood’ means that he is the ultimate answer to all human need, and the true endpoint of every human aspiration.
All this is way past the politics of food supply. All this is from a man who is indeed the Messiah. Yet ‘I am the bread of life’ was a claim that is too big for many people to accept. The crowd were willing to follow Jesus all the while they thought a constant supply of bread and fish was on offer. Not so many followed once it was clear that he was calling for a deeper, closer, personal union: “eat my flesh, and drink my blood, remain in me, and I will remain in you”. I want your whole life, and in return I will give you my life. “From this time”, we read in verse 66, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him”.
And Jesus let them go. In verse 61 he asks the second of three questions in this passage: “Does this offend you?” He goes on to say, in effect, that if they were offended by these words, they would be likely to be even more offended by all those series of future events that would be inaugurated by the crucifixion and would culminate in the ascension.(2) Jesus knew, and said in verse 65, that no-one can come to him unless the Father has enabled him. He knew people well enough not to entrust himself to anyone, we read elsewhere in the Gospel of John, and he knew what was, and what was not, within their hearts (cf. John 2:24-25).
So he let go, those who wanted to go – and the question for him then became whether he would have any followers left at all. That is the third question in the passage, which is directed to the twelve who were closest to him, and appears in verse 67: ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’ What kind of leader would he be without followers? There would indeed come a time when all his disciples would flee in fear of their lives, when he was unjustly condemned to death and crucified. At that time he walked a lonely path, forsaken even by his Father as he bore the weight of the sin of the world upon his shoulders. Yet in our reading today, the apostle Peter articulates the faith the twelve had come to share, a faith that would be tested by the cross but renewed by the resurrection; a faith that would build a community of those who did not leave and go their own way, but who stayed put and stayed united under one common confession. That faith is expressed in three answers, given one after the other, which we read in verses 68 and 69.
First we read that Simon Peter answered Jesus, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go?’ Yes, I do know that this is another question, but here Peter is answering a question with another question. The answer is in the question: for those that have come to know Jesus, having been enabled by God to do so, there is no other like him to whom they may go. The biblical commentator Leon Morris writes: Why would anyone “who has come to know Jesus’ life-giving word … ever forsake him [?] When a person once knows Jesus, none else can satisfy.”(3)
‘To whom shall we go?’ is one of Peter’s rock-bottom statements, and we would do well to remember and repeat it whenever we are at or near rock-bottom. Even if in a thought experiment we did want to throw in the towel and depart from the path of Christian discipleship, to whom else would we go? Needy people may latch onto anything or anyone that comes along if they think their needs can be fulfilled by doing so, but we, having shared in the Holy Spirit and tasted the goodness of the word of God, cannot be content with that. What do we honestly think our options are? We must know, as Peter knows, that in the final analysis, Christ is all we have, and that we are good for nothing and for no-one else. Or, to state the matter more accurately, we must know that nothing and no-one else is good enough for us, and that is perfectly fine, because in Christ all the fullness of God dwells bodily, and we are complete in him (cf. Colossians 2:9-10).
The next answer given by Peter builds on what has gone before. ‘You have the words of eternal life’. He says this in recognition and acceptance of what Jesus has previously said in verse 63: “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life”. This is a recognition that we cannot gain life on our own. “If Jesus is divine revelation come down from heaven like bread to nourish people, his purpose is to communicate to them the principle of eternal life”.(4) We feed on him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving in the Word as much as we do in Holy Communion. Perhaps you know the old saying that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. This is itself a saying of Jesus Christ. So let us, like Peter, hang on his every word, in the knowledge that all his words are life-giving.
I am not advocating a “mere knowledge of the stories about Christ”, but rather that through reading the Scriptures “we recognise Christ truly as our redeemer and trust in him, so that solely because of his obedience, by grace, we have the forgiveness of sins … and have eternal life”.(5) For the truth is that Jesus does not speak the language of self-help and positive thinking. Instead, he speaks a language understood by people who know from bitter experience that the answers they require do not all lie within their own grasp. It is a language of grace, and of hope, coming to us from the outside. The words of eternal life are, that God helps those who know they cannot help themselves.
Finally Peter says, ‘We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God’. Jesus Christ was as much flesh and blood as anyone else who has ever walked the planet. Yet Peter and the twelve staked their lives on the insight that he was this, and much more besides: that he was God in the flesh, come to redeem the world from sin and death. And it has been given to us to believe this of him.
The title ‘the Holy One of God’ is rare in the New Testament. In fact, it only occurs in two other places, Mark chapter 1 and Luke chapter 4, where a demon-possessed man says to Jesus, ‘I know who you are, the Holy One of God’. Here in John chapter 6, this spiritual insight arises not from the opposition of devils but from the submission of a disciple, and it represents one of the highest points of recognition on the part of the disciples in the Gospels, along with Peter’s confession in Matthew chapter 16 that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Thomas’ cry in John chapter 20, ‘My Lord and my God’.
And it makes sense of everything that has gone before. If Jesus were not the Holy One of God, then there could certainly have been other rabbis to whom the disciples could equally well have gone. If he were not the Holy One of God, it would have been far too much to claim that he had the words of eternal life.
We might say that Ted Heath was right, that there is a unity for which humankind in its very essence needs, a need for something greater than themselves, something in which they themselves can share, which gives them their ultimate goal. It is just that the project he offered, was nowhere near big enough to answer that desire, just as no other political or social project within the sphere of what is humanly possible has ever been big enough to answer that desire. These are human projects after all. Yet what is impossible with man is possible with God, and that possibility arises from union with Christ, we remaining in him and he in us. He alone is the answer to all our questions. To whom else would we go? He has the words of eternal life, he is the Holy One of God.
(1) https://cutt.ly/jegdwdhB
(2) cf. Leon Morris, The Gospel according to John, pp. 383-384.
(3) Ibid., p. 390.
(4) R.E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, p. 300.
(5) Kolb and Wengert, Formula of Concord, p. 495.
St. Luke's Church Ramsgate 