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COMING AND GOING
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So many former disciples (or at least listeners) chose to walk away from Jesus when He spoke of Himself as the Bread of Life, offering His Flesh for the life of the world. It was not that they didn’t get it; they couldn’t get their heads around it. But this raises a couple of important questions, at any rate in my mind.
What attracted them to Jesus in the first place? No, the answer is not the miracle of multiplication of the loaves and fish—they were already there with Him before this happened. Why? In John at least there is no record that they were trying to get near to Jesus for the sake of being healed; they seemed content just to be there. So surely it had to be Jesus’ teachings and personality (utterly magnetic) that were drawing them. What teachings would have appealed to the crowds?
Here I have to guess, since Jesus rarely “teaches” in a way that can be found especially in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels. Up until this point, the major “teaching moments” were private conversations—with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman. Whatever attracted them, they came.
But once they heard a teaching they could not accept, they left. Here’s my second question—what were they going back to? Would it ever still be able to satisfy them? I’m reminded of the closing lines of TS Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi”—after seeing the Christ-Child, the speaker says All this was a long time ago, I remember…
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
They’d tasted something (more than the bread and fish), and they were giving up their future as “too hard to swallow.” But the “old dispensation” won’t do. Would they regret their walking away? Would they try to persuade themselves that the way of mediocrity was good enough? Would they long for what they thought they had with Jesus (whatever that was)? Who can tell?
What about us? What might cause us to walk away? Perhaps on-line worship that keeps us from having to extend ourselves, at least on Sunday mornings? Perhaps the idea that the Eucharist doesn’t mean that much to us, after all? Perhaps if we were not committed to church we might not have to be committed to outreach (as to Haiti, for example)?
Truth is difficult—it’s why Jesus called it the “narrow Way.” It calls for sacrifice (and no one other than Jesus realizes what that entails). It means commitment when I don’t feel like it—saying another YES even when I’m not in the mood.
But “Lord, to whom [else] shall we go?”
