Last week in Bible study when we were struggling through all of the weird “eat my flesh and drink my blood” language, I jokingly mentioned that we were not unique in struggling with what Jesus was saying here. Because in verse sixty, right after the section we’d just read, Jesus’ own disciples remarked, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And if the disciples, who were standing with Jesus, who had the benefit of having been traveling with Jesus, couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, then no wonder we can’t quite understand it either.
And Jesus’ response to his disciples discomfort was not to explain it further or back off and take a lighter tone. No, Jesus found the point of soreness and pushed even harder into it. “Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? … among you there are some who do not believe… For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” This approach shouldn’t surprise us, Jesus had been doing this throughout the whole Bread of Life discourse. When the crowd he had fed with five loaves and two fish came searching for him, he chastised them for not working for the food that endures. When they complained he claimed to be from heaven, when they knew he was Joseph and Mary’s son, he told them they couldn’t know him unless they were drawn to him by God. When they were disturbed by his calls to eat his flesh, he told them that only by eating his flesh could they live.
As we wrap up the Bread of Life discourse, I’ve been thinking about why Jesus might have done this, to take something that made the crowd and his disciples uncomfortable and just keep pushing further into it until eventually, as we read this morning in verse sixty-six, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Wasn’t pushing so hard that people turned away counter-intuitive to what he was trying to do? But something about this reminded me of someone; it reminded me of my physical therapist. Let me explain.
As I think most of you know, this summer I’ve been seeing a physical therapist to try to work through some issues I’ve been having with my hip. The problem is one of the muscles around my hip was underdeveloped, apparently a super common problem in runners, and it made the other muscles over function, which caused them to tighten up and get inflamed. The treatment for this is a combination strengthening the underdeveloped muscles and loosening the overused ones, to balance everything out. The strengthening part is fine. Each time I go in, the therapist leads me through a series of funny exercises. I walk with a stretchy band around my ankles, I stand on one foot and throw a medicine ball at a trampoline, I slide my foot back and forth along a slippery board. It’s a workout, but I run marathons, for fun. Kicking my foot backwards, not that big of a deal. But the part that I love to hate is the stretching and loosening the tight muscles. After I’ve done all the funny exercises, the therapist has my lay on my back on a massage table, and she kneads into the muscle to try and encourage it to relax. And let me tell you what friends, it hurts. She leans into it with the base of her hand, and her elbow, and I lay there, clutching the side of the table just trying not to cry.
While this is going on, I’m supposed to be relaxing into the pressure, or else the muscle won’t relax and all the pain is for nothing. There are few things more counterintuitive then trying to loosen a muscle that someone is digging into for all they’re worth. And it’s not just painful, it’s also a really vulnerable feeling. It’s my hip, right, so basically this means twice a week I have a twenty-minute long butt massage that ends in me biting back tears of pain while simultaneously trying to breath into it, relax, and place my entire weight into a person I’d never met before last month and really don’t know all that well. The strengthening part’s ok, because it’s something I’m doing, something I can control. But the stretching part feels more like its being done to me, and I’m not a big fan of that.
But, as much as I don’t like it, I have to admit, it’s helping. Recovery is so, so, so much slower than I’d like, I want to be back up and running, like, yesterday, but even I can admit its improving. On Wednesday when Kendra and I were chasing the bat out of the church I was able to sprint full speed from the bathrooms, through the kitchen, and across the social hall without any pain. That’s a huge step forward from earlier in the summer. And even in the painful pushing into the muscle there is some relief. Because as much as it hurts, it feels better. As the therapist is pressing down into the muscle, I can feel the knot start to give way, I can feel the blood flowing into it, I can feel the tightness start to loosen. It hurts, but it is a good hurt, a hurt that I can tell is leading to healing.
And I wonder if this sort of hurt is exactly what Jesus was trying to do for his disciples. I wonder if he was trying to push them past a point of tension into new life. He could have laid back, not driven so hard into the weird and hard pieces of this teaching, could have talked more about the spirit and less about his flesh, could have given them the actual food they wanted in the beginning rather than these harder teachings. These things would probably have made Jesus more popular, and maybe would have kept many from turning away. But look where the reading from this morning ended, it ended with Peter confessing, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” And would Peter have been able to make such a bold confession, “We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God,” without having been challenged in this way? I would guess not.
I could have quit physical therapy at any point if I wanted to. I've had no pain during any of my normal life activities. I can walk, sit, move, totally fine. But I kept going because it still hurt when I run, and without running I don’t feel like I’m truly living. So I let the physical therapist push me past the point of pain trusting that what I’ll gain on the other side is a richer, fuller, more vibrant life. And I think that is what Peter and the disciples found when Jesus had pushed them through this Bread of Life discourse. It hurt going through, but on the other side they found the Source of Life itself, the Holy One of God.
Jesus pushes us so hard because he loves us too much to let us be our same stagnant selves, to let us stay where we are instead of grow to who we could be. And Jesus does this however we come to him and whether we ask for it or not. This talk about seeing the Son of Man ascending is the same challenge he issued Nathanael, when Nathanael came to him way back in chapter one. Quick refresher because that was a while ago, at the very start of Jesus’ ministry, Philip, one of Jesus’ first disciples, went and found Nathanael and invited him to come meet Jesus. To which Nathanael quipped, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” But when Jesus saw Nathanael coming, he told Nathanael he knew him because he’d seen him “under the fig tree before Philip called you.” To which Nathanael replied, stunned, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God.” Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than these… you will see the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
The crowd listening to the Bread of Life discourse came to Jesus with their doubts, “this teaching is hard,” and Jesus pushed them to a new and fresh idea. Nathanael came to Jesus in faith, albeit a limited faith, and Jesus pushed him too, to a deeper and richer understanding. This is the hard and wonderful reality of grace, of a God who loves us unconditionally, exactly who and where we are. A God who loves us that much is never going to be satisfied with where we are, but is always going to want more for us, always going to want better for us. It is precisely because God loves us exactly who we are, that God is pushing so hard for us to be more. So when you find your faith challenged, when you find yourself pushed, let this text be a reminder to lean into the challenge, to let yourself be pushed. Ours is a God who never settles for us to be anything less than our best, God just loves us too much for that. Amen.
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