postID: 6942; title: The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost
Grant, we beseech thee, merciful God, that thy Church, being gathered together in unity by thy Holy Spirit, may manifest thy power among all peoples, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen. (Proper 16)
Array
(
[date] => 2009-08-23 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 261
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2009-08-23 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2009-08-23postID: 6942 (The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 6942; date_type: variable; year: 2009
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 6942
displayDates for postID: 6942/year: 2009
Array
(
[0] => 2009-08-23
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2009-08-23 with ID: 6942 (The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost)
The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost
Array
(
[date] => 2009-08-23 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 261
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2009-08-23 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2009-08-23postID: 6942 (The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 6942; date_type: variable; year: 2009
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 6942
displayDates for postID: 6942/year: 2009
Array
(
[0] => 2009-08-23
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2009-08-23 with ID: 6942 (The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost)
The reading_id [73460] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): John 6:60-69
A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
on
John 6:60-69
✛
Hard Saying, Good News
Array
(
[0] => 60758
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60758
)
] (reading_id: 73460)bbook_id: 60758
The bbook_id [60758] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life…and…you are the Holy One of God.” St. John 6:60-69
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Today’s scene at the Capernaum Synagogue finishes a story that began on the other side of the Sea of Galilee when Jesus fed five thousand people with two small fishes and five loaves of bread.¹ This miracle moved the crowd to attempt to take Jesus by force and make him king.
Perceiving what was afoot, Jesus dismissed the crowd and compelled his disciples to get into their boat and go across the lake to Capernaum, while he withdrew into the hills by himself. When the disciples ran into a strong wind several miles out on their way across (it was now night), Jesus came to them walking on the sea. Frightened and amazed, they took him into the boat and immediately found themselves safe at land.
The next day, puzzled to find Jesus in Capernaum they knew not how, the people who witnessed the miracle engaged him at the synagogue. There Jesus taught them to work not for perishable food but for the food which endures to eternal life, “which the Son of man will give to you.” This begins the great Bread of Life discourse, the sixth chapter of Saint John’s Gospel, where Jesus refers to himself as the Bread of Life which, if one eats of it, he will live forever; “and the bread which I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
As Christ got ever more definite in this teaching, he turned hearers off. He put off many in the crowds. The Jews murmured, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” and withdrew from Jesus. This brings us to the crisis at the end of the chapter, when Jesus addresses his twelve apostles, and asks, “Will you also go away?” This seems to be the very opposite of growing the Church; and yet Jesus has led his hearers to the very heart of his Gospel – Gospel, remember, means Good News.
Throughout Jesus’ ministry there is a sifting of his followers. Many were attracted to him by his miracles, his healings, his authoritative teaching. Many attached themselves to Jesus, some wholeheartedly, some loosely. Then there comes a crisis when allegiance is tested, when the real nature of Jesus ministry, mission and claims becomes apparent. True disciples are sifted from false ones; deep discipleship from shallow. This is one of those crises: “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it,” does not mean this is hard to understand, but rather, this is hard to take.²
Jesus himself perceived the sifting, just as he had perceived the attempt to try to make him a worldly king when he multiplied the loaves and fishes. The multitude was interested in a messianic kingdom in the general, worldly expectation. Instead they found themselves with an invitation to believe, to receive Christ, to eat his flesh and drink his blood, to enter into the eternal life he proclaimed. It was too much.
What was too much? All my ministry I have encountered people repelled by the realistic language of receiving, of eating and drinking really, the Body and Blood of Christ, or, as he says himself in his Bread of Life discourse, his flesh and blood which is food and nourishment unto eternal life. It seems primitive, cannibalistic, in whatever sense one takes it. But Jesus is saying that unless we take into ourselves his own life-giving Humanity, the life of the Son of man who is also the Son of God living in perfect union with the Father, then we, who are alienated from the life of God, have no life in us. Human life is not disembodied. It is embodied, and its physical and spiritual dimensions are impossible to segregate. Jesus’ words on this score, as he says, “are spirit, and they are life.”
Beneath the resistance to the physical language Jesus uses here and elsewhere (for example, at the Last Supper, where he gives the twelve his Body and Blood under the forms of bread and wine), there is something else that we resist. Jesus himself indicates it, when he says his Body is broken for us and his Blood is poured out for us. Our true resistance is to his death, his crucifixion, his self-sacrifice. We are not alone, for Peter himself fought against it.
But Peter, today, answers for us, when Jesus asks, “Will you also go away?” and Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” With Peter, we are going to have to trust Jesus to show us the mystery of life itself, his Good News. The way of the cross pains and frightens us, but if we follow the Lord, he brings us to a place of life and peace beyond imagining. He will show us “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”³
The cross is the great paradox at the heart of life and of God himself. It is there, where Jesus gives up everything, that we find everything. “I,” Jesus said, “if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.” There Jesus Christ confronts what ails us, everything that stems from our alienation from God. He goes into the very heart of human darkness, the great wound in the soul of our human race; and he lightens and heals it. He dies our death. On Good Friday, as we prepare to venerate the cross in the solemn liturgy, we sing words that touch on what Christ has done: “O mysterious condescending! O abandonment sublime! Very God himself is bearing all the sufferings of time!” And on the third day, God raised him from the dead.
The Eucharist, which the Lord instituted and commanded to be continued until his coming again, communicates the healing and nourishment of the cross of Jesus. Holy Communion is the gift of the risen Christ. As we receive this Sacrament by faith with thanksgiving, we find that far from being put off or offended, we have entered into the life-giving paradox of the Gospel, the blessing of the cross. For the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the flesh and blood of the Son of man, is the living Bread which preserves our bodies and souls unto everlasting life. O taste and see how gracious the Lord is!
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
__________
¹St. John 6: 1-71 tells the entire story in this sermon.
²Leon Morris, John, in International Commentary on the New Testament, Eerdmans 1971, p. 382.
³Dante, Paradiso, Canto xxxiii, 145.
