11 Pentecost 27 August 2000
St. George’s Episcopal Church
Le Mars, Iowa
Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher
Joshua 24.1-2a, 14-25
Psalm 16
Ephesians 5.21-33
John 6.60-69
Jesus
or Nothing!
“Lord, to whom can we go?”
A few weeks ago Karen and I were camping in the Big Horn range in Wyoming. The first night there we thought we heard the sound of rushing water in the distance. The next day we hiked a bit to investigate and discovered a lake nestled among the mountains, formed by a dam that obviously had been completed recently; that explained why the Tie Hack reservoir wasn’t on our map. The trail around the lake continued onto the concrete curve of the dam. The walkway on the top of the dam was broad and enclosed on both sides by reassuringly high parapets. We walked out onto it for several yards until we could clearly see the source of the sound we’d heard the night before: at the dam’s center was a spillway, maybe thirty feet wide; water from the lake was plunging over the brink, thousands of gallons a minute crashing down to the rocks hundreds of feet below. All this was a pretty impressive thing to come upon unexpectedly in the woods, and I eagerly proceeded toward the center of the dam. There, the concrete walkway stopped. To cross the spillway and continue to the other side you had to walk on an open steel gridwork. As you stepped out onto it you were suspended immediately above the brink, looking straight down past your feet at the point where the water hurled itself off into space and fell to the ground far below. Being a cautious fellow, I stopped and had a look before proceeding. The steel and concrete were new looking, no rust or loose pieces were apparent, the bolts fastening the walkway to the dam secure. It looked perfectly safe, so I walked out onto it to enjoy the view and the interesting sensation of hanging in space at the top of a waterfall. Had I been wrong about the trustworthiness of this piece of engineering, there’d be a more interesting story here, though I wouldn’t be the one telling it. I lingered a bit to take a picture straight down and continued on to the other side of the dam (alone, needless to say).
The traditional theological point to make here is about faith and trust, and I don’t want to disappoint you. As I stood on that walkway over the precipice what did I have to do to make sure it held me up? The answer of course is nothing. It’s not as though its holding me up was a joint effort of it and me; that I had immediately to lose forty pounds or quickly learn the art of levitation or start flapping my arms really fast. Even if I could have done those things, they’d have made not a bit of difference; they’d have been a complete waste of effort, so far as that walkway holding me went. On the other hand, if the walkway had been unreliable, if it had given way, any efforts on my part to remain safely suspended in mid-air would have been to no avail. Either way, anything I could do made no difference, so the only attitude that made sense was to trust, to put my faith in the engineers and their work.
We all know, or at least we’re supposed to know, that this is how it is with us and God. The eternal life we have with God is entirely a matter of faith, of putting our trust in Jesus. It’s not a reward for being a good person, or for being a regular churchgoer, or for anything we could do. Salvation is by grace through faith. Still, before getting to today’s text from John’s Gospel I’d like to fine tune the analogy. Note that faith is the one sensible response to the situation of being on the walkway, but this doesn’t mean that I needed to have faith in its ability to hold me for it to do so. As if it had a detector built into it so a trapdoor drops the untrusting to death in the torrent. I could have been supremely confident in its ability to keep me safe and just enjoyed being there. Or I could have been absolutely terrified, convinced I was about to drop into the abyss; I’d have been miserable. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the view nor gotten the picture, but I’d have been no less safe. My trust or lack of trust has no effect on the trustworthiness of the structure. Everything depends on it, nothing depends on me, not even on my faith in it. What counts for the thing’s efficacy is what it is, not what I do.
The same goes for salvation: what ultimately matters is who Jesus is, not our faith in him, his trustworthiness, not our trusting him. I think this is the core issue in the encounter portrayed in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus says, “I am the living bread...the one who eats it will live forever” and John writes that many of the people following Jesus respond by saying, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” They are offended and they leave him. Why were they offended; why did they find Jesus’ statement impossible to accept? I don’t think it has anything to do with them taking Jesus’ words literally, thinking he was advocating some sort of cannibalistic rite. I don’t think these were literal minded clods incapable of understanding metaphor; if anything, they were better at it than we are. Simple minded literalism is a product of modern times, not the ancient world.
Instead, I think what Jesus has been claiming over and over up to this point in John’s gospel is at last hitting home. These people have been following and listening to Jesus for quite awhile and at least some of them must have been conscientious seekers of God, not just curiosity seekers. They’d have seen Jesus as some sort of prophet and they’d have been waiting for him to deliver God’s word to them, to tell them what God wants them to do - and to stop doing - to get in God’s favor again, to get out from under the Roman heel, to receive salvation. But what becomes clear now is that Jesus doesn’t have anything like that for them. All he has for them is himself. No instructions on how to be righteous and earn salvation. He keeps telling them he is the righteousness of God; he is the salvation of Israel. They’re waiting for a word from God; what they get is Jesus’ wild assertion that he is God’s Word. “I am the living water. I am the bread that gives life.” What matters isn’t anything they ought to do; what matters is who he is. John expresses good Anglican theology here: it’s Jesus being who he is, God incarnate, God taking on our humanity, drawing our sin and suffering into himself, that saves us. No transaction, no deal, no quid pro quo, good works - or even faith - exchanged for God’s approval -- nothing but the utterly free gift, the self-sacrificing God who gives himself for the whole world. The single response that makes sense is faith: to trust in the God made flesh. Yet this is not what they want to hear: “this teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” As if to drive the point home, Jesus adds “No one can come to me unless it is granted by the father.” Just in case you wondered, all your efforts to get in good with God are pointless; not even your response to me depends on you. It’s no surprise they’ve had enough and take off.
Not everyone leaves. The twelve are still there. The gospel writers often portray the apostles as obtuse and faithless, but not here. In fact I think this is one of the most beautiful examples of Jesus’ followers responding to him in faith. The crowds have not understood Jesus; they are frustrated and disappointed with him; and he with them. As they abandon him Jesus turns to the twelve and asks, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answers “Lord, to whom can we go?” I don’t hear adoration or even enthusiasm in Peter’s response. I suspect that he’s not especially happy with Jesus at this point either. Jesus has confused and exasperated him too. But Peter’s words are a great confession of faith: for him it’s Jesus or nothing. Jesus is his only hope. His last chance. The only game in town. He can only trust Jesus, even if it’s a Jesus he isn’t altogether pleased with right now, a Jesus who hasn’t made much sense recently. He’s grasped the crucial fact, the fact of who Jesus is.
So it is with faith in this God revealed in Jesus. We don’t always feel happy about him and his ways. We don’t always understand what he’s doing. Why does he allow so much evil? Why doesn’t he make his existence obvious and his intentions clear? Why are so many of his followers such pains in the butt? But it’s him or nothing. Like Peter, once we’ve known him, we realize we have nowhere else to go. For us, as for Peter, what saves us isn’t the strength or clarity of our faith. That’s a good thing; we’d be without hope if our lives depended upon something as vacillating, as undependable, as our faith in Jesus. The great good news is that God is faithful, and he calls us to put our trust in him.
Amen.