By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
John 6: 1-15, 30-36
July 29, 2012
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Last week (and the week before–someone this morning commented that anybody who preaches the same passage three times is bound to get it right eventually!) I preached on this same story as it’s told in Mark. I pointed out that though the disciples advise Jesus to send the crowd out to get food, Jesus says no. He knows they’re sheep without a shepherd, and he has compassion for them, because he knows that what they really need only he can provide. They need the assurance of God’s love and the spiritual nourishment of staying together as the Beloved Community, united by their certainty that God loves them. These are things only Jesus can provide, and He provides them.
Then the Gospel of Mark says, Jesus “immediately” sent the crowd one direction, the disciples another, and himself left to pray. (Mark 6: 45)
He was the glue that held them together, but then He left and exploded the crowd after all, the very thing He’d not wanted to do at the beginning.
What do you do when Jesus leaves?
It’s a question many of us deal with personally when we’re in crisis: where did Jesus go? Why has He let me down? Often it seems sudden and unexpected–immediate. I was doing so well! Then out of the blue–blam! Where did Jesus suddenly go?
It’s the question bedeviling the mainline church today as we see our numbers dwindling and our clout disappearing. We thought we’d cornered the Jesus market and then everything went south. Where did Jesus go?
The Gospel of John tells the story a bit differently from Mark, and the differences are enlightening.
In John, for instance, there’s a particular reason that Jesus decides to leave. They want to make him king. By king they don’t mean, king in our hearts. They mean, let’s overthrow Herod and make Jesus king, political ruler of Judea, and direct threat to Roman rule. It’s at that point Jesus makes Himself scarce. He had no intention of gaining or practicing political power as such.
And yet we in the church view our loss of political clout as a loss of Jesus. It could be viewed the other way round– that in the pursuit of political clout, in pursuit of the Christian nation, we sent Jesus packing.
Because though the Beloved Community has political implications, its political implications and effects are a side effect, and not the purpose, of the community. In the sixties, the Beloved Community was a rallying cry for African Americans and the oppressed, especially people of faith, to inspire political change–to make our nation more compassionate to the poor, to recognize the equality of human beings regardless of race, color or ethnicity. Those were worthwhile things. But they are not the be-all and end-all, what we used to call in seminary the purpose of the church and its ministry.
It is the great classic mistake of western Christendom to mistake the gospel for a political agenda, and to mistake Gods kingdom for the success of that political agenda. What we are always called to remember is that while the gospel has political implications, they are often quite different from our expectations or goals– and that almost by definition, they are less likely to succeed than to fail, because they’re so radically different from the world’s political agenda.
So, back to the story. When the crowd notices Jesus is gone, they track him down. When they find him, Jesus challenges their motives for seeking him out. “What you going to give us?” they ask. And He says, you aren’t looking for me because you understand who I am–you are looking for me because you want me to perform more miracles for you.
When we want Jesus to perform a miracle–or when we want Jesus to be our political savior–at either of those times, what we’re asking Jesus to do is to solve our problems. And that’s a misunderstanding of what is meant by “savior,” that we’re all guilty of from time to time. We understand savior to mean “problem solver.” but Jesus doesn’t claim to be our problem solver, to make life smooth and easy. In fact, he claims the opposite: “I come not to bring peace, but a sword,” He says.
Jesus is not a solution–He is Lord. And to follow a Lord faithfully in a world that doesn’t claim His Lordship brings its own problems, as centuries of martyrs can attest.
When Margaret and I were in England this past month we were visiting with an old friend of mine from my last church, located outside Washington DC. Until four years ago, Steve was a diplomat with the State Department. He’d served as US ambassador to two Persian Gulf nations and was considered the State department’s resident expert on Caspian Sea oil issues. We got to talking about Syria, and the Middle East situation overall, and I asked him his opinions. “First of all,” he said, “my opinion doesn’t count for much because I’m out of the picture now. But I’ll make a generalization. When we make mistakes in Middle East policy, it’s because we think of the Middle East as a problem. But the Middle East isn’t a problem—it’s a dilemma. And we have a saying in the diplomatic corps: Problems have solutions, but dilemmas have horns.”
When we look to Jesus to be the solution to our problems, we make the same mistake. Life isn’t a problem–it’s a dilemma. It has complexities and difficulties often beyond our understanding or any discernible solution. Life has horns, and to attempt to escape them risks getting hooked on them.
Jesus challenges the crowd by hooking them exactly on the horns of the dilemma of faithful living. “I am the bread of life. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever–and the bread that I will give for the life of the world will be my flesh.”
The religious leaders are confounded and offended, even shocked and horrified. “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” their shock and outrage are not that hard to understand. This is a troubling and exceptionally gritty and down to earth way of talking about something that we’d prefer to think of as spiritual and other-worldly.
But Jesus has hooked us on the horns of the dilemma. He’s predicting His bloody and tortuous death to save the world. But He’s also keying us into a profound truth: faithful living can only happen in the gritty reality of the world as it is. Christian life is not escape from suffering and pain and evil –nor is it disdain for earthly pleasures. Rather, it is immersion in these very things. And because of that, Christian living has horns.
But the horns aren’t all bad. First of all, we believe that Christ is immersed in the flesh and blood realities of the world as it is. That means that God is in those flesh-and-blood realities.
And not only that, Christ is in us and among us, one with us, sharing our struggles with the dilemmas of life. That means inexplicably, wonderfully, we can and most often do find the evidence of the Divine in the complexities of the world in which we live and the lives we are living.
This is a source of incredible hope. God doesn’t help us to escape the world. Instead, God has come to join us in it, in the lives we live, our flesh and blood reality. We face the horns of the dilemma of life together.
When we look at life as a problem needing a solution, and we look to Jesus as the problem solver, we over-simplify Jesus, and we infantilize ourselves. Jesus left the crowd in order for them to understand that the Jesus they need is not outside of us, as a political agenda, or a set of rules to live by, or a miracle that straightens out our problems–Jesus is inside us, individually and corporately, giving us the internal resources we need to contend with the horns of life’s dilemmas.
Often the time we are most challenged to remember this is when we feel the horns are their sharpest–when we’re grieving, or suffering, or overwhelmed– when everything is going wrong and we feel that God’s loving care and protection have abandoned us, that God has betrayed us–at those times we most need the Jesus who lives in us.
Jesus doesn’t present Himself as the solution to the problem of life, the universe, and everything. Rather, He presents Himself as The Way. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he says in John.
And ultimately, Palmer found his way not out, but through, the dilemma he faced, not because his coach helped him, but because he’d internalized what the coach wanted him to understand.
Jesus is the way–not out, but through. He is not the solution to life’s problems–whether personal or political, whether church problems or human problems–he is the way through them. He gives us wisdom to learn the lessons and strength to stay the course and hope that keeps us going when the way seems dark. He is with us when we feel abandoned. He is here in the world, with us and healing the broken world, in good times and in bad.
He has never left. He never will. So let’s stay with Him.