There are places in the Bible where I read and say, “no, no, that’s too much!”  Too hard.  I feel like closing the book, right there; I don’t want to hear any more.  These are the places where the Bible records the evil we do to one another.  People pursue their own ways on their own terms, regardless of God, or, worse, having convinced themselves, despite God’s Word and the witness of the prophets, that they are being faithful to God.

God, who will have none of that, ultimately allows people to know what it is like to live without His shepherding presence.  Life without God.  People without God.  Pain and suffering without God.  So, women are raped and murdered, and children, and men murder each other over a word, and nations war against nations, bodies piled like cord wood, and Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot murder people by the millions.  And millions are murdered even before they take their first breath.  But why do we need God?

You and I know it’s better to have God in our lives than not to.  We make room for God, for Jesus, for faith.  We accept and receive Jesus, and God . . . on our terms.  Mainline Christians—Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians—have all proven very adept at adapting faith to culture.  W. Graham Scroggie incisively points out: “The Master never trimmed his message to keep the crowd: would that his followers had never done so.”[1]  This adaptation, trimming, though, is what culture is all about.

Tim Keller, one of the most prominent Presbyterian pastors in America (though not a pastor in the PC(USA)), reminds us that the notion of culture came from cultivating the ground.  Keller defines culture as taking something as we find it, the land, for example, and adapting it to our purposes, wishes, and aims: prairies into cropland and orchards, forests into buildings, homes, and furniture.  We take sound and rearrange it into music.  We take words and arrange them into sentences, paragraphs, poems, and novels that tell us about ourselves.[2]

And how with the Word of God?  How with God?  If the world teaches us to take what we find and to rearrange and adapt it to our purposes, wishes, and aims, and if experience has shown us that the results very often seem to be good—I mean, I like living in a house, with furniture, and I like being able to go to the grocery store and to buy the fruits and vegetables and meat and cheese that are there as a direct result of the culture, the cultivation, of the land—if the results seem so often to be so good, why would we not also adapt religion to suit our purposes, wishes, and aims?  Why would we not culture religion?  We take what we find, and we adapt it.  I suggest to you that human history is a long tale of doing exactly that.  Scripture, as I hear it, confirms this.

Human history is likewise a long tale of some very terrible things we have done to one another.  And if you believe these terrible things are for the most part recent, and that there was some pristine period in a far distant era when we all got along and loved one another and shared, I invite you to read Scripture.  There are only two times that I can recall in Scripture where we might have gotten close to that pristine time of loving one another and sharing: in Eden, which didn’t last long, and in the earliest days of the Church, which were far from perfect.

Many listening to Jesus that day had been with him for quite some time.  They were excited by what he was doing and saying, eager to find out what was going to happen next.  They were thinking that they might just be willing to devote themselves to him.  They were anticipating the way that, with Jesus, they would start remaking everything, rearranging things, ushering in the kingdom; finally, they would arrange the world to fit with their purposes, their wishes, their aims.  And they had Jesus with them to do it.  Jesus was such a blessing for them.

And then Jesus goes and says things like we must eat his flesh and drink his blood, and he makes it clear that he isn’t talking here about our assenting to what he teaches about how we should treat one another.  If all he was saying—of course in a very poetic way—if all he was saying was follow his instructions, then we could probably do that, or try for a while, anyway.  What I’ve been trying to share with you these past several weeks, trying to share with you as we look ahead to next week, and our celebration of the holy ordinance of our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus, trying to develop for you is that Jesus is not telling us only to follow his ethical teaching.  It’s not enough just to strive to live with others as he taught.  If we’re to live with the Father in heaven, fully restored to God, we must receive and accept the sacrifice, we must partake of the flesh and the blood, so that Life himself, in Spirit and Truth, is in us.  We do this by faith.

The world has taught us to see, take, and remake.  We do the finding.  We do it all.  This is normal for us; it is not surprising or unexpected.  In Jesus Christ, however, God comes to us, sees us, takes us, and remakes us.  We don’t come to God; God comes to us.  It is God who comes to us, God who calls us, God who saves us, and God who prepares us to live with Him eternally, through faith.

And what are we to do?  What is our part?  What is our role?  How are we supposed to rearrange things?  This is worldly thinking, which is quite natural for us.  We get caught up in the doing.  What must I do?  Just tell me what I need to do.  What should I be doing?  Officially, for Muslims, your good deeds must outweigh your bad deeds by the time of your death, or you just cannot and will not enter paradise.  This is part of the reason that charitable giving is commanded in Islam.  Islam has a very definite works-righteousness dimension.  What are you doing to guarantee your salvation?

One of the most difficult teachings of Christianity, especially Reformed Christianity, our own branch, is the teaching that everything is in God’s hands.  We don’t know what to do with it.  “What gives life is God’s Spirit; man’s power is of no use at all” (6:63).  Jesus is being plainer here about what he has been saying.  He has been saying that, if we wish to live, to have life, we must eat his flesh, drink his blood; we must be in him, and he will be in us.  Man’s power is of no use at all.  Only God.  “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him” (6:56).  Lives, remains . . . abides.  Have you ever sung that old hymn, “Abide with Me”?  And, if you have sung it, have you felt what you were singing?  Abide.  That’s what we’re talking about.  That’s what Jesus is talking about.  If Jesus abides with you, in you, if you believe and know it, my hunch is that it’s been a life-changing belief for you.

Sometimes we want the prize without that change.  The world has taught us to change our surroundings, our circumstances.  There is also philosophy that suggests we should focus rather on changing ourselves.  Scripture tells us we don’t have the power, only God does.  We don’t know what to do with that.  Our focus is on what we do, are doing, and can do.  Today, Jesus is saying that, apart from him, we can do nothing—nothing toward salvation, nothing toward life with God.  Jesus is calling us to focus on him.  “What gives life is God’s Spirit; man’s power is of no use at all.”  Jesus is saying we cannot obtain the prize without the change in our focus: not on what we do, are doing, or can do, but upon what God has done, is doing, and will do.  Not a God after our own hearts, our cultured god, more idolatry, mere idolatry, but our hearts alive in God, a covenant people.  I hear Jesus saying to those dazed and confused listeners there that day that the prize is the change, the change of focus.

We do not change our focus, God the Father, through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, changes our focus.  God sees us, God comes to us, God calls us, God saves us, God changes us.  Salvation is up to God; good behavior does not merit salvation, that pardon from the penalty of sin.  “You are not doing God a favour by accepting the Gospel; He is doing you a favour by offering it.”[3]  No one merits salvation; everyone merits condemnation, and God, in love, mercy, and grace, comes to us, calls us, saves us, and changes us.

Jesus says, again, “no one can come to me unless the Father makes it possible for him to do so” (6:65, see also 6:44).  Those who come to the Father come because the Father has granted it to them to come.  No one comes to the Father whom God has not called.  I think that is a stunning affirmation of what we are doing here today.  God has called us here.  If you ever wonder if God is really at work in your life, if God really takes an interest, then think about that.  You are here today because God has granted it to you; you could not come, if God had not granted it to you.

This also means the faith you have in Jesus is not your achievement, not your accomplishment.  Your faith is yet another sign of God at work in you.  More evidence for God; more evidence for what God has done and is doing; more evidence that God indeed takes a very particular interest in you, personally: a gracious, a merciful, and a loving interest.

And all this is too much, too hard, too unpleasant to hear, too inflexible for some of those hearing Jesus.  Who can accept what he is saying?  If we cannot, by our actions, by our will, by our righteousness, merit our salvation, if we cannot work our way into heaven, if we can have God only on God’s terms, and not at all on our terms, then, well, forget it.  This is how those who had been Jesus’ followers are now talking amongst themselves.  Jesus has just told them it must be God’s way, not their way.  Eternal life does not come through their effort or their works, their will or their way, no matter how “faithful” they see themselves—it does not come through them but through him, through Jesus.

God’s way, not their way, be it ever so cultured, so enlightened.

Why is our faith all about Jesus?  Sure, Mohammed is important in Islam (Jesus is too, strangely); sure, the Buddha is important in Buddhism, because Mohammed and Buddha teach about the way to paradise and nirvana, respectively—these aren’t the same thing.  They are teachers.  Many people regard Jesus positively for his teaching; many of the people among whom Jesus walked and taught regarded him as a magnificent teacher.  Islam is not all about Mohammed.  Buddhism is not all about the Buddha.  Christianity is all about Christ.  Because Jesus says he is the way, and the truth, and the life.  Because he says there is no life apart from him, without him.  Jesus, Word of God and Lamb of God, says it’s me or nothing.  There is nothing for us to rearrange.  We are to be rearranged by God.

And many of those who had been following Jesus right up to that point, that day, that hour, those words, then stopped following him.  They no longer walked with him (6:66).[4]  They are shocked and offended by what he has said: nobody likes to be told that they are all wrong.  Nobody likes to be told that they cannot have what they want on their own terms.

“I will never turn away anyone who comes to me” (6:37).  So Jesus told us a few Sundays back.  People come to Jesus for many reasons, some because the Father has granted it.  Jesus does not turn us away; he drives no one away; we turn away.  “The final rejection of Christ is never due to want of mind [the intellect, the inability to receive and accept intellectually what Jesus says], but to want of faith.”[5]  “And you—would you also like to leave?” (6:67).  Peter has a unique gift for shoving his foot into his mouth—something every pastor has to think about—and Peter has the blessed gift, at just the right moment, of speaking words given to him by the Spirit: “Lord, to whom would we go?  You have the words that give eternal life [. . .] now we believe and know that you are the Holy One who has come from God” (6:68-69).

To follow Christ is to be challenged by Christ.  To follow Christ is to be changed by Christ, for Christ, in Christ.  The primary teaching of Jesus is not that we must have acts, works, deeds.  What Jesus says, repeatedly, as though he really wanted this to sink in through our ears, into our minds and down into the depths of our hearts is this: have faith.  Have faith in Jesus.

Some go away.  Some go astray.  May God grant it to us, as to Peter, to stay.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

                [1] W. Graham Scroggie.  Gospel of John.  Study Hour Ser.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1976.  50.

                [2] Tim Keller: Why Culture Matters.  QIdeas.org.  Sept. 6, 2015.  https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=XWynJbvcZfs

                [3] Scroggie 50.

                [4] While I don’t see myself as superstitious, it does strike me as quite interesting that this verse should be the sixty-sixth verse of the sixth chapter (6:66).

                [5] Scroggie 50.