I want to paint a picture in your minds of a different story about Jesus from the one we heard in the reading. I want you to imagine the encounter Jesus had with the person we call ‘The rich young ruler.’
You will remember how this young man came to Jesus and asked him what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies by listing a number of the commandments.
The young man responds by saying, ‘Teacher, I’ve kept all of these commandments since birth’ – which is an amazing claim, if you think about it.
‘One thing you lack,’ says Jesus. ‘Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.’
‘Rabbi,’ replies the young man, ‘I can’t do that. What about I give ten per cent to the poor?’
Jesus answers, ‘OK, it’s a deal. Come, follow me.’
What’s wrong with this picture?
I think you know. In the original story, Jesus doesn’t negotiate with the young man. He doesn’t compromise his call. He doesn’t water down the cost of commitment. He doesn’t soften the hard edges of discipleship.
In today’s reading we don’t have an individual who is rubbed up the wrong way by Jesus’ demands, we have a whole crowd that does.
60 On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’
And just as with the rich young ruler, Jesus refuses to give an inch.
This is an important lesson for us. The Christian church is faced with many people who say, we can’t believe what you teach, or we can’t accept the morality of the Bible. We are tempted to dilute the challenge of following Jesus to keep these folk.
But I fear that, unlike Jesus, we give in to that temptation to strike a bargain with people. Jesus held firm, but then saw many of his disciples walk away:
66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
We, on the other hand, know that people are leaving the church or having nothing to do with it in the first place, and in the face of our declining and aging numbers succumb easily to the temptation to relax the demands of Jesus, or reinterpret them in a way that we think will be more palatable for today’s society.
Now of course there are areas where the church needs to self-correct. There are too many stories of where we have been cruel or uncaring to people, most shamefully perhaps in our failures to protect children. There are also places where we need to understand the teaching of Jesus in its original context to make sense of it.
But at the heart of our message, it is a catastrophic mistake to weaken our claims about who Jesus is and what Jesus teaches. I want to explore those two areas with you today and show why it’s vital that we hold firm on the Person of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus.
Firstly, then, the Person of Jesus.
In this passage, Jesus claims to come from the Father (verse 57) and the true bread that comes from heaven (verse 58). He also says he will ascend back to where he came from (verse 62). He’s pretty much making divine claims here, just as he did earlier in the chapter when he said, ‘I am the Bread of life’, where ‘I am’ is not simply the beginning of a sentence but the claiming of a divine name from the Old Testament.
The crowd doesn’t like this claim. As good Jews, they have problems with it. Jesus hears them grumbling and he knows they are offended (verse 61). But he doesn’t budge an inch.
Why? Because Jesus knows who he is, and he knows that unless he is fully divine as well as fully human, he cannot bridge the gap between heaven and sinful humanity and so save us. For as Lord of all he has the authority to forgive, and as a human being he identifies with us in our plight. So, however difficult it is to understand Jesus as having both divine and human natures, it is a doctrine we cannot row back on.
Where might that be important today? Where might we be tempted to dial down the claims of Jesus? I would suggest that one area is in our conversations with our Muslim friends. I have heard Christians say, ‘We are more similar to Muslims than we thought. Isn’t it good that they recognise Jesus as a prophet?’
But if Jesus is only a prophet, he can’t save us, because he isn’t fully divine. We may think it’s well-meaning from our Muslim friends, but it doesn’t help.
At its root, you will probably know that Muslims reject the idea that Jesus died on the Cross, and they say that it would be beneath the dignity of a prophet, let alone the Son of God, to die in such a way. Immediately, that cuts out God’s chosen means of salvation.
And this is linked with Muhammad rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, almost certainly because rather than coming into contact with people who believed in the Trinity, he encountered tribes that believed in three gods.
Of course, we should be kind and loving to our Muslim neighbours. We should have respectful conversations. But what we cannot do is agree with them about who Jesus is.
Ultimately, it’s not that different from the way many people from a western culture say that Jesus was a good man, but no more. However, it’s now many decades since CS Lewis made his famous rejoinder to that position. He said that when you look at the claims Jesus made about himself, either he was exactly who he said he was, or he was being deceitful, or he was deluded. The choice, he said, was between Jesus being Lord, liar, or lunatic. ‘Good man’ is not on the table.
So the first thing I want us to acknowledge today is we need to hold fast to the classical Christian beliefs about who Jesus is. If we move away from them, then salvation itself is at stake.
Secondly, the Teaching of Jesus.
Again, let’s begin by collecting some data from the passage.
Jesus says that people need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to be in relationship with him (verse 56). This isn’t a reference to the Lord’s Supper: there are no allusions to that in John 6: there is no wine, there is no eating and drinking in remembrance of Jesus, and so on. This language is about believing in Jesus and taking his life and words into themselves. The same thing occurs in the next verse where Jesus talks about people feeding on him.
Furthermore, Jesus then says he has spoken words that are full of Spirit and life (verse 63) and when Simon Peter rejects the idea of leaving him, he tells Jesus he has the ‘words of eternal life’ (verse 68).
It is clear, then, that Jesus is telling us that his teaching has divine authority. And if that’s the case, then we’d better not mess with it.
I did say in the introduction to the sermon that there are times of course when we need to be careful how we interpret the teaching of Jesus, because he gave it in a different time and culture, and we need to understand that background in order to make sense of it. Sometimes he does something typically Jewish and uses extreme language – we would call it ‘hyperbolic’ – to make a point. It’s like drawing a cartoon of someone in which their features are shown in an exaggerated way to make a point. Perhaps that includes examples such as when he said we should pull out our eyes or cut off our hands if doing so would prevent us from sinning.
But for all those important caveats, my experience is that Christians of all sorts of persuasions have their ways of trying to neuter the teaching of Jesus. And that’s dangerous, because we are called to be his disciples – that is, his apprentices, or students. To be a disciple is to come under his teaching and be formed by it.
So some right-wing Christians will do somersaults around Jesus’ teaching on money and concern for the poor, and come up with the heresy that we call ‘The Prosperity Gospel’, where wealth is taken to be a sure indication of divine blessing.
And left-wing Christians will do all they can to dance around Jesus’ plain teaching about sexual ethics, to justify relationships outside marriage.
In sum, many of us in the church, across varying social and spiritual persuasions, will find an aspect of Jesus’ teaching that we don’t like and we will look for a route to get around it and avoid it. Sometimes we do that, because it’s an element of Jesus’ teaching that we personally find uncomfortable. On other occasions we do it, because we are afraid that people will reject faith in Christ because of it.
But whatever our motive, this is dangerous. It is a delusion to invite someone to follow Jesus when we are going to alter his teaching to make it more palatable. For then we are not actually following him at all.
Believe you me, there are many parts of Jesus’ teaching that I wish were not there. I feel at times like Mark Twain, who once said that it was not the parts of Jesus’ words that he didn’t understand that troubled him, it was the parts that he did understand that gave him problems. I wonder if any of you share that feeling.
Conclusion
So what are we going to do? It’s not nice seeing people walk away from Jesus and his church, is it? I even get the feeling that Jesus was upset by it. At least, that’s the feeling I draw from verse 67 where he asks the Twelve, ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’
Now if people are walking away because we haven’t been good ambassadors for Christ, then we have something serious to correct in our life of faith together.
But if they are leaving because they reject who Jesus is or what he teaches, then we need to learn to let them, however painful that feels. For them to stay and follow a false Jesus and distortions of his teaching is no good to anyone. It doesn’t save them at all.
I believe the challenge of this passage for us is to recommit ourselves to presenting a full-blooded Jesus and unvarnished accounts of his teaching to the world.
For we can trust the Father to draw people to Jesus, and we can pray for people to respond to that call.
Big Circumstance 
What Do You Think?