Cannibal Christians

One thing I find fascinating about Jesus is that he doesn’t make it very easy to follow him sometimes. I can imagine at times some of his followers were like, “easy yoke my foot!” Like this one time (John 6) where Jesus feeds all these people and then just basically leaves. He crosses the lake and goes some 15 miles away or so.

Well, the people back then were poor and there were far fewer McDonald’s in ancient Palestine so cheap food was hard to come by – this made Jesus quite popular. So, the people track him down. After all, a free meal’s a free meal, right? Just ask your neighborhood college student.

Well, when they finally track him down they’re like, “hey, so…when’d you get here?” Which, I suppose was a Jewish way of saying, “fancy meeting you here.” Very smooth. To which Jesus totally calls them out and tells them that they’re just after him for his food (don't act like you didn't have that one friend whose parents always stocked up on Doritos and Snack Packs). Normally we’d expect the people to be like, “ya, you got us, can you do the bread thing again, but this time with chicken?”

But instead, he goes into this spiel about how his body is bread and they should eat him. Errr…what?! Here we are coming for a mid-morning snack and you want us to eat you? Get real! Besides, let's face it, you're all skin and bones and gristle and there are far too many of us; there would never be enough to go around.

Nowadays we read Jesus’ words through this filter where we know the whole story already. And so when we read this business about eating his flesh, we read stuff into it like communion and sacrificial atonement, blah, blah, blah. But you have to take off that filter for a second and realize that these people don’t have the rest of the story yet. If Jesus really is talking about all of those things, his hearers sure as heck don’t know it.

Can you imagine hearing that without all of the context we have now?

Or what about when he told people that they had to hate their father, mother, wife, children, brother, sister, and their own life to be his follower? Now that one, I’d been told, well actually the Greek word that we translate as “hate” really means something more like “love less” or something like that. Um…not true. The word is translated in the NIV as hate, hates, hated, hating, and detestable…never “love less.” It’s the same word in Revelation 17:16 where it says, “The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute. They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked; they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire.” 'Love less', my foot.

Now we can explain all this stuff theologically and whatnot, but again, can you imagine hearing that without having the whole picture as we do today?

So, after Jesus talks about how people should eat him, they leave. Can you blame them? Would YOU stay for dinner?

The Bible says that people walk away saying, “this is a hard teaching.”

Now there’s an understatement.

But here’s the thing, Jesus doesn’t say, “no, you don’t understand. It’s a metaphor. You don’t really have to eat me, just follow me around and do what I teach, live how I live and later on, eat some bread and act like it’s my body and we’ll be cool.”

He doesn’t say that though.

He just watches them walk away.

Can you imagine the rumors people began?

I wonder if Jesus said stuff like this for the same reason he told parables instead of giving people a straight answer with a 3 minute Powerpoint presentation with bullet points…and an outline...and a fill-in-the-blank handout. It seems to me that talking to the people in parables promoted relationship with him rather than just giving people answers which they could walk away with.

When you talk in parables people have to keep coming back to figure out what the heck you’re talking about.

But now that I think about it, these statements are like the opposite of this. They actually invite people to walk away, not to come back.

Is that what we need in our sermons; a regular pattern of inviting people into a relationship with Jesus, and a regular invitation to walk away?