Perhaps you will recall that on the Second of August . . . our Prayerbook Lectionary interrupted its sequence of readings from Mark’s Gospel; . . . our Prayerbook Lectionary interrupts Mark’s Gospel just after Jesus fed five thousand men with five loaves and two fish; . . . our Lectionary interrupts Mark’s Gospel in order for us to hear what Jesus has to say about this miraculous feeding in John’s Gospel.  . . . And so, for four Sundays, now, at the reading of the Gospel, we have been listening to Christ’s Bread of Life Discourse.

    Jesus begins by telling some of the crowd He had fed and that had followed Him to Capernaum; . . . Jesus begins His Bread of Life Discourse by saying, “You know, you mustn’t follow me around because you ate your fill of bread yesterday.  Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures for eternal life.”  . . . And when the crowd that is following Him says to Jesus that they do desire the divine life, and to please give them the bread that shall cause them to live, . . . Jesus says, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”  . . . Jesus declares to us that He is the Incarnate God Who has come to us in order to reveal and become the Way for us to attain, not to an ordinary life which perishes, . . . but to an extraordinary Life which endures; . . . Jesus has come to us to enable us to use our human powers to become the people we were created by God to be . . . and not the parody of God’s Purpose which sin can make of us.  . . . And so, we heard Jesus say to us last Sunday,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,

which is Christ’s extravagant use of language to make the point that in order to live . . . we must become Jesus; . . . not figuratively, mind you; it must not be for you “as if” you were a son of God . . . or “as if” you were God’s daughter; . . . you must be the flesh and you must be the life of Jesus.  And to make this possible, Jesus says,

my flesh is food, indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.  He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.

    And today we hear the reaction of the crowd to this teaching of Jesus: . . . “Many of his disciples,” Saint John writes; . . . “many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’ ”  . . . Many of the people whom Jesus had fed with five loaves and two fish and followed Him to Capernaum hungering to participate in the extraordinarily sacred life of Jesus, . . . when they hear what He has to say about becoming sons and daughters of God, … many find His words offensive.  . . . I wonder why.  . . . Well, first of all, I am reminded of Naaman and the prophet Elisha.  . . . Naaman, you might remember, is an important Syrian general who has leprosy; . . . Naaman is sent to Elisha to be cured.  So Naaman pulls up in front of the house of Elisha with his impressive motorcade of chariots and stamping horses and armed spearmen decked out in polished armor; . . . Naaman pulls up in front of the house of Elisha . . . and a tattered, soiled servant emerges to tell Naaman to dip himself seven times in the River Jordan.  . . . Well, Naaman goes ballistic:  to be ordered about by this grubby servant and told to wash in a muddy trickle which hardly compares to the majestic width and flow of the rivers of Damascus; . . . to be snubbed by the prophet who doesn’t even show himself to dance about and lay hands on the leprosy and make long prayers to his God; . . . well, it’s all so offensive!  . . . And so it is for the disciples of Jesus.  Jesus gives them no secret handshake, no special prayers; no sacred place of pilgrimage where one may become one with God.  . . . Jesus simply describes everlasting felicity to be as commonplace as Bread.

    The second thing about the words of Jesus that are offensive is that they are somewhat repulsive!  Jesus tells us that He is the Bread of Life Whose flesh must be eaten and Whose blood must be swallowed.  The literal image is . . . dreadful!  … Jesus doesn’t make it easy on His listeners.  If they really desire what He wishes to give them, . . . then they must take Him very, very seriously.  They must listen to His teaching and meditate with concentration and focus upon what His words might mean; . . . what they might mean at several levels.  Jesus means what the says when He tells His disciples that they must labor for the bread that endures for eternal life.

    When He hears His disciples grumbling, Jesus raises His eyebrows in surprise and asks His disgruntled disciples, “Do you take offense at this?”  . . . And then He explains, “You are offended because you understand neither the Nature nor the Mechanism of the thing you seek.  It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.  . . . You cannot have religion on your own terms, when it is agreeable and convenient,” Jesus says; “no one can come to me unless they submit to the Father’s calling.”

    Well, that pretty much ended a lot of Christian vocations right there.  . . . Or, as Saint John puts it, “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.”  . . . And so, Jesus asks the original Twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?”  And Peter, speaking for everyone; . . . Peter responds with the thing we call the Confession of Saint Peter:  . . . “Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”  . . . Peter and his friends have progressively learned to take Jesus very, very seriously; . . . they have progressively learned to regard the words of Jesus thoughtfully.  Peter and his friends have learned not to expect showmanship and mumbo-jumbo from Jesus.  . . . They have, instead, become practiced in submitting themselves to God the Father so as to receive the living water . . . the Bread of Life and the font of Salvation . . . that flows from God the Son.  . . . And all that disciplined submission to the Life of the Spirit (not on their own terms, mind you, but as the Father has willed); . . . all that disciplined submission by the Twelve to the Life of the Spirit . . . has led them to believe in Jesus and know . . . that He is the Holy One of God; . . . their Lord and Saviour in Whom they put their entire trust and love.

    It is my prayer that you will cherish Christ’s Bread of Life Discourse in the Sixth Chapter of Saint John’s Gospel.  It is my prayer that you will take the words of Jesus very, very seriously.  It is my prayer that your disciplined submission to Him and the spiritual food with which He feeds you . . . will bring you to know that Jesus is the Holy One of God, of Whom we may eat and live forever.