Who Can Hear?

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     Picture a red-and-silver Chevy truck, a 1993 model. It’s parked along Riverside Drive in beautiful downtown Overpeck, Ohio. The year is 1999. There’s one occupant in the truck, in the shotgun seat. That’s me. It’ll be between 11:30am and noon, for that was our lunch break where I worked back then. The day is partly sunny and almost chilly, but the truck windows provide just enough greenhouse effect to make the cab a good place to eat lunch and read Bible.

     On my reading plan for that day was the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John:

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (verse 51).

“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” (verse 53).  

     As noon rushed up, I prayed, “Lord, don’t let any of the crew ask what I was reading today. I don’t know how to explain it. Indeed, I can’t – not even to myself.” I’d been a Christian sixteen years by then, thoroughly in love with Jesus. And for twenty-odd years before that, I had lived among people who were thoroughly in love with Jesus. His words and his manner of speaking were familiar to me. And yet, faced with the prospect of taking Jesus at his word or making up something to explain his words away, my fervent hope was to avoid the exercise altogether.

     Let me ask: When Jesus’ words puzzle you, annoy you, or both – what do you do?

     For a long reach back into history, let’s see what the people did who first heard some of the words we’re hearing now. In the Capernaum synagogue, Jesus claimed to be the bread of life… come down from heaven (John 6:35, 38). Mighty big claim, that, and some grumbled – no surprise there. And the more he was pressed, the more it sounded like Jesus was saying that people should literally eat his flesh and drink his blood. Grumbling increased, and puzzlement ran like a tidal wave through the assembly – “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” (verse 60). Unrelenting, Jesus went on, challenging their commitment until it snapped: After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him (verse 66).

     Was there no one who still believed? Of the thousands who followed Jesus into Capernaum, was anyone at all willing to keep on walking with him? So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” (verse 67). Scripture doesn’t give us the length of the ensuing pause. Jesus knew the answer to his question; the Twelve, for at least a moment, did not.

     And that’s the moment you and I have to dwell in right now. The question on the table is, “Do you want to go away as well?” Please don’t answer too quickly. Please don’t let some conditioned reflex speak for you. Jesus’ question is superbly crafted, built to generate a thoughtful response from those on whom it bears.

     The Gospels are full of open-ended stories, snapshots of Jesus’ encounters with people. Which way will they go? We get to see a general direction, but not the conclusion. Whatever happened to the invalid Jesus healed at the pool of Bethesda, or the woman caught in the act of adultery? Nicodemus helped with the burial of Jesus – is that a sign he was saved, maybe as a result of the earlier nighttime conversation with him?

     I sometimes wonder about this multitude in Capernaum. The Gospel writer says many of his disciples… no longer walked with (Jesus). “Many” is different than “all”. Not all turned away. The twelve apostles continued with him – even though one of them was “a devil” (verse 70). There may have been others who, though thoroughly puzzled, stuck around to see what would happen next. And I don’t think the Lord would be displeased with me bringing up another possibility: some percentage of the multitude for whom Jesus’ words were just too much, but only in that setting. Some of the most important things Jesus said weren’t clear, even to the apostles, until after his resurrection. Scripture doesn’t exclude the possibility of a gap in time between hearing Jesus’ words and believing them.

     Peter, the outspoken apostle, gets credit/blame for being the smartest/dumbest of the twelve, depending on the moment. But his response to Jesus, somewhere in or near the synagogue of Capernaum, has to rank as some of the purest, most gut-wrenchingly honest words ever produced by human heart and mind: Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life…” (verse 68). Jesus had asked, “Do you want to go away as well?” The easy answer, the reflex, would have been, “Yes, as a matter of fact I do. Based on what I understand and what I’m feeling right now, no, I can’t listen to this anymore.” But Peter recognized the reality and spoke of it. He and some others set all other words in their place – secondary to the words of Jesus.

     If anyone else in the Capernaum crowd ever came to saving faith – if anyone ever has or ever will – it’ll be by way of hearing and eventually believing the words of eternal life. At several points throughout the Gospels, Jesus thins the crowd. He lets the fervor grow, lets the numbers increase, and then he does or says something that separates the wannabe’s from the gonna-be’s. Do you suppose he did that on purpose? Did he ever do anything not on purpose? Do you suppose he does it still? Hard teaching, indeed. Saving faith works with hard teaching by waiting for the Lord, in his time, to give understanding.

     As present-day Christians, we’re tempted as much as any other generation of believers to find a more convenient and palatable source of truth. Doing so only widens the gap between hearing and believing. The long-ago Bible commentator, Matthew Henry, once wrote, “The practical love of truth is the most powerful preservative from error and delusion.” I don’t think Mr. Henry would object to us capitalizing the “T” in Truth, since Jesus took that distinction for himself.

     I miss that ’93 Chevy truck. I drove it hard and it served me well for twenty years. Over those years, the Lord did a remarkable amount of sanctification in me – in the cab, on the tailgate, sometimes under the hood – right in the middle of life. Even thirty minutes of off-the-clock solitude he could use to make me more like Jesus, as unlikely as it seemed to me at the time. And I could slug down a ham sandwich or a Hot Pocket to boot. All these years later, given my druthers, I would prefer you ask me about the easier and happier words of Jesus. But I’m not afraid of the hard ones anymore. And I’m more likely than ever, if you ask about the hard ones, to say, “Well, I’m not sure, so let’s ask Jesus.”

     To whom else shall we go?

 

 Grace and Peace (and faith to fill the gap),

 John