Should I stay or should I go?

 13^th Sunday after Trinity     Proper 16       Year B

 Eucharist – 25.viii.2024

 (Joshua 24.1-2a, 14-18; Ephesians 6.10-20; John 6.56-59)

“Choose whom you will serve…” That’s the invitation in both the Old Testament reading and the Gospel today. In the Old Testament reading, Joshua has led the people of Israel through the waters of the Jordan into the Promised Land. They’ve defeated the inhabitants of a land they are now taking by force. Now they can settle down and enjoy the fruits of conquest. But, he asks them, will God still be part of the picture? Will they continue to serve the God who has been their companion and guide since the days of their slavery in Egypt? Or will they now forget him? Along with all the busy-ness of tilling the fields which have come into their possession, will they find themselves switching to the worship of the gods served already by the people of that land which they have taken? And of course they join in chorus together, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods…”

Jesus puts his disciples on the spot too… in our Gospel reading. We’ve been reading in recent weeks how the crowds have come out in their thousands – literally – and Jesus has not only taught them, he’s fed them in that miracle of the loaves and fishes. But after the works of wonder, there’s the teaching, things to learn, things to reflect upon and take in as to who this man really is. The disciples themselves say: “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” After the first flush of enthusiasm, the simple fact is that many of them can’t. John’s Gospel tells us, “Because of this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” That’s when Jesus asks the original Twelve, “Do you also wish to go?” As elsewhere in the Gospels, it’s Peter who makes the reply: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life…”

Joshua’s words: “Choose whom you will serve….” Jesus’ words: “Do you also wish to go away?” We have to answer questions like these. Where would we rather be? Listen to your heart – where does it direct you?”

There’s a prayer which might strike a chord with us:

Dear Lord, So far today, I’ve done all right. I haven’t gossiped, haven’t lost my temper, haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or over indulgent. I’m very thankful for that.

 

But, in a few minutes, God,… I’m going to get out of bed. And from then on, I’m probably going to need a lot more help.

It can be easy to serve God in the right situation… lying in bed first thing in the morning; when we’re hearing the message we want to hear; when we’re with people we agree with, people we want to be with. It can be more difficult when the circumstances are different – which is nearly all the time. So in the Church’s Office of Morning Prayer, we pray every day:

The night has passed, and the day lies open before us;
let us pray with one heart and mind.

And we keep silence before we go on to pray...

As we rejoice in the gift of this new day,
so may the light of your presence, O God,
set our hearts on fire with love for you;
now and for ever.

We can make the decision to be Christ’s people each and every day.

Where else can we go? asks Peter. Not just, there’s nothing better on offer, so we’ll stick around. Peter finds himself saying those words which the Gospel writer wants us to hear: “You have the words of eternal life.”

We need to remind ourselves of that. What drew us first to Christ? What remains true and life-changing for us? What are those “words of eternal life”?

Famously the writer G K Chesterton, author of the Father Brown books, said “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” What can draw us on to try again? We need something to warm the heart, to rekindle our faith.

Fr. Flor McCarthy suggests these are some of the words recorded in Scripture that can bring us back to Christ. Just take time to ponder them. To let them draw us on though prayer into life. Words like these:

·        Go in peace. Your sins are forgiven.

·        I am the bread of life. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever.

·        I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows me will never walk in darkness, but will always have the light of life.

·        I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep…

·        I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will never die…

All words of Jesus, which may seem to be chosen rather arbitrarily. But they raise the question, what draws us to Christ? What will keep us traveling with him? There’ll be other words of Scripture which you might find for yourself…

People who know me know that I don’t think you can prove anything just by quoting passages of scripture. But we need “words of eternal life” which will  tell us a truth that has meaning for our lives. We need words which we can reflect upon and live by. We need God as our companion, Christ as our guide, and we need to make the decision that it should be so.

The Gospel passage we use today comes from the end of chapter 6 in St John’s Gospel. We’ve been reading that one chapter for the last five weeks, since the middle of July! So much of it is about bread: Jesus taking bread and fishes to feed the five thousand; Jesus speaking about himself as the bread of life or the true bread from heaven; Jesus inviting his hearers to eat this bread.

But now as Jesus goes on speaking there’s a change of place. This sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel begins in the open air with the crowds thronging to hear Jesus speak. Now it ends in the synagogue in Capernaum – John tells us that Jesus “said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.” I think this shift in location is significant. We’ve moved from the place where people are drawn eagerly and with enthusiasm to discover something new… to another place where religious debate is the focus and where people bring out the teachings which have been rehearsed over hundreds of years. It’s in this second place where Jesus seems so often to come into confrontation over issues of religious authority that the going is much tougher: hard for Jesus who finds so many of the synagogue adherents unsympathetic to his message; hard for people who have so far gone along with Jesus, but now find his teachings too difficult.

But each location has its necessary place. We all need the conditions where a message can come to us fresh as it did to the crowds, a place where emotion and enthusiasm can kindle new faith. But we need also the readiness to work hard at faith, to ask what it means in the light of what has gone before, to recognize what it means as we seek to work it out day by day.

Jesus’ question to his followers, “Do you also wish to go away?” is not just a plea that they stick around with a weary attitude for want of anything better to do. It’s to ask us all to see where we are on our journey of faith - where Christ is in our midst. We may need our inherited assumptions to be challenged – the things we took for granted, not least a faith which needs to mature. We may need to ask again what we expect out of our faith – the Israelites tell Joshua that they will stick with their God because he had driven out the people from their land and wiped out the Amorites; surely after months of devastation and death wrought in Gaza, southern Lebanon and the borders of Israel there must be a better reasoning than this! And day by day we need to be able to make our affirmation of Christ a part of our worship and prayer, and a transforming presence in our lives.

In all this I find the words of one of John Keble’s hymns coming back to me in its challenge to recognise God’s place in our lives even as we start each day:

New every morning is the love
our wakening and uprising prove;
through sleep and darkness safely brought,
restored to life and power and thought.

New mercies, each returning day,
hover around us while we pray;
new perils past, new sins forgiven,
new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.

But then, as the hymn reminds us, this is more than a spiritual pick-me-up or a pious hope. This is a faith worked out in the midst of daily life:

The trivial round, the common task,
will furnish all we ought to ask:
room to deny ourselves; a road
to bring us daily nearer God.