Life in our fallen world is a curious mixture of gladness and
sadness, of joy and of sorrow. At one
moment we can feel up – the next, down!
At one moment there is death, the next moment there is a birth.
Sometimes we enjoy abundance, and then there are times when we have too little.
This is life. Gladness and Sadness go together.[1]
The church has experienced such times throughout
her history. Jesus certainly saw this in His earthly ministry. Charles Spurgeon, in a sermon, makes the
comment upon our text that,
“Churches have summers,
like our gardens, and then all things are full; but then come their winters,
and alas, what emptyings are seen! Have we not all seen the flood when the tide
has come far upon the beach, and have we not all marked the ebb, when every
wave has seemed to fall short of that which preceded it? Such ebbs and flows
there are in the history of the kingdom of Christ. One day, “The kingdom
suffers violence, and every man presses into it; at another time men seem to be ashamed of the
Christian faith, and they wander off into a thousand delusions, and the church
is diminished and brought low by heresy, by worldliness, by lukewarmness, and
by all sorts of evils. Often may the chronicle run thus: “Then all the
disciples forsook Him and fled“. It is well then, at times when those that did
run well are asked by the Master: “will you also go away”? Ah, dear friends,
some of you are very steadfast now while this church flourishes. How would it
be if your pastor were dead, or his name in ill repute? How would you be if
there was a decline in all the work of the church? Have you no backbone enough
in you to be faithful if all others were faithless…. Can you fight a losing
battle?… Alas! What numbers swim with the tide! How very few swim against the
current. Well may the Saviour ask the question of us today, for we are as frail
and fickle as others. Well may he ask it now, for worse times than these may be
drawing near – “will you also go away?“”[2]
This introduces us to our text which reveals the saddest and
yet also the gladdest statements in John’s gospel.
What we have just read indicates that Jesus’ followers
weren’t pleased with His teaching. They were grumbling[3]
against him (6:41,61). This reminds
us immediately of the grumbling of the Israelites against God in
the desert[4].
They said to Jesus, “This is a hard
saying. Who can listen to it?” (6:60).This
did not mean that they could not understand Jesus’ teaching. They did
understand, but they would not accept it. That is the case with so very many
people. We notice then that there was an ‘ebb tide’, a low point, even in
Jesus’ ministry. Those who once called Him Lord,
Rabbi and ‘the prophet’ are ready to walk out on
Him.
Jesus plainly asks them, “do
you take offense[5]
at this?” (6:61).The Greek word here is ‘skandalon’. It was the name for that part of a trap to
which the bait is attached.[6]
He is asking them, “Is what I am saying
to you scandalous? Does it trap you? Do
you find my words offensive?” The
answer is – yes, they did find Jesus’s words offensive. They are ready to
walk out on Him, despite the fact that
they had seen His miracles, and have heard His teachings. I am constantly
amazed to see how little it takes to swing a crowd’s opinion. All the capital
that Jesus had gained with them had evaporated in an instant.
Allow me to briefly
remind you what caused the scandal – the offence:
At the beginning of Chapter 6 Jesus had miraculously fed 5000
people. They were amazed and they followed Him, mainly because they were
looking for a perpetual food supply and a hero.
Jesus tells them not to seek temporary bread, but the eternal bread
which comes from heaven – that is, Himself! That is always the problem. People
are always inclined to seek the gifts more than the Giver. Jesus tried to explain that they actually did
not need miraculous manna, nor a fallible human leader called Moses, as in the
times of the Exodus. Yes, they needed
something to eat, and He had miraculously provided food for them on the
previous day, but they actually needed much more than this physical bread. They needed Him – the Living Bread, the food that endures to eternal life (6:27). They needed food that would
sustain them for more than this life – for eternal life!
This is also true for you who hear this. Listen! Jesus came
to deliver them and us from far more than hunger and sickness. He came to
deliver us from the eternal hell to which the whole of humanity is
heading. He came to provide eternal life. In so doing, He invites us (speaking
figuratively) to feed on Him. By this He means
that we must take Him into
our very lives, into our own
hearts, in order to receive this eternal life. When He put it to them in this graphic way in
6:53-56, saying that they needed to “eat His flesh and drink His blood”,
they thought this to be scandalous and offensive to them. They interpreted His
words, not in the way He intended them to be received – with love and grace and
in truth. Instead they received His
words rigidly and literally, for they did not want to see it in any other
way. They did not combine His words with faith.
All that they could see and think was this, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose
father and mother we know? How can He now say, “I came from heaven?’ (6:42).They considered Him a mere man,
even though His actions and words
should have convinced them that He was the Messiah. We learn here that
mere outer appearances must never be our final criteria for judging. In the
end, because they were merely focused on appearances, they show that they did
not really want Jesus. They only wanted that which He could do for them. To
which Jesus answers, “Then what if you
were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit
who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words I have spoken to you are
spirit and life.” (6:62,63)
The Ascension of Jesus will in fact happen very soon - 40
days after He rose from the dead. But
right now they will not accept that Jesus has come from heaven (6:33,38,50,58). They will not accept
Him as the Living Bread that has been given by God the Father. That is why
Jesus says, “What if you see me ascend
to where I was before (i.e. with God the Father)?”
Why can they not see
this?
Jesus now repeats essentially the same thing which he has
already said to Nicodemus in John 3:1-8.
“It
is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words I have
spoken to you are spirit and life.”
Jesus is saying that spiritually
dead people cannot understand these
things which He is saying. Therefore they cannot understand His figurative
language. For this reason they could
also not understand His parables[7].
The Holy Spirit needs to give life. Only
those that are born again can see! And Jesus continues, “But there are some of you who do not believe…” (6:64a). Understand this. Spiritual deadness always issues in unbelief. It
is not the hardness of Jesus speech, nor my repeating of His profound words that
is the problem. It is the hardness of our hearts that causes such a reaction. Instead
of taking Jesus into our hearts we reject Him. And the John, the Gospel writer now
adds this: “For Jesus had known from the
beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray Him. This is why I
told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.” (vv.64b,65 cf. 6:37,44).
This is the doctrine of sovereign election. If ever there was
a doctrine that has caused many to be offended, it is this one. Many are
offended by the thought that they cannot make their own way to heaven. They are
offended by the thought that Jesus alone can give them eternal life -
that He alone is the way to God (cf. Jn. 14:6). The sobering truth is that no one wants to go to heaven…God’s
way. And so we say again, our sin blinds
us; it closes our ears; it hardens our heart. We need to be born again in order
to see all this.
In this passage Jesus' words are falling on hard and
unproductive soil (6:66,67). This is
what Jesus has already taught in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed.[8] And that is why this is the saddest text in
the entire gospel. How near they all were to Jesus, and yet how far! We had hoped that they would see, hear and
understand these spiritual and life giving words. The saddest words then are
these, “After this many of
his disciples turned back and no longer
walked with Him” (6:66). Like shallow soil hearers they had no root and therefore no fruit. They showed promise for a time – but
no more than that. Never let this surprise you when it happens in our own day.
It even happened under our Lord’s ministry. Many over the years have come to
listen to our preaching of the word… and have left, fruitless. The fact that
they were called disciples ought not
to unsettle us. Had these disciples then lost their salvation? The Greek word for disciple simply means follower
or learner. It does not
necessarily imply that these followers were converted. In fact, by their action they showed that they
were not true disciples. They left Him,
because they could not reconcile what they wanted to believe with what He
taught. There are many people who don’t like what the Bible plainly teaches.
There are those that don’t like the fact that Jesus is equal with God, and that
the Holy Spirit is a real person on whom we depend to see Jesus for who He is.
There are those who dislike the teaching of God’s sovereign drawing of His
people. There are those that dislike the
fact that God can use suffering for good. There are those that think that the
Bible is too chauvinistic. There are those that cannot settle with the Bible’s
clear teaching on gender identity, and so on.
Augustine had a good response to this, “If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't
like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.” If you become
offended by what you perceive to be difficult doctrines, you will leave the
Christian faith very soon. And so we note that the desertion is massive! In
response to this Jesus asks His 12 disciples: “Do you want to go away as well?”
The gladdest statement:
The greatest statement of faith in John’s gospel
Peter gives the answer on behalf of the 12, and this proves
to be a glad and a full confession of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is the mark
of the true believer. He cannot quit! Responding to our Lord’s words, Peter
says in 6:68,69, Lord to whom shall we go? He says in effect, “We confess that we do not understand you at times. You offend people
who we think are important. You say
things that are hard to understand at times, but we have never found anyone who
can do what you do. You meet our deepest needs. To whom else can we go? “You
have the words of eternal life”. We
cannot deny your words. Nobody speaks like you do. Nobody understands us like
you do. Where else can we go? We believe
and know that you are the Holy One of God…”. If you have found Jesus to be
like that, where else can you go?
What have we learned
from this text?
(i) A sad truth: How dead and unresponsive
man is by nature to spiritual truth – even when Christ is right among us. Note
that, even among His closest disciples - the 12 disciples there was a devil,
called Judas.
(ii) A glad truth: As soon as we have come to know Christ through the help that the
Holy Spirit gives, we know that there is
no other way to go. We are drawn by the Father and we have been given life by the Holy Spirit
. We gladly take
Him into us. We confess His Name. We are nourished by His Word and we know
where we are going.
[3] Gr.
Gonguzō – to mutter , murmur,
grumble … to say something in a low
tone - an onomatopoeic word
[4]
See Numbers 14
[6]
Vines’s Greek Dictionary
[7] see
Matt 13 : 10 – 17
[8] Mark
4:13ff
