Words on the Word

21. Sunday B

Joshua 24.1-18: Choose today whom you wish to serve.
Ephesians 5.21-32: This mystery applies to Christ and the Church.
John 6.60-69: ‘This is intolerable! How could anyone accept it?’

Our Gospel begins with the exclamation of one who’s had enough: ‘Intolerable! How can anyone put up with this?’

What is this all about? What led this fellow, and so many others besides, to withdraw from Jesus’s company, so that we find him asking even his trusted friends, the ones he had called to remain with him: ‘Will you go away, too?’

The scene is played out in the wake of the speech Jesus pronounced in Capernaum after feeding multitudes by the Lake of Galilee. What we witness is the formation of clear fronts. On the bank of the lake the day before, five thousand men, not counting women and children, had been fed from provisions that amounted to next to nothing, five loaves and a couple of fish. These thousands had followed after Jesus because they were fascinated by him. They had seen some of the wonders he performed; they had heard him speak nobly, with authority. They had benefited from free meals.

Since the beginning of recorded time people have followed prophets of various kinds noncommittally like this, asking themselves, ‘Maybe? Maybe not?’ It is immensely satisfying to be in the vicinity of a categorical imperative. We get butterflies in our tummy and think: ‘I could make a radical decision. Who’s to say I haven’t got the makings of a hero?’ Indeed, it can happen that we are deeply moved by our own capacity for greatness before we think, ‘Still, there’s no rush’, and potter home to flick on the telly.

When Jesus, in Capernaum, saw people from the day before come to see him, he said: ‘You look for me, not because you have seen signs, but because you have eaten your fill of bread’. This remark, and the question to the apostles, ‘Will you go away, too?’ shows God’s realism with regard to human beings. It has a tragic aspect being based on perennial experience. Again and again the Lord has ascertained that we, apparently pious, openhandedly receive his gifts but shy away from his demands. When the Church teaches us about original sin, about the force of sin in our lives, it is not primarily with a view to sensational transgressions or lewd excesses. We know we are sinners because even our noblest aspirations and aims are subject to corruption, like the rose in Blake’s poem:

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

The ‘secret love’ referred to here can be simply our search for security, maintenance, food and drink — things we really need, not bad in themselves; however they risk shutting us off from the world and from others, fixing our attention on our navel, untouched by the rose’s unselfconsciousness. For the rose is content simply to be, and freely to be picked.

Jesus would teach us to live like the flowers of the field. This image is far from sentimental mush; it is radical. Think of how the Loreto litany calls Mary, the utterly absorbed who knew the Godhead’s burning and the sword of suffering, ‘Mystic Rose’. In Capernaum Jesus tries to induce self-centred people to raise their gaze towards the import of his long catechesis about the bread of life: the eucharistic self-outpouring of the Son of Man. It is that which will permit him to ‘ascend to where he was before’, thence to bestow life and spirit on those who, following his example, renounce themselves and the dear illusion that they might conquer the world, in order instead to abandon themselves into God’s hands.

To live by faith, to ‘serve the Lord’ the way Joshua taught the Israelites at Shechem, is to step outside, once for all, the logic of profit and graciously to receive God’s gift, which Scripture likes to call ‘grace’. Thus we are made gracious, and renewed.

Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus says to the woman at the well: ‘Ah! If you knew the gift of God’. If we knew if, even just a reflection of it, no sacrifice would seem to us too great, no trial too heavy; then it would be self-evident that the pearl of great price is worth whatever else we might own. We find an expression of such insight in Peter’s answer to the Lord’s question to the twelve about whether they will retrace their steps and return home: ‘Lord, to whom should we go? You have the words of eternal life.’

To be fully a Christian is to assent to a degree of homelessness on earth. It is to know that only ‘in Christ’ do we have certain anchorage. To live on these terms is demanding. We walk blindly at first, and fumble. The Bible tells us what it cost Peter to take leave of accumulated securities. It shows no less the fecundity he found in surrendering himself to divine providence. He reminded believers that they are, true enough, ‘aliens and exiles’ but subsisting within ‘an indescribable and glorious joy’ (1 Peter 2.11, 1.8).

To be truly united to Christ is to experience a unity so profound that even the nuptial covenant of man and wife seems in comparison an imperfect symbol. Paul, no less than John, though in a different dialect, bids us practise the art of living ecstatically, so as to give our lives that others might live. This is love, he tells us: the self-transcendence that lets us joyfully, gratefully find our life’s focus outside ourselves.

This is the way to construct our lives if we want to live fully, and not merely survive. The rose of our love is capable of eternity if it isn’t just left in the swamp of selfishness but is nurtured by spirit and enabled to stretch upward towards the hand of God, who will pick it at the opportune time. No ‘dark secret’ has power over it then; the invisible worm is swallowed up by the night, while we bloom towards day.

In today’s collect we pray that our hearts may be fixed ‘where true gladness is found’, that is through Christ, with Christ, in Christ. To him be glory for ever. May our devoted lives give him praise, and joy. Amen.

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