York Minster

This is too difficult

Date: 18th September 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Dr Jonathan Draper

For those of you who came this evening to hear the Dean preach, I apologise. He has gone to a family funeral in Suffolk and asked me to stand in. So please don’t complain about the Dean about anything that you might hear in this sermon: it’s all mine.

I want to take as my text this evening a small portion of our NT reading: ‘The disciples said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it”?’

As one who spent many happy years teaching those training for ordained ministry in the Church of England, this is a complaint I am used to hearing. It is, indeed, a complaint I’ve heard in my parish ministry as well; not just about the teaching of Jesus or the teaching of the church, but about my sermons too. People often complain that churches, clergy and theologians make a faith which is essentially simple too complicated, and make things that should be straight-forward far too tricky. It’s as if they are trying to make sure they have a job by making sure no one else understands what they’re on about.

I do have some sympathy with this. We worship a God who came among us as Jesus of Nazareth. This Jesus preached a message of love and liberation and was eventually killed for it. We believe that his death brings forgiveness of sins to us and a new kind of relationship with God as well. A part of that new relationship is to live our lives in a way which embodies God’s love to the world. And we believe that our life is now so bound up with God’s that we shall live within the life and love of God for ever. It really is that simple.

But there is also not one word of the version of the Christian faith I have just presented, let alone anyone else’s version of the Christian faith, which cannot be explored into less simple forms of understanding, let alone very significant complexity. What do we really mean by the eternal and un-begotten creator God coming among us as a particular human being at a particular place and time? What does it mean to say that the death of a particular human being nearly 2000 years ago has anything to do with us today, let alone with the forgiveness of our sins? What does it mean to say that we shall live within the life and love of God for ever? Each of these and much else besides has troubled and engaged some of the greatest minds in human history, and continues to do so today. This teaching is indeed difficult and is hard to accept.

But in the story related as our NT reading this evening, Jesus is not just saying that we have to be prepared for a little bit of hard intellectual work if we are to follow him or that we might have to become a little bit more sophisticated in the ways in which we think about and understand the faith we hold, though both of these things are true. The problem Jesus identifies in our reading,  in both his disciples and in the crowds who were following him, is that they didn’t want to make either the intellectual leap necessary to see the world in a different kind of way, or to pay the price that really following him might entail. And in a religious culture where the eating of blood was taboo, it was pretty provocative of Jesus, in any case, to put his self-understanding to the crowds in terms of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. This would have been very difficult indeed. So to those who think the Christian faith will not challenge them or for whom it is just a kind of eccentric but essentially harmless activity, think again. Jesus was not about to compromise his mission and his understanding of what he was sent by God to do and of what he called people to just for the sake of keeping a few more people on board. So he asks the 12, his inner core of followers, are you going to leave me too. And Peter, of course, the one known for speaking first and thinking later, says, ‘Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’

I have heard many a sermon on this text; sermons that essentially say that there is no one else to whom we can go to know anything about God for here, in Jesus, is the truth. Now in some respects that’s fair enough: that is exactly the point John is trying to make in his Gospel and why these words are put in precisely the form they take. But I also think that Peter does a neat, but not illegitimate, side-step here. Peter ignores all those difficult and complex issues Jesus has just raised in a very short space of time, and draws instead on his experience of Jesus for his answer. It’s as if Peter is saying, ‘I don’t understand these things any better than anyone else and perhaps we can come back to them later, but in what I have seen and heard and done with you I can see the truth, and I need nothing else’. 

That is a powerful response and one we should bear in mind when it comes to our own thinking about our faith. Jesus doesn’t call us to assent to a list of propositions about the nature of God and the world and his own person; Jesus doesn’t call us to pass an exam on obscure bits of Trinitarian or Eucharistic theology; Jesus doesn’t call us to sign up to a form of words or a particular set of understandings about human sexuality or the words of the Bible or whatever; Jesus calls us to believe and trust in him because in him we have experienced God at work, and through him we’ve got a glimpse of eternity.

The other important thing to remember here is that today we are the people through whom others will get that experience of God and through whom they might get a glimpse of glory. We may not be able to explain all the complicated bits of our faith, but we ought to embody all that others need to know about where to find the truth. Now there’s a thought.