Six
Feet From All Hope
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise
him up at the last day.
For my flesh is real food and my
blood is real drink. John 6:54-55
An incredible event took place in 2008, though I doubt any of us ever heard
of it.
In January, 2008,
a 15-year-old girl in Australia named Demi-Lee
Brennan became the world's first known transplant patient to change blood
types. She went from O negative to O positive, taking on the immune system
of her organ donor. At first the doctors assumed someone had made a mistake,
because it's always been assumed that a change like that can't happen. Now
they say she's a "one-in-six-billion miracle."
The blood stem
cells in Brennan's new liver invaded her body's bone marrow, taking over
her entire immune system. She now has an entirely different kind of blood—blood
that welcomes life, rather than carrying death. "It's like my second chance
at life," Brennan says.1.
The incredible and impossible took place: instead of her own immune system
threatening to reject her new liver, her new liver transformed her immune
system, saving her life. Amazing!
In a way this is exactly what Jesus is saying to the group listening to his
words.
It is his blood in us, through faith in his death, that transforms
us and saves our lives.
Let's set the scene :
This is not a particularly friendly crowd, even though this is part of the
crowd who followed him to Capernaum after he fed them with the loaves
and fishes. They find Jesus and and instead of greeting them warmly, he confronts
them saying, "its because I gave you bread that you are here. You should
seek to do the work of God. And that is to believe in the One God sent"
They are skeptical and challenge him to do a miraculous sign to prove
himself, as if the earlier feeding of the five thousand was not enough.
They say, "Moses gave our ancestors bread from heaven. What will you do?'
Listen to them! What nerve!
Jesus does not react but answers it directly. He says, "It was not Moses
who gave this to you, but God. You should seek the bread of eternal
life."
They say, "Good, give us that bread."
His reply is "I am the bread of life."
Now they are really annoyed and say, "Who does He think he is? He comes from
Nazareth. How can he say he came down from heaven?"
Instead of defending himself, Jesus turns up the heat on them.
He says, "Listen...unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no
life in you."
And at that the fat is in the fire.
John tells us that from that point on, people began turning away from him
in large numbers.
He even turns to the twelve and asks, "Are you going to leave as well?".
Peter answers for them: "Where would we go? You have the words of life."
You might ask, "Why be so confrontational?"
Jesus had a remarkably similar conversation with a woman at the well
in Sychar. He told her about living water, but did it in such a compelling
way that she responded along with many of her neighbors. But on this occasion,
it almost seems as if Jesus is making it especially difficult.
We hear the words, "My body is food indeed and my blood is drink", and of
course we think of the communion service. And we have two thousand years
of history to view his statement.
But we are not first century Jews.
For a Jew, even to touch a dead body was to be unclean. To eat the flesh
of a person is beyond consideration.
Consuming the blood even of the animals they ate was forbidden.
How could he expect them not to hear this as a gross violation of their holiness
food rules?
But their inclination was to cast Jesus as another person
in a long line of people they knew or had heard about.
Wise beyond his station, but nothing beyond that.
Their trust was in the traditions of the law.
Jesus gets after them time and again. He says on one occasion, “So you trust
in the law of Moses. At the day of judgment, it won’t be me accusing you,
it will be Moses himself because his writings should have directed you to
me.”
But now they had come to trust in their teachings and
traditions and they were as blind as bats to the real thing when they saw
it.
Jesus is as much as saying, your food laws and all your scruples are worthless,
without seeing the One to whom they all point.
We need to take note.
We are prone to the same error:
To believe it is our teachings, our practices, our confessions or our theology
that are the answer.
They are not. Those are good, but not the main thing.
Jesus is the main thing. Everything else just points
to Him.
They stood only six feet away from the author of the
law and the one promised by the scriptures.
They stood six feet away from the creator of their world. Right there in
the flesh.
But they could not see him for looking at him. Sure they believed the principals
Jesus stood for.
But it was the fact of him being there in the flesh that they rejected. His
bodily presence in the flesh was the very
thing they needed to not only to recognize but it was his death in the flesh
that would be their hope, and our hope.
And they stood six feet away from the ultimate judge
at the end of time, and a day would come when each one of them would be six
feet away from all hope, unless they allowed him to transform their lives.
Our hope for eternity is not in being good, or doing
good or believing the right things.
It is confessing our need of his forgiveness and pledging our allegiance
to him as lord.
Without that, any of us will ultimately one day be six feet beyond redemption.
Jesus is not a nice add on to a good life.
He is the life. Live in him or die without him.
That is the choice he gives us.
Not me, not the Presbyterian church.
Jesus.
What we need is his life in us, transforming our life
into his life.
Nothing less will do.
He said it, not me.
Preached August 23, 2009
Dr. Harold McNabb
West Shore Presbyterian Church
Victoria, British Columbia
Notes
1. source: www.reuters.com as reported in Preachingtoday.com
Resources Consulted
Online Resources Consulted
http://www.preachingtoday.com/
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