Jesus said ‘The words I have spoken to you are ‘spirit and life’.

John 6: 41- 71 Part2

John 6: 60-61

60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’ ⁶¹But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, ‘Does this offend you? 

Today you and I stand at the crossroads of our world and the radical alternative offered by Jesus Christ. Disciples in our reading are being challenged to be obedient to the words and practices of Jesus, that is, to meet their holistic needs by being obedient to the words of Jesus. This is what Jesus offers as the explanation of what He has just taught. To eat and drink the ‘flesh and blood’ of Jesus is to hear His words and put them into practice. Verse 63 could not be simpler. The flesh is useless in and of itself. There is no teaching of humanity that can fully meet the needs of humanity. This story is not announcing our need of the transubstantiation of bread and wine to flesh and blood: (eating flesh and drinking blood is prohibited in Mosaic Law Lev 17: 10-14: Deut 12:16 and Acts 15: 29). There is no ‘bread and wine’ in this story; this is not the Passover story; this is a ‘feeding in the desert story’. Jesus does refer to His death but as a substitutionary atonement (verses 51 see also John 3:6 & 16: here the metaphor is to be ‘born again’ or ‘born from above’). The question being addressed is: how can we survive in the desert of life and inherit the Kingdom prepared for us by God? There is transubstantiation: conversion, changes and transformation being revealed here but it is that of our lives to the words and practices of Jesus of the Nazareth sermon. It is the Spirit that gives life; the Holy Spirit empowers the transubstantiation, the conversion of the human life through applying the words of Jesus to our lives. Jesus said ‘The words I have spoken to you are ‘spirit and life’. The Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of willing active participation through the obedience of accepting Jesus and His participative teaching culminating in the cross and resurrection as the substitutionary atonement. Participation is not through personal will (this is an act of ‘flesh and blood’) but by the divine gift of ‘belief and the faith’, of obedience to the words and practices of Jesus. Remember all this talk of bread is because the people listening to Jesus have mobilised the story of the feeding of the ancient people of God with manna in the desert (6: 31) as some sort of sign that they were the people of the Kingdom of God. But they only told part of the story; why then did the ancient people of God die in the desert and not inherit the kingdom? They had the bread and water of God but they lacked obedience.  Joshua 5:6 makes it clear: ‘⁶For the Israelites travelled for forty years in the wilderness, until all the nation, the warriors who came out of Egypt, perished, not having listened to the voice of the Lord.’ The process of obedience to Jesus is the evidence and assurance of eternal life. The outcome of participation is personal and communal transformation where we become one with the body of Jesus and the life giving Spirit of God which becomes the lifeblood of our new lives in Christ. We can be confident in the words of Jesus; He is not trying to confuse He is explaining exactly what He means. By the reference to the ancient people of God being fed in the desert by Manna and comparing Himself to that Manna as the gift of God that brings life Jesus is clearly stating that He is the gift of God the fulfilment of the promise: Jesus is the messiah. To inherit the Kingdom and not perish in the desert we need to take the bread, eat AND obey the words (bread) which we eat.  This is clearly what the disciples who continue to follow Jesus understood and accepted. In verses 66 to 71 Jesus asks his disciples standing at the crossroads of decision to make their choice. Peter speaks up and replies to Jesus and in so doing reveals his understanding of what has just been taught. This understanding is accepted by Jesus; Peter states: ‘You have the words of eternal life’. Participative obedience to the teachings and practices of Jesus brings eternal life.  Only this will ensure we don’t die in the desert and never participate in the culmination of the journey, namely the consummated Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus; the Kingdom of peacemakers.  

We all have a difficult decision to make; Jesus says 'The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.'

John 6: 41- 71 Part 1

John 6: 63

⁶³It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 

Humans are complex beings. Since the time of the European Enlightenment, from around the late 17^th century there has been an attempt to use reason, individualism and the scientific method to understand and gain meaning regarding the complexity about life and the cosmos. This method uses manageable parts of disciplined investigation and analysis to produce understanding and meaning. It is an approach that has brought many benefits to our life and culture along with disasters through its misuse and application. Gaps in knowledge can provisionally be sketched or predicted in an attempt to achieve a more complete story of life using the story of scientific investigation. From time to time the story of science has to be re-written because of some new discovery and gradually over time the scientific story of life unfolds and our understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we live grows and develops. The explaining of the complexity of life and the world around us through the telling of stories is a very human approach to the production of knowledge. It is as old as human beings; telling stories is how we make sense of the world and ourselves. Biology, chemistry and physics tell the story of the physical world; philosophy and psychology tell the story of ideas and mental events; sociology, politics and economics tell the story of the world of relationships, how to get things done culturally and the production and distribution of wealth. There are other genres  for producing meaning with very long histories for example the: arts, music and in literature. These too are very powerful means in providing sources of meaning about life and how we live and should live together.  The bible is literature; a story of the revelation of the creative, sustaining and redemptive power and consciousness known as God. The bible uses the story of the revelation of God to answer the questions of life and does so through the use of many different types of literature: ancient historical narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, prophetic writings, biography and letters. It is a story that has travelled through many different cultures and engaged with many different ways of understanding the world. It is a story that has also like science been abused and used in destructive and oppressive ways.  The biblical story has met with other ways of telling the story of life at historical cultural crossroads where there has been a mutual exchange of meanings. In Scotland we currently live at the crossroads between the post enlightenment story and the story of the creative, sustaining and redemptive God. We will consider this much more in other series. In our biblical story today we are witnessing one such crossroad interaction. Competing ways of understanding human needs and how they should be met are interacting before us; stories are being told to answer questions and answers are being interrogated by participants; symbols are being deployed and challenged; new understanding and meaning is emerging from the interaction and people are coming to conclusions and taking action based on the encounter.  This is the process that continues today. We are invited by Jesus to interact; to bring ourselves and our story to the crossroads of participation and decision. If we will come and participate we will be offered an alternative way of meeting our needs; of understanding who we are and how we got here; we will be offered the hope of a new life free from the threats and experience of oppression and death. The words that Jesus is speaking in our story are ‘spirit and life’; Jesus words are powerfully symbolic; His words, His story offer us life at the crossroads of decision. It,s time to decide.

My First AA Meeting - Matthew Strange | RHETORIC 2014

Hungry?

John 6: 22:40

25 When they found him on the other side of the lake, they said to him, ‘Rabbi, when did you come here?’ ²⁶Jesus answered them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

Some people are persistent seekers of Jesus and the community of disciples but for the wrong reasons. It’s understandable, people have an ongoing experience of their wants and desires and they hear about the power of Jesus to answer the questions of life or they hear about a community of disciples where people of all sorts are made to feel they belong even if they don’t believe. So they seek more. However there is a problem if we continue to seek the thing that does not actually meet our needs. People end up blaming Jesus or His community of disciples for not being the answer to their need because they don’t actually understand what their need is. After the feeding of the 5000 you would have thought, after Jesus refuses to be made King, people would stop and think about what Jesus has really come to achieve. The people thought He was here to overthrow the Romans and their puppet rulers and that if they throw in their support for the overthrow Jesus will supply their physical needs by setting up a Kingdom where they don’t have to work for their food, shelter and clothing.’ In verse 26 Jesus makes it clear to the crowd that He knows even if they don’t why they are following Him so enthusiastically. There is no doubt they wanted transformed lives. It’s their assessment of personal and community need that is mistaken. Again the people are concentrating on the physical and empirical needs of life and the mistaken view that they can only be met by physical and empirical means. Jesus appeals to them to re-examine how they are meeting their needs (27). This leads them to ask the question that matters (28); what does God require? Are you and I at that point in life yet? Are we ready to ask the question what does God require for us to meet our real needs, individually and collectively His way? Jesus cannot be simpler in His response: ‘Believe in him whom He has sent.’ Jesus is asking them to believe in Him.   But the crowd still want a ‘sign’ they want a reason to believe; their real need is not enough: the teaching and practice of Jesus is not enough they want a ‘meal and a miracle’. The crowd have a view of their leaders; ‘just meet our needs our way Jesus and you’re in; we have already offered to make you our King’. It’s sad to think that God feeds us, protects us and leads us to the point of revealing who He is and we think it’s our ‘kings’ that provide for us. It is God who provides (32) always God.  His provision is not just for our physical needs but each area of our life; His provision is the ‘bread of life’ (35) the physical, social, psychological and spiritual means of life. God’s provision is Jesus; He is the ‘Bread of Life’ and we must eat. We must put into our lives His teaching and practice if we are to experience life. This is believing: accepting Jesus for who He is as revealed in scripture, accepting that we cannot meet our needs our way, turning to Jesus and seeking His forgiveness for meeting our needs our own way and we must  follow Him the way He teaches : this is saving faith.  It’s the only way to meet all our needs the way God has created us for them to be met.        

Steph MacLeod

      

Two very different views of the future.... You decide!

Videos to help us decide?

OR

Seems obvious really!

Culture Jamming in the Scottish independence referendum....

Will Scotland vote to be a peacemaker and a 

welfare for all provider?

Check it out: 

CND

We can feed the crowds of the hungry....

Matthew 14:  13-22; Mark 6: 30-46; Luke 9: 10-17; John 6: 1- 15

Mark 6:30

30 The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught…..

What kind of Jesus is it that we follow and why would we choose to follow Him? Through reading the scriptures I have come to realise that I have an in-built tendency to choose the wrong thing. Left to my own devices I will meet my needs my own way. It’s not a matter of will power it’s a matter of poor judgement; no matter how hard I try; it’s not a matter of effort it’s a matter of ability. I am powerless to do what is right; I need help. I need to see myself and the world in a radically different way.  In our story today we read about Jesus feeding 5000 men not counting women and children. It’s a record contained in all four gospels; obviously it is seen by all writers as providing some essential answers to our questions about following Jesus. This is a story that reveals the messiah that people desired to have and the actual authentic messiah revealed in Jesus. The story tells us that the fickle crowd follow because of their curiosity regarding the signs or miracles they have heard about or seen. They follow Jesus unprepared for the journey and they have no food or apparently no or little means of getting any. They follow out of a self-centred fascination and getting caught up in the crowd. They appear to Jesus to be vulnerable, leaderless and in a desperate need that they don’t recognise. This moves Jesus; He recognises that these are the ones he has come to liberate from the forces that rage against them; their inbuilt tendency to choose the wrong answer to the questions of their life. The masses are hungry what will Jesus do? Jesus feeds them; He takes a few bread biscuits and some fish paste and he makes food out of nothing. Bread and fish multiply in abundance that results in more, much more than enough being provided. Jesus of the Nazareth sermon physically feeds the hungry and the masses identify Him as the Prophet that was promised by God in Deuteronomy 18:15. This is the point where we see the messiah, the King that the crowds are seeking and they want to make Him King now!. The Kingdom of the crowd makes only a physical assessment and provision for their holistic need. They have drawn the conclusion that their only issue is that of physical need. They understand that their messiah will meet their physical need.  Let’s be clear, they do have physical needs and Jesus does meet them. But they have much more complex need than that! They want a King that will feed them and cure their illness and that’s fine but their need run much deeper. Jesus refuses the offer to be made their King. But I thought that’s why He came?  Jesus’s Kingdom meets much more than physical needs.  Jesus also meets the social, psychological, environmental and spiritual needs of people; they cannot be left unmet. If they are, it will be impossible to meet physical need in the long term. We see this every day in the news. We supply aid to the hungry and so we should; Jesus did in our story. But the people will be hungry again and again because of the refusal to address the other needs of what it means to be a human being. We have to meet all our needs the way God desires if we are to have Him as our King. The people in the story, you and I have to see our needs through the teachings of Jesus; we may not like what we see but we have to repent from meeting our needs our own way and turn and accept Jesus as King as He is revealed in scripture if we are to be transformed by participation in the Kingdom of God. This is why Jesus told His disciples to feed the crowd; they are just back from teaching about the Kingdom; they could teach the people before them what it really means to follow Jesus and the holistic transformation that following Him brings. Read the story again and hear the words of Jesus in Matthew 14: 16 ‘16Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’’