“Are You Ready To Be Shocked

“Are You Ready To Be Shocked?”

Text: John 6:56-71

© August 27, 2006 by C. Edward Bowen

When most people go to the library, they go to borrow a book. Or nowadays some people go to the library to check out an audio tape or a DVD. But at a library in Sweden you can now borrow a person. The library in Malmo, Sweden, now makes it possible for you to borrow someone so that you can sit down and have a 45-minute conversation with them. You see, that library provides opportunities for you to borrow someone like a Muslim person or a gypsy or an environmental activist, and the hope is that by sitting down and talking with that person one-on-one, people might discover that some of the prejudices or preconceived notions that they had about what those people were like are wrong. The hope is that by sitting down and talking with that person one-on-one, people might be shocked to discover that in some respects the truth is something different than they had thought.[1]

At the beginning of the sixth chapter in the Gospel of John a crowd of some 5,000 people had gathered around Jesus. And those people had brought with them their own set of preconceived notions about what they were looking for in a God and what they were looking for in a Savior. But the more that Jesus talked that day, the more shocked the crowds became at his words, because what Jesus was saying just didn’t match up with what they thought the truth was.

And especially when Jesus got to the part about saying that those who wanted to follow him needed to eat his flesh and drink his blood, that was too much. The crowds simply couldn’t take it anymore. Why was Jesus speaking in such shocking terms?

Yes, on one level Jesus was referring to communion. Eating his flesh and drinking his blood was a reference to the bread and the cup that we partake of in the sacrament. That’s not so bad. That’s not so shocking.

But at the same time, when Jesus spoke of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he was referring to the way that he would have to die, and how only by dying would he then be able to open the way that leads to life, the way that leads to eternal life. And if you want to be my disciples, Jesus was saying, you need to be willing to follow me in that way. But when the crowds heard those words, they thought to themselves, “Eat my flesh? Drink my blood? Be prepared to die so that we can have life? Jesus, we’re sorry, but what you’re saying is just too shocking. It doesn’t match up with what we’re looking for in a God. It doesn’t match up with what we’re looking for in a Savior.” And so on that day when Jesus started out with some 5,000 followers, by sunset he was down to having only 12 followers.

The simple fact is that we don’t always like to hear the truth. Sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes the truth shocks us. And so what many people end up doing is creating their own version of the truth, a version that’s pleasing to them, and they call that the truth.

In fact, doing that has become so common that they’ve even come out with a word for it: truthiness. Truthiness refers to ability to declare that something is the truth even if you don’t have any facts, even if you don’t have any truth, to back up what you’re saying. An example of truthiness is when a politician stands up and says, “This is the worst the economy has been in 50 years,” even though the politician has no evidence to support that claim. But with truthiness, you don’t have to have evidence to support what you say. With truthiness, all you have to do is believe that it’s the truth.[2]

Or when it comes to Christianity some people might engage in truthiness by saying, “As long as you don’t hurt other people, God really doesn’t care what you believe or what you do with your life.” But even though people who say that don’t really have anything to support that view, even though they can’t point to anything in the Bible to back them up, many people don’t seem to care. Because, again, with truthiness, all you have to do is believe that it’s the truth. Whether it really is the truth or not is beside the point. It’s like the bumper sticker that perhaps you’ve seen that says, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.”

Or it’s like Peter Gomes, the chaplain at Harvard University, who says that most Americans who go to church go to be validated. They go to church to be told that what they believe and do is 100% AOK. They go to church to be told that what they already believe about God and about the Christian faith is the complete and total truth. And so if people go to a church and find themselves being challenged in some way, if the church tries to suggest that maybe the truth is something different than what the people currently think it is, many people respond by leaving that church and looking for another one that won’t challenge them.[3] After all, isn’t that what crowd of 5,000 people did? When Jesus’ version of the truth became too challenging and shocking, they responded by leaving, by walking away.

But as we’re reminded here in the Gospel of John, not everyone who was shocked by Jesus’ words walked away. One person responded in another way. And that person was Judas, Judas Iscariot. Especially in the last year or so Judas has received a lot of attention, particularly because of the release of an ancient manuscript called the Gospel of Judas. Now we should begin by noting that the so-called Gospel of Judas was most likely written at least 100 years after the time that Judas lived. And so even though it’s called the Gospel of Judas, most scholars think it’s rather unlikely that it’s something that Judas actually wrote.

But according to the Gospel of Judas, on the Monday of what we call Holy Week, Jesus took Judas aside and asked Judas to do him a favor. The favor was for Judas to arrange to have Jesus killed.[4] According to the Gospel of Judas, Jesus wanted to be killed because he believed that our bodies are like prisons and that we need to die in order for our spirits to be set free so that they can go to be with God in heaven. And so according to the Gospel of Judas, when Judas betrayed Jesus, he was doing him a favor.

Was that why Judas did what he did? I have my doubts. The problem is that when we read the Bible, we aren’t told that are bodies are prisons for our souls. And if they were, like the Gospel of Judas suggests, it would seem that the only logical thing for you to do would be to go out and commit suicide as quickly as possible to speed up your death and speed up your spirit’s release from your body.

No, I think Judas turned against Jesus not because Jesus asked him to, but because the truth that Jesus was speaking was just too shocking. And so Judas did what he did, I think, as a way of trying to silence Jesus. But looking back at Judas from a distance of nearly 2,000 years, we think to ourselves, “How could Judas have done that? How could Judas have turned against Jesus and rejected him like that?”

But I suppose the question we really need to ask is: “If we had been in Judas’ place, would we have done any different? To hear Jesus say that we have to eat his flesh and drink his blood, to hear Jesus say that we need to be prepared to die for our faith, is that a truth that we’re willing to accept?” What do we do when Jesus presents us with a version of the truth that doesn’t match up with what we want to think the truth is? Do we smile and just accept what Jesus says? Or do we do what Judas did, and insist that our version of the truth is the only true and right version of the truth?

I still remember something that happened about 10 or 12 years ago. It was a Sunday night, about 9:00, and I was at home when the phone rang. When I answered it, it was one of my church members and in a completely panicked tone said, “Rev. Bowen, what are we going to do? The world is going to end in about 6 hours! Should we get everyone together for a worship service? What should we do?”

Well, that’s not the usual kind of phone call that I get at 9:00 on a Sunday night, but fortunately I knew what was going on. I had seen commercials on TV earlier that week for the Sunday night movie that one of the networks was airing. I forget what the name of the movie was, but the basic idea was that the Sunday night movie would be in the form of a special alert news program, a news program that would be informing the nation that a huge asteroid was on a direct collision course with earth, and there was absolutely nothing that anyone could do about it. And so I realized that what was going on was that this church member must have tuned into that movie and not realized that it was just a movie and not a real news broadcast.

And so as kindly as I could, I explained to the woman that what she was watching wasn’t true and that as far as I knew the world was not coming to an end in six hours. And I remember that after I told her that, she said, “You know, I did kind of wonder about that. If the world was coming to an end in six hours, I thought it was kind of strange that none of the other TV networks were reporting about it.”

In a way, though, I believe that’s how it is at times with many of us. We sometimes get ourselves so focused on something, and we convince ourselves that that’s the truth. And oftentimes we try to surround ourselves with other people who see things the exact same way that we do, so that we can reassure ourselves that we’re right and that everyone else is wrong. And since we figure that we’re right and that everyone else is wrong, we get to a point where we don’t even want to listen to any other voices, even if it’s God trying to tell us what the real truth is.

You see, one of the things the Bible shows us over and over again is that when God speaks to us, when God speaks to the truth to us, we better be prepared to be shocked. Think about Moses. He had his life all figured out the way that he wanted it to be. He had gotten married, he had a son, he had a job tending his father-in-law’s sheep. But when God came and spoke to Moses there at that burning bush, God shocked him by telling him that God wanted him to go back to Egypt and free all the Hebrew slaves.

Likewise, there was Mary. She had her life all figured out the way that she wanted it to be. She was engaged to Joseph, she was making wedding plans, picking out china patterns and sewing curtains. But when God spoke to Mary, God shocked her by telling her that God wanted her to be the mother of the Son of God.

And in both of their cases, with both Moses and Mary, they could have said no to God. They could have run away from God. But instead, even though what God was saying to them was shocking, even though what God was saying to them was something that they had a hard time believing, in the end they knew that it was something they needed to pay attention to, because it was the truth.

When was the last time that God shocked you? If it’s never happened, or if it’s been quite a while, that might not be such a good thing. Because that might be a sign that we’ve got ourselves so focused on what we want the truth to be, that we’ve got ourselves so focused on what we want to do with our lives, that we’ve stopped listening for what God has to say, we’ve stopped listening for what God says the truth is. Have the courage to be shocked by God. Have the courage to listen to what God wants to say to you.